I disagree with your point on FDR being a great war commander. He may have had a firm grasp on strategy dealing with his enemies, but he was disastrously naive about his allies. As is brilliantly explained in Sean McMeekin's book "Stalin's War", Roosevelt played right into Stalin's hands. He snubbed Churchill and courted Stalin. Through his policies, he allowed Stalin to gain control over eastern Europe after the war. Also, through Roosevelt's appointees in the lend lease program, especially the known Soviet pawn Harry Hopkins, Soviets were allowed to gain access to United States war equipment and technology, a history affecting mistake. I would highly recommend the book, as it shows the war in a whole new light.
On another note, I certainly agree with you about Coolidge and Polk. I have recently come across this newsletter and heartily enjoy your writing. Keep on!
I don't disagree at all. But I'm not comparing FDR to President Platonic Ideal. I'm comparing him to other wartime presidents--Madison, Polk, Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, LBJ, both Bushes, etc. Most of them spent a great deal of their war efforts flailing. Polk and McKinley were competent, but neither faced the existential threat that FDR faced in 1941. The Bushes both lacked the political skills to maintain consensus for their policies (or perhaps they were simply dealing with worse adversaries than FDR had). No argument about FDR's tragic misjudgments--or the perfidy of some of his aides. ... Thanks, too, for the kind words.
We have a local trial lawyer who has put his face on billboards for years. [(name redacted to protect the guilty) will "make them pay"] The other day my bride saw his face five times on a Mt. Rushmore Billboard Ad and immediately exclaimed: "that's sacrilegious"! Seriously, North by Northwest is Hitchcock's greatest movie. Went to college for journalism and business and my pet peeve is undocumented facts and dubious business-boosting PR releases disguised as news. Ten glasses of water a day, $250,000 to raise a child, 50¢ to price a grocery item, Podunk City leads the state in new site development -- all typical items I've read for years. The typical news writer today will quote a factoid like this and not provide methodology. So I've been seeing this greatest presidents list for years and only recently has the methodology been available, as the typical wire news story of the 20th century would only quote the results. And one last comment: Amity Shales did an economic analysis of the New Deal, but.... FDR provided hope for a nation devoted by the Great Depression via his fireside chats, etc. And can you put an economic value on that? Let's not forget that we did go through the excesses of the 1920s financially, and the government of the 1930s brought us regulation.
Great bunch of comments. As for FDR and fireside chats, the question is whether his economic ineptitude caused people to NEED the hope that his fireside chats gave them. Amity's thesis, I believe, is that the answer is yes. When Harding entered entered office, the US was in a deep, deep economic valley--deeper than post-Crash 1929, if I remember correctly. Harding made clear that he would stay out of the way of business as they resolved things. Six months later, the economy was roaring. In contrast, Hoover, and then FDR tried fixing things from the White House, and in doing so, they cast enormous uncertainty over businesses, which responded by going into their shells. I'm not persuaded that the "excesses" of the 20s did harm, and I am persuaded that the regulation of the 1930s absolute did do harm. By the late 1930s, Henry Morgenthau was saying that all their efforts had failed--as we went into a second valley in 1938. Amity's thesis--which I do buy--is that WWII did bring us out of the Depression, but not for the reasons people usually assume. It wasn't because wartime production got the economy going again. Rather, it's because the war kept FDR too busy to continue subjecting businesses to his lab-rat experiments and changing the rules on whim. Had FDR left office after two terms, his presidency would look in hindsight like a two-term Jimmy Carter.
I have one book that I keep in my library: Secrets of the Temple, by William Grieder. This history of the Federal Reserve puts the cause of the Great Depression as the contraction of the money supply in the USA. There were other causes too -- or so I've been told for 50 years. I've read and reread biographies, histories of FDR, TR, Lincoln. FDR tried the NRA, Supreme Court packing, one thing then another... FDR had the great ability to let every person who talked to him think that he (FDR) was in agreement with what that person was saying to him. The 1930s left a legacy of the TVA, SSA, SEC, FCC, etc. And small towns across America had new schools, post offices but... no more one room school houses due to school district consolidation, no more "environmentally friendly" wind-powered water pumps because electric pumps were encouraged due to rural electrification. Good things: 30 year mortgages, regulation of Wall Street so that small investors were "less likely" to be swindled. Bad things: redlining of properties, urban renewal, high rise public housing. Perhaps I've bought into the "Great Depression" myth as portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath and similar books just as I've had to erase "The Lost Cause" myth portrayed in books I read in my youth about "The War between the States" from my memory. I'll mull this over and read Amity's book. (This is refreshing, literate comments online from everyone!)
