F.D.R.
The Roosevelt I Knew. By Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labour from 1933-1945. (Hammond and Hammond. 18s.) "FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT was not a simple man. That quality of sim- plicity which we delight to think marks the great and noble was not his. He was the most complicated human being I evei knew." With these words, Miss Perkins begins her very remarkable and successful effort at the portrayal of her great chief. The Roosevelt personality was a great force in modern history, and the problems it raised when he was alive will perplex historians long after his death. For Miss Perkins is right; he was not simple. He was not, in a sense, com- plicated as a result of versatility. He was far less versatile, interested in far fewer aspects of life, than is Mr. Churchill. One does not feel in the records of his achievements or in his own speech the deep and mysterious subtlety of Lincoln or even the elusive, intangible manoeuvring genius of Jefferson. On the other hand, no one, in a way, could have been less like his great hero Andrew Jackson than his successor as President and leader of the Democratic party, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Unlike him in method (though, as A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., has pointed out, Jackson was much less of the plain, blunt man than he chose to appear), but like him in obstinacy, in courage and in the indefinable flair for democratic leadership to which we owe so much.
Miss Perkins had exceptional opportunities for studying Roosevelt. She had known him and his wife when they were all entering public life on the eve of the Wilson epoch in Washington. And the Franklin Roosevelt that Miss Perkins remembers from that time was a good- looking, rather self-satisfied young man of wealth and family, oppos- ing (with a good deal of popular applause) the wicked machinations of Tammany, but really a much less useful legislator than such Tam- many spokesmen as Al Smith and Robert Wagner. That young State Senator from Dutchess County would never have become a great national figure, much less a great world figure; he would have remained the nephew by marriage of Theodore Roosevelt and a country squire with a taste for naval history and tree-planting. That he became more than this he owed to three things; his experience in Washington as Assistant-Secretary of the Navy under Wilson; to the fact that he had married not merely the President's niece, but a very remarkable woman indeed; and to the terrible blow of diat attack of infantile paralysis which seemed, for a time, certain to end all political activity and which in fact made a new man of the handsome, eloquent, brash young gentleman-in-politics.
How much Roosevelt owed to his wife is more and more common knowledge. She encouraged his political ambitions when he was prostrate; she kept him in touch with the men and women working to mitigate the savagery of much 01 American industrial life; and, as the wife of the Governor of New York, she made the official mansion at Albany a social centre in far more than the conventional " social " sense. It is odd to read here that Mrs. Roosevelt, on the eve of her departure for Washington, was resigning herself to a life of official empty duties, to a kind of annoying leisure. Such was the power of self-deception that she thought herself capable of being just the First Lady. Within a few months of her arrival in the White House she had become something much more important, the First Woman, the "Lady of every Year," whoever might be the "Lady of the Year." And it is one of the moving and touching moments of this book when Miss Perkins recounts the story of her last interview with the Presi- dent, when he told her of the state visit to England that he was planning. " I told Eleanor to order her clothes and get some fine ones so that she will make a really handsome appearance."
A close friend of Mrs. Roosevelt, one of the most important mem- ber; of the Roosevelt administration at Albany, Miss Perkins was made Secretary of Labour to the indignation of the regular union leaders who objected to anybody but a labour bureaucrat being appointed and were even more furious that the appointee was a woman. Miss Per- kins had and made plenty of enemies, but her candid and winning account of her stewardship is an answer to most of the criticism heaped on her by more or less interested critics. Although it involves narrating the history of a good many technical disputes and problems in the complicated evolution of the modem American labour move- ment, Miss Perkins has rightly decided that this is the proper way to paint her picture of Roosevelt. And she does paint a convincing pic- ture, stressing those human and political talents that, in Roosevelt's case, mounted up to genius and were a substitute for the strictly ad- ministrative talents that he lacked. There was waste, confusion, conflict- ing delegation of authority, unnecessary heart-burning and alienation of loyal subordinates. " It is a technique of administration which drives professors of political science almost mad." It drove even more impor- tant people almost mad, but the basic quality of leadership was there all the same. And what that quality was is demonstrated over and over again in this most recommendable book. There are some chrono- logical slips (the President on the eve of his death cannot have been preparing his Jackson Day speech; it was surely his Jefferson Day speech). But these slips do not matter. Indeed, the only serious slip is apparently F.D.R.'s own. It was not Theodore Roosevelt who asked, " What's the Constitution between friends?", though he acted on the implied principle often enough. According to T. R.'s own testimony, the famous dictum was uttered by a colleague in the New
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