FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928

Kenneth S. Davis

He was born into one of the few really patrician families in the United States; his imperious, strong-willed mother was young enough to be his father's daughter; he grew up on a landed estate beside the Hudson River, was educated at one of the most exclusive preparatory schools in the country and as an undergraduate at Harvard lived a life of splendor on the legendary Gold Coast; his wife was a distant cousin whose bloodlines were as exemplary as his own; his cousin and exemplar was the twenty-sixth President of the United States; before he was forty, he was the Vice Presidential candidate of the Democratic Party; and then, at the height of his manhood, he was struck down by polio and waged the bravest, most determined fight of his life to overcome its crippling effects. The man described is, of course, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the dimensions of this prodigious book are best reflected in the words "A History." For this is no standard biography, no ordinary life of FDR from birth until his decision to run for the governorship of New York. What author Kenneth S. Davis has chosen to do is to set Roosevelt against the background and happenings of almost half a century and to show how the man and his career were shaped and influenced by the world in which he lived. Thus, the reader learns not only what happened to Roosevelt while he was a student at Groton but what Groton was and represented; not only that Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson but what issues were involved in the clash between Wilson's program of the New Freedom and Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and how the resolution of that clash has been the major influence upon American life in the twentieth century. What is even more extraordinary is that the book is based upon two sustained and crucial theories which are woven into the fabric of the story of the man and of his times. The first, international in scope, deals with the failure of the world's leaders, and of Roosevelt, to understand the widening breach between technology and man's ability to control it. The second concerns FDR himself and represents what is perhaps the first, and certainly most coherent, attempt to explain that mercurial man in terms of an overall premise. For while there is no question that FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny is indeed "A History," there is equally little doubt that the figures of Roosevelt and those around him dominate the book. From Sara Delano Roosevelt, the mother who forced upon him the guises that were to be the making of his political career, to Louis Howe, the ugly little kingmaker whose devotion knew no bounds; from Josephus Daniels, the Southern Populist who was but one of many of FDR's political mentors, to Eleanor, his wife, they form a group of personalities as strong, as vivid, as memorable as Franklin Roosevelt himself.