I recall Grieder's book, though I never read it. It dates from 1989, which is the year I began my 12-year stint in the Federal Reserve System. I don't really remember how the book was perceived, but it seems to me it was a bit Da Vinci Code-esque. But again, my memory of the book is faint. People in that era saw the Fed as this all-powerful cephalopod, with tentacles reaching into every facet of American life. My own insider's view of the Fed was that it was mundane and mechanistic--too loaded with nerd power to serve as the manipulative monster that conspiracy theorists imagined. I do agree that monetary contraction played an outsized role in lengthening and deepening the Depression--but fiscal policies, tariffs, regulation, predictability matter a great deal and there, Hoover and FDR did much harm. I suspect you'll enjoy "The Forgotten Man." Shlaes changed my perception of FDR considerably--and not for the better. He comes off as something of a nettlesome, insecure man-child. If you were a fan of the original Star Trek, think of "General Trelane" in the episode "The Squire of Gothos." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4SVDUf69bc
The 1980s went from Paul Volcker, appointed by Jimmy Carter, and high interest rates that lasted until 1986 to the tax reform of 1987 that eventually turned home equity loans into ATM machines for homeowners. But that was an unforeseen consequence. I read Bernake's memoir about his years at the Fed. And there was "irrational exuberance" Alan Greenspan, and I read his book too. Conspiracy theorists used to ask "who owns the Fed" -- but it is a matter of public law. I will read The Forgotten Man. I didn't appreciate Star Trek went it first came out in 1966 (watching on 19" bw TV) but do now (watching on 43" LCD TV) if my OCD eyes stop focusing on how they did the special effects back then.
Yup. Jimmy Carter “decided” to appoint Paul Volcker in the same way that Joe Biden “decided” not to run again. … Watching the early Star Trek Special FX is a hoot. Lots of it was very practical. The transporter was added because otherwise, the show would have needed lots of landings and takeoffs, and Roddenberry and Crew decided that such scenes would eat up an inordinate amount of screen time. long ago, I read a book called “The Physics of Star Trek”—written by a theoretical physicist. Told where the physics really excelled and where it didn’t. He approached the question of what the unlikeliest aspect was. He said most people assumed that it would be faster-than-light travel, but as he noted, the General Theory of Relativity has some loopholes that could conceivably make that possible. His candidate for the unlikeliest technology was, in fact, the transporter. He estimated the amount of informational content/energy that would be required to deconstruct, beam, and reconstruct a single person, and if I recall, it was something on the order of the total energy of the known universe. (Writing this just prompted me to download the Kindle version, so I’ll have to revisit what he said.)
A very nice pair of essays. Not because of pointing out that the expert survey was complete bullshit -- I would expect little else from any contemporary survey of the current academy on US Presidents, although I guess it's mild news that they are a bit more corrupt than I would have thought -- but because of the many and interesting comments on the distinctions between the delusion of the survey and your own thoughts. Some of it I have also thought myself, but not nearly all, and I really enjoyed all the extra chunks of insight and ideas.
In the spirit of speculation, let me argue a case against FDR and for Reagan on Mt. Rushmore: (1) Against FDR: I am not entirely persuaded that the US needed to pursue the Second World War to the extreme end it did, and I think FDR's susceptibility to Stalin's manipulation, for whatever reason that happened, removed the possibility of flexibility that might have achieved similar aims without quite as much brute-force appalling destruction -- which cost arguably led to the post-war Allied exhaustion that allowed the bitter division of Europe to crystallize. I don't think we should minimize the human cost of what happened in Eastern Europe 1945-1990. It may have been better than Nazi occupation, but not by much. (2) For Reagan: contrariwise, Reagan's delivery of the end of the Cold War was shockingly low cost. Nobody could've imagined at the time that it would end without conflict, without revolution, without huge cost, tense and bitter compromise, et cetera. It was truly bizarre the way it just sort of all...stopped, as if it had been a big misunderstanding and everyone was now cool with each other.
But that lack of drama, at the time and since (before Putin at least*) is not to be underestimated: it could very well have gone a different way. I'm not entirely sure how much to credit Reagan for this -- there were other magical factors, including Chernobyl and the Afghan war, both of which made the Soviet people lose faith in the USSR, the presence of a high-level mole in London that gave Thatcher and Reagan unprecedented insight into Gorbachev's thinking in Reykjavik, Gorbachev himself, Thatcher, one of the ablest leaders of the UK since 1945, the accelerating divergence between USSR and US in technology, and more besides. But if Reagan benefited from all these currents, he also seems to have had the wit and purpose to recognized them, bundled them, and direct them masterfully towards his aims, and achieved a peaceful end to the Cold War that nobody would have dreamed possible in any of the 45 years preceding it.
