General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFDR and President Biden both have the same superpower.
I've seen a number of posts on DU comparing President Biden and FDR. For Democrats, to be compared with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is high praise indeed.
But there are of course some notable differences.
FDR came from a wealthy family which had already sent one of its members to the White House. He was a member of the closest thing America has had to an aristocracy--"old money" as it used to be called.
President Biden comes from a very different background--working class, not politically connected.
And their political backgrounds are different--FDR as a two term governor, Biden as a long time Senator. And while FDR had been the party's vice presidential candidate, it was on a losing ticket.
I think though there is one similarity that supersedes any and all such differences.
They both have been confronted with loss beyond their control, and the struggle that comes with it.
President Biden's experiences with grief and the struggle to carry on in the face of tremendous personal loss are well known.
FDR's are now more or less common knowledge, but at the time the public was largely unaware of the extent of his disability or the severity of his illness (he very nearly died during the initial stages of his polio). FDR lived every day with the subsequent loss of his physical independence and mobility, and this experience informed his consciousness for the rest of his life. Hugh Gregory Gallagher, in his biography of FDR, describes what polio meant to the survivors of his generation, not only the physical challenges, but also the stigma, the ableism, the obstacles put in place by an unthinking and often unfeeling society.
As a result FDR arrived at a place where he could feel tremendous empathy for those struggling with realities beyond their control.
For both FDR and President Biden then, empathy has been their superpower. This acute awareness of how difficult a struggle life can be informs everything President Biden does--just as it informed so much of what FDR tried to accomplish and did accomplish.
And our country is so much the better for it.
This administration is very definitely turning out to be exactly what this nation so desperately needed.
It makes me proud to be a Democrat.
iemanja
(53,001 posts)It was forced on him by people's movements across the country. People's movements helped Biden get elected, but he is making things happen from the very beginning of his presidency.
thucythucy
(7,985 posts)And much of what he did in his first one hundred days was considered quite radical at the time.
People's movements didn't force the actions FDR took as much as enabled them.
Yes, there was grassroots and local advocacy, just as there is today.
But the New Deal was far and away the most progressive program of any American president to date, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln and the Homestead Act. In fact it was too progressive for the Supreme Court, which rolled back or tried to roll back much of what he did.
Rural electrification alone was a significant achievement, which prompted accusations of communism from the conservatives of the day. The Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Recovery Act, Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, all of these were significant progressive programs that brought howls from conservatives. And much of the groundwork for the New Deal was laid down during "the first hundred days."
Indeed, the whole notion of measuring the success of an administration's first hundred days goes back to FDR. Nobody ever cites Rutherford B. Hayes' first hundred days as being notable. As far as I know the term was hardly used in American politics at all.
iemanja
(53,001 posts)and this version comports better with what I learned about the New Deal in graduate school. https://socialistworker.org/2008/11/14/who-made-the-new-deal
The main point of the article:
thucythucy
(7,985 posts)Just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the result of widespread social action and organizing, but also the placement of Lyndon Johnson as President. Rev. King himself said that without LBJ in the White House the Civil Rights Act--and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 -- might never have happened. LBJ wouldn't have signed or probably even proposed the Act without the civil rights struggle of the decades before, while a reactionary president wouldn't have signed it no matter how powerful a groundswell from below. The people kicked open the door, and LBJ walked on through.
And yes, the New Deal saved American capitalism, which makes the opposition of conservatives all the more thick headed. And the only way to have saved capitalism at that point was to make concessions to the working and middle classes. FDR understood this--most other American politicians didn't. The New Deal was at the time a middle road between the fascism of Italy and Germany, and the Stalinism of the Soviet Union. The right in America wanted the former, the left had a romanticized vision of the benefits of the latter.
FDR set us down a road that might well have brought us at the end of the 20th century to a form of regulated capitalism, the "Democratic Socialism" that western Europe and Scandinavia worked towards in the post war decades. That leftward trend that began with FDR was slowed by Nixon, then reversed by Reagan. What followed after Reagan has been by and large a backlash against the New Deal and the civil rights gains of the 1960s and '70s, which has brought untold misery to millions.
FDR's foreign policy was also a departure from previous administrations. His "Good Neighbor Policy" essentially meant trying to reverse the sort of blatant colonialist interference in Latin American politics, up to and including sending the marines to occupy Nicaragua all through the 1920s. The policy ended when Eisenhower Nixon began engineering coups in Guatemala and JFK supported the coup in Guyana that ended democracy there as well.
I'm hoping the Biden/Harris years will undo Reaganism and the Zombie economics of trickle down and "government is the problem."
iemanja
(53,001 posts)And your points are solid.
Joinfortmill
(14,237 posts)electric_blue68
(14,598 posts)but he died before getting it to Congress.
thucythucy
(7,985 posts)and opposed allowing the French back into Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos ("French Indochina" once the Japanese withdrew in 1945.
That alone might have prevented so much of the misery of the following decades.
electric_blue68
(14,598 posts)thucythucy
(7,985 posts)If you read Churchill's memoirs of World War II, he was quite furious at FDR "meddling" in British affairs. Roosevelt also criticized British colonialism in Africa. He visited a British colony in west Africa on his way back from the Casablanca conference, and sent Churchill a telegram calling it a "hell hole" and implied British exploitation was the cause.
And one of the reasons FDR was critical of De Gaul was the French insistence that all French colonies should be returned to French rule once the war was over. His feeling was that American blood wasn't being shed in order to set the French back up in Algeria.
Truman unfortunately was of a different mind, and history took a different course because of that.