Roosevelt: Dictator or Democrat
By HARPERS, $3.00
THE clue to Mr. Johnson’s fundamental purpose in this book, the clue to its special timeliness, is to be found in the dedication ‘ to every man who cast an honest vote for Willkie.’ There were 22,000,000 who voted for Willkie. One cannot know how many of their votes were honest by Mr. Johnson’s definition, but doubtless there was as high a proportion of honesty as in the 27,000,000 votes for Roosevelt. And of the honest voters against the New Deal an overwhelming fraction were honestly convinced that they were voting against everything that in the campaign was summed up as ‘alien ideologies and isms.’ They believed that under the New Deal the country had got into the hands of insidious political forces that meant to achieve an un-American regimentation of American life and in the end to confront us with the accomplished fact of a Sovietized United States. It is to persons of this persuasion that Mr. Johnson addresses his political biography of Franklin Roosevelt. He sees their attitude toward the New Deal as the most dangerous of all impediments to our national unity in this hour when the threat from without gives internal solidarity a crucial importance.
Briefly and simply, we cannot get together for a truly effective fight against Hitlerism it a third of us are half convinced that our country is itself hovering on the brink of Stalinism. Mr. Johnson, a New Dealer with candid reservations, meets this issue by writing eight emphatic chapters to show by logical and historical proofs that the New Deal and its leadership are and always have been American to the core. ‘ Even if you are one of those who regard the New Deal as Americanism at its worst, it is still Americanism. However distorted you may think its ideas, they are still ideas whose origin is to be found in the Constitution and the Federalist, not in Wagnerian opera. Its traditional hero is Mr. Jefferson, not Wotan; and Mr. Jefferson, with all his faults, was recognizably a statesman, and not a baritone singer seven feet high with cow-horns on his hat.’ w. F.