In short, I'm arguing for Reagan and against FDR because Reagan arguably won *his* war without enormous cost in blood and treasure, and any postwar division that burdened the world for another two generations, and the Cold War was at least as much of an existential threat to the US as was the Second World War. We can also credit Reagan with putting a stop to the ennui, malaise, and fecklessness of the 70s, and initiating one of the greatest post-war periods of confidence and economic growth, and we do, I think, need to add to the deficit side of FDR's ledger a fair amount of the human cost of the Great Depression, since I also agree with Shlae's thesis on that.
-----------------------------
* Arguably Putin is in some part due to following US Presidents, who with the notable exception of GHWB, paid too little attention to what was happening in Russia, and did not take any opportunity to help steer it differently.
Another great example of why Substack is a treasure. A great collection of well reasoned thoughts by the author and commenters. Thanks for setting up a great weekend ahead.
I'm always hoping that the greatest president is the next one. I'm alway disappointed. I hope the worst one is the one who comes after I'm dead and not sooner.
One of the problems with people at FDR's level (and Stalin and Trump and everyone else) is that they think they know more and understand more about a problem than they really do. The other problem is the osmosis. Information comes in, someone writes a report it goes up the line, its add or subtracted to and goes up the line. More addition and subtraction and perhaps division and multiplication. Finally gets to the President or whomever and that's what they have to go by. How close the paper is to reality is another question. People tended to tell Stalin what he wanted to hear or what they thought he wanted to hear. No one wanted to visit Siberia for any extended time period. Or worse. As for FDR's seeming to agree with everyone he spoke to. It's an old Pol trick. Ask them a question and the reply will be "well what do YOU think." The person tells them,, Poll nods his or her head, makes appropriate nosies. Questioner is happy. Not too many people will say: I know what I think. I don't know what you think. That's why I'm asking you. Try it. You won't get invited back for tea. People go by what information the process. That can lead to some very very and I do mean very bad consequences. And people alway assume they know more than they really do know. There is the old RR comment: I"t isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”Some good jokes along those lines but take to long to type.
The voices of the Presidents link is nice. Even snippets show a bit of what they beleived Americans were concerend with at the time.
They really are a lovely bunch of clips.
I disagree with your point on FDR being a great war commander. He may have had a firm grasp on strategy dealing with his enemies, but he was disastrously naive about his allies. As is brilliantly explained in Sean McMeekin's book "Stalin's War", Roosevelt played right into Stalin's hands. He snubbed Churchill and courted Stalin. Through his policies, he allowed Stalin to gain control over eastern Europe after the war. Also, through Roosevelt's appointees in the lend lease program, especially the known Soviet pawn Harry Hopkins, Soviets were allowed to gain access to United States war equipment and technology, a history affecting mistake. I would highly recommend the book, as it shows the war in a whole new light.
On another note, I certainly agree with you about Coolidge and Polk. I have recently come across this newsletter and heartily enjoy your writing. Keep on!
I don't disagree at all. But I'm not comparing FDR to President Platonic Ideal. I'm comparing him to other wartime presidents--Madison, Polk, Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, LBJ, both Bushes, etc. Most of them spent a great deal of their war efforts flailing. Polk and McKinley were competent, but neither faced the existential threat that FDR faced in 1941. The Bushes both lacked the political skills to maintain consensus for their policies (or perhaps they were simply dealing with worse adversaries than FDR had). No argument about FDR's tragic misjudgments--or the perfidy of some of his aides. ... Thanks, too, for the kind words.
We have a local trial lawyer who has put his face on billboards for years. [(name redacted to protect the guilty) will "make them pay"] The other day my bride saw his face five times on a Mt. Rushmore Billboard Ad and immediately exclaimed: "that's sacrilegious"! Seriously, North by Northwest is Hitchcock's greatest movie. Went to college for journalism and business and my pet peeve is undocumented facts and dubious business-boosting PR releases disguised as news. Ten glasses of water a day, $250,000 to raise a child, 50¢ to price a grocery item, Podunk City leads the state in new site development -- all typical items I've read for years. The typical news writer today will quote a factoid like this and not provide methodology. So I've been seeing this greatest presidents list for years and only recently has the methodology been available, as the typical wire news story of the 20th century would only quote the results. And one last comment: Amity Shales did an economic analysis of the New Deal, but.... FDR provided hope for a nation devoted by the Great Depression via his fireside chats, etc. And can you put an economic value on that? Let's not forget that we did go through the excesses of the 1920s financially, and the government of the 1930s brought us regulation.
