Valentines to the Supreme Court

Still, with all the apparatus of closeups and fade-outs, the blarney about “patrician” social responsibility, the “intimate pictures” and the hero worshipper’s loving lingering on detail, the lineaments of the real Roosevelt are discernible enough: a person of charm, of great influence over men, revealing himself fully to no one, intent always upon power and its achievement, unmeasured in his ambition. He was no firm ideologist, it is true; but one thing he understood as far back as his days in the Albany Legislature, and earlier, was that the road to power in the twentieth century lay in the statist and socialist direction.

This, at least, Mr. Schlesinger makes clear and in this he glories. There is a sense in which he has, after all, written the kind of ideological tract adequate to his purposes. It may be that the very style in which it is written, the very refusal to state openly his premises and argue for them is a tribute to his hero, the tribute of imitation. For Roosevelt, who led this country far along the road to socialism, never himself publicly stated his premises nor argued for them. As he said to Tugwell about government “planning” in 1932: “That kind of thing would have to grow rather than be campaigned for.”

CW

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C. Dickerman Williams

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Still, with all the apparatus of closeups and fade-outs, the blarney about “patrician” social responsibility, the “intimate pictures” and the hero worshipper’s loving lingering on detail, the lineaments of the real Roosevelt are discernible enough: a person of charm, of great influence over men, revealing himself fully to no one, intent always upon power and its achievement, unmeasured in his ambition. He was no firm ideologist, it is true; but one thing he understood as far back as his days in the Albany Legislature, and earlier, was that the road to power in the twentieth century lay in the statist and socialist direction.

This, at least, Mr. Schlesinger makes clear and in this he glories. There is a sense in which he has, after all, written the kind of ideological tract adequate to his purposes. It may be that the very style in which it is written, the very refusal to state openly his premises and argue for them is a tribute to his hero, the tribute of imitation. For Roosevelt, who led this country far along the road to socialism, never himself publicly stated his premises nor argued for them. As he said to Tugwell about government “planning” in 1932: “That kind of thing would have to grow rather than be campaigned for.”