Roosevelt (88 page)

The campaign (1932—International News photo)

The press (aboard campaign train, Sept. 13, 1932—
Wide World photo)

The crowds (at Newburgh, N. Y., Nov. 4, 1940—
United Press photo)

The polling booth (with his wife and mother at Hyde Park’s Town Hall, Nov. 8, 1938—
United Press photo)

The inauguration (Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes administering the oath of office, Jan. 20, 1937—
International News photo)

A drought year—but when Roosevelt spoke, it rained—Charlotte, N. C, Sept. 10, 1936

Roosevelt laughing at his crippled legs to put others at ease, Hollywood Bowl, Sept. 24, 1932
(Wide World photo)

At Warm Springs, Ga., Dec. 1, 1933
(United Press photo)

The President reviewing the fleet from the
U.S.S. Houston
at San Francisco, July 14, 1938
(Wide World photo)

M
Y DEBTS ARE SO HEAVY
and so numerous that this book amounts virtually to an exercise in collective scholarship. I wish to express my deep appreciation to the following friends and colleagues for their generous help in making perceptive and painstaking critiques of the manuscript: Stephen K. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University; Russell H. Bastert, C. Frederick Rudolph, and Robert C. L. Scott, all of the Department of History at Williams; John H. Blum, Department of Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Philip K. Hastings, Department of Psychology, Williams College; William Leuchtenburg, Department of History, Columbia University; Jack Walter Peltason, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois; Lester Seligman, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon; Clinton Rossiter, Department of Government, Cornell University. I am indebted to all the foregoing both for their over-all review of the manuscript and for the special
expertise
they brought to bear in areas that they have made their particular fields of study.

La Rue Brown of Boston, a classmate of Roosevelt’s at Harvard and long active in Boston law and politics, gave me valuable advice and information out of his close observation of the American political scene and of Roosevelt himself, especially in the earlier chapters and in my evaluation of the presidential personality. William B. Gates, Jr., Department of Economics, Williams College, went over the material dealing with economic problems and made some extremely useful suggestions, as did Fred Greene of the Political Science Department, Williams College, with the foreign policy chapters. John P. Roche, Department of Government, Haverford College, helped me on some of the theoretical formulations both through comments on the manuscript and through his writings on related subjects. Herbert Rosenberg went over the whole manuscript with care, paying particular attention to matters of style.

Harcourt, Brace and Company kindly secured the highly prized services of Henry Steele Commager, Eric Goldman, and C. Vann Woodward, who made many important suggestions for improving the manuscript. James Milholland of Harcourt, Brace and Company also went over the chapters and contributed comments from his close study of the historical period.

I am grateful to the entire staff of the Williams College Library for their invariably cheerful assistance on a great variety of aspects of this work, and to the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library for guiding me expertly through the great variety of material there, and especially to George Roach
and William J. Nichols for coping with a great number of special demands. Herman Kahn, Director of the Library and an authority on Roosevelt, has provided me with indispensable advice as to both sources and substance. I thank also the National Archives, Widener Library at Harvard, the Columbia University Library, the University of Chicago Library, and the Roper Public Opinion Collection, Williams College, for their co-operation.

To the Social Science Research Council I express appreciation for a grant to enable me to study certain theoretical aspects of political leadership, and to Williams College for financial help on travel and other expenses.

Finally, I have pitilessly enlisted my own family in the cause. My mother, Mildred Curry Baxter, and my mother-in-law, Margaret Dismorr Thompson, have made many helpful suggestions from the vantage point of having lived through more of Roosevelt's own years than have I. And my children have performed a variety of chores to the extent that their tender years allowed.

N
EVER HAS A POLITICAL
leader left a more complex personal character and governmental program than did Roosevelt; but never has a leader left such ample means for the attempt to unravel the complexity. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park is a monument to his sense of responsibility to future generations, to his recognition of the needs of historians for the full record, and, no doubt, to his certainty of the high place he would hold in history once that record was carefully appraised. Above all, the Library represented his faith in the idea, as he expressed it at the dedication of the Library on June 30, 1941, that to collect and preserve its records a nation must believe in the past and in the future, and in the “capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”