Great bunch of comments. As for FDR and fireside chats, the question is whether his economic ineptitude caused people to NEED the hope that his fireside chats gave them. Amity's thesis, I believe, is that the answer is yes. When Harding entered entered office, the US was in a deep, deep economic valley--deeper than post-Crash 1929, if I remember correctly. Harding made clear that he would stay out of the way of business as they resolved things. Six months later, the economy was roaring. In contrast, Hoover, and then FDR tried fixing things from the White House, and in doing so, they cast enormous uncertainty over businesses, which responded by going into their shells. I'm not persuaded that the "excesses" of the 20s did harm, and I am persuaded that the regulation of the 1930s absolute did do harm. By the late 1930s, Henry Morgenthau was saying that all their efforts had failed--as we went into a second valley in 1938. Amity's thesis--which I do buy--is that WWII did bring us out of the Depression, but not for the reasons people usually assume. It wasn't because wartime production got the economy going again. Rather, it's because the war kept FDR too busy to continue subjecting businesses to his lab-rat experiments and changing the rules on whim. Had FDR left office after two terms, his presidency would look in hindsight like a two-term Jimmy Carter.
I have one book that I keep in my library: Secrets of the Temple, by William Grieder. This history of the Federal Reserve puts the cause of the Great Depression as the contraction of the money supply in the USA. There were other causes too -- or so I've been told for 50 years. I've read and reread biographies, histories of FDR, TR, Lincoln. FDR tried the NRA, Supreme Court packing, one thing then another... FDR had the great ability to let every person who talked to him think that he (FDR) was in agreement with what that person was saying to him. The 1930s left a legacy of the TVA, SSA, SEC, FCC, etc. And small towns across America had new schools, post offices but... no more one room school houses due to school district consolidation, no more "environmentally friendly" wind-powered water pumps because electric pumps were encouraged due to rural electrification. Good things: 30 year mortgages, regulation of Wall Street so that small investors were "less likely" to be swindled. Bad things: redlining of properties, urban renewal, high rise public housing. Perhaps I've bought into the "Great Depression" myth as portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath and similar books just as I've had to erase "The Lost Cause" myth portrayed in books I read in my youth about "The War between the States" from my memory. I'll mull this over and read Amity's book. (This is refreshing, literate comments online from everyone!)
I recall Grieder's book, though I never read it. It dates from 1989, which is the year I began my 12-year stint in the Federal Reserve System. I don't really remember how the book was perceived, but it seems to me it was a bit Da Vinci Code-esque. But again, my memory of the book is faint. People in that era saw the Fed as this all-powerful cephalopod, with tentacles reaching into every facet of American life. My own insider's view of the Fed was that it was mundane and mechanistic--too loaded with nerd power to serve as the manipulative monster that conspiracy theorists imagined. I do agree that monetary contraction played an outsized role in lengthening and deepening the Depression--but fiscal policies, tariffs, regulation, predictability matter a great deal and there, Hoover and FDR did much harm. I suspect you'll enjoy "The Forgotten Man." Shlaes changed my perception of FDR considerably--and not for the better. He comes off as something of a nettlesome, insecure man-child. If you were a fan of the original Star Trek, think of "General Trelane" in the episode "The Squire of Gothos." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4SVDUf69bc
The 1980s went from Paul Volcker, appointed by Jimmy Carter, and high interest rates that lasted until 1986 to the tax reform of 1987 that eventually turned home equity loans into ATM machines for homeowners. But that was an unforeseen consequence. I read Bernake's memoir about his years at the Fed. And there was "irrational exuberance" Alan Greenspan, and I read his book too. Conspiracy theorists used to ask "who owns the Fed" -- but it is a matter of public law. I will read The Forgotten Man. I didn't appreciate Star Trek went it first came out in 1966 (watching on 19" bw TV) but do now (watching on 43" LCD TV) if my OCD eyes stop focusing on how they did the special effects back then.
Yup. Jimmy Carter “decided” to appoint Paul Volcker in the same way that Joe Biden “decided” not to run again. … Watching the early Star Trek Special FX is a hoot. Lots of it was very practical. The transporter was added because otherwise, the show would have needed lots of landings and takeoffs, and Roddenberry and Crew decided that such scenes would eat up an inordinate amount of screen time. long ago, I read a book called “The Physics of Star Trek”—written by a theoretical physicist. Told where the physics really excelled and where it didn’t. He approached the question of what the unlikeliest aspect was. He said most people assumed that it would be faster-than-light travel, but as he noted, the General Theory of Relativity has some loopholes that could conceivably make that possible. His candidate for the unlikeliest technology was, in fact, the transporter. He estimated the amount of informational content/energy that would be required to deconstruct, beam, and reconstruct a single person, and if I recall, it was something on the order of the total energy of the known universe. (Writing this just prompted me to download the Kindle version, so I’ll have to revisit what he said.)
Re Cary Grant: I read a comment somewhere that Pelosi wanted to put Biden on Mt. Rushmore -- and leave him there.
Mine's just kinda the visual equivalent.
A very nice pair of essays. Not because of pointing out that the expert survey was complete bullshit -- I would expect little else from any contemporary survey of the current academy on US Presidents, although I guess it's mild news that they are a bit more corrupt than I would have thought -- but because of the many and interesting comments on the distinctions between the delusion of the survey and your own thoughts. Some of it I have also thought myself, but not nearly all, and I really enjoyed all the extra chunks of insight and ideas.
In the spirit of speculation, let me argue a case against FDR and for Reagan on Mt. Rushmore: (1) Against FDR: I am not entirely persuaded that the US needed to pursue the Second World War to the extreme end it did, and I think FDR's susceptibility to Stalin's manipulation, for whatever reason that happened, removed the possibility of flexibility that might have achieved similar aims without quite as much brute-force appalling destruction -- which cost arguably led to the post-war Allied exhaustion that allowed the bitter division of Europe to crystallize. I don't think we should minimize the human cost of what happened in Eastern Europe 1945-1990. It may have been better than Nazi occupation, but not by much. (2) For Reagan: contrariwise, Reagan's delivery of the end of the Cold War was shockingly low cost. Nobody could've imagined at the time that it would end without conflict, without revolution, without huge cost, tense and bitter compromise, et cetera. It was truly bizarre the way it just sort of all...stopped, as if it had been a big misunderstanding and everyone was now cool with each other.
But that lack of drama, at the time and since (before Putin at least*) is not to be underestimated: it could very well have gone a different way. I'm not entirely sure how much to credit Reagan for this -- there were other magical factors, including Chernobyl and the Afghan war, both of which made the Soviet people lose faith in the USSR, the presence of a high-level mole in London that gave Thatcher and Reagan unprecedented insight into Gorbachev's thinking in Reykjavik, Gorbachev himself, Thatcher, one of the ablest leaders of the UK since 1945, the accelerating divergence between USSR and US in technology, and more besides. But if Reagan benefited from all these currents, he also seems to have had the wit and purpose to recognized them, bundled them, and direct them masterfully towards his aims, and achieved a peaceful end to the Cold War that nobody would have dreamed possible in any of the 45 years preceding it.
In short, I'm arguing for Reagan and against FDR because Reagan arguably won *his* war without enormous cost in blood and treasure, and any postwar division that burdened the world for another two generations, and the Cold War was at least as much of an existential threat to the US as was the Second World War. We can also credit Reagan with putting a stop to the ennui, malaise, and fecklessness of the 70s, and initiating one of the greatest post-war periods of confidence and economic growth, and we do, I think, need to add to the deficit side of FDR's ledger a fair amount of the human cost of the Great Depression, since I also agree with Shlae's thesis on that.
-----------------------------
* Arguably Putin is in some part due to following US Presidents, who with the notable exception of GHWB, paid too little attention to what was happening in Russia, and did not take any opportunity to help steer it differently.
Another great example of why Substack is a treasure. A great collection of well reasoned thoughts by the author and commenters. Thanks for setting up a great weekend ahead.
I'm always hoping that the greatest president is the next one. I'm alway disappointed. I hope the worst one is the one who comes after I'm dead and not sooner.
One of the problems with people at FDR's level (and Stalin and Trump and everyone else) is that they think they know more and understand more about a problem than they really do. The other problem is the osmosis. Information comes in, someone writes a report it goes up the line, its add or subtracted to and goes up the line. More addition and subtraction and perhaps division and multiplication. Finally gets to the President or whomever and that's what they have to go by. How close the paper is to reality is another question. People tended to tell Stalin what he wanted to hear or what they thought he wanted to hear. No one wanted to visit Siberia for any extended time period. Or worse. As for FDR's seeming to agree with everyone he spoke to. It's an old Pol trick. Ask them a question and the reply will be "well what do YOU think." The person tells them,, Poll nods his or her head, makes appropriate nosies. Questioner is happy. Not too many people will say: I know what I think. I don't know what you think. That's why I'm asking you. Try it. You won't get invited back for tea. People go by what information the process. That can lead to some very very and I do mean very bad consequences. And people alway assume they know more than they really do know. There is the old RR comment: I"t isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”Some good jokes along those lines but take to long to type.