American History Hit - Becoming FDR

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

In August 1921, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was 39 years old, he contracted Polio, paralysing him from the waist down. Jonathan Darman tells Don how, despite some telling FDR that any political aspirations he might have were over, he went on to become the 32nd President of the United States.Produced and mixed by Benjie Guy. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. We are on a grand vacation home on Campobello Island off the coast of northern Maine. It is the early morning of August 11, 1921, and a 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt is awakening to horrible, painful aches throughout his body.

At first, he supposed it was fatigue and stiffness from all the swimming and sailing, the usual activities here on the island. But now the symptoms and a worsening fever were debilitating. The viral contagion he'd contracted, poliomyel. polio would overtake him that summer, eventually paralyzing his legs and altering the course of his life forever. But it would also change the course of the United States and the world. Hi, everybody. Welcome to American History hit. I'm Don Wildman. One interesting way to view American history is as a long series of before and afters. There is pre-revolution and post. The antebellum period and then the Civil War. There is American neutrality in World War II, and then there's

Pearl Harbor. It's part of the fabric of this nation that there is one thing, rather definitely, and then there is another. And when that pivot happens, sadly, more often than not, it's paid for inhuman suffering, if not outright tragedy. But this phenomenon is not so much the case with American political leadership. American leaders tend to exist in one camp or the other, conservative or liberal, most generally. And for better or worse, their service to a certain cause is rewarded by re-election, by a boating constituency that sees them sticking to their guns and digging in their heels. But in the case of one giant of American governance, one of our greatest presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the before and after is clearly attributable for his most enduring

and accomplished achievements. It's the subject of a fascinating new book, Becoming FDR, recently released, whose author is my guest today. Jonathan Darmine, welcome to American History Hit. Hi, Don. It's great to be with you. In the opening pages of your book, you compare two defining moments in FDR's political ascendancy. One at the 1920 Democratic Convention, when he's named Vice Presidential Candidate on the James Cox ticket, and the other in 1936, 16 years later at his own convention in Philadelphia, nominated for a second term. Two different political moments, two entirely different eras, and really two different men. That's exactly right. I chose those two scenes because I think they really get at that before and after that you so

wonderfully described there in Franklin Roosevelt's life. A lot of people don't realize that Franklin Roosevelt got polio in the middle of his life. And he had a whole career in politics before he got polio. And his whole sort of identity in national politics in his 20s and his 30s was as the reincarnation of his famous cousin, Teddy Roosevelt. And he was trying always to be sort of the vigorous, athletic, young American man in a hurry. And that was sort of his claim to fame. And he, at the 1920 convention, which I start my book with, he landed himself a spot on the Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate, in part because people loved the way he

looked running around the room, jumping over Roseville. of chairs, and he just seemed such an attractive and elegant and active young man. And he sort of thought at that stage in his life that if he did that Teddy Roosevelt impersonation well enough, that could land him in the White House. And I think that sort of gets to who the pre-polio FDR was. He was someone who had a lot of charisma and some talent, but he lacked a certain depth. It was all about surface. And it's only when he gets polio in the middle of his life at age 39 and all of his plans for the future are wrenched away from him. And that whole identity that he had so carefully constructed was wrenched away from him, that he's forced to develop new qualities of character, which are going

to make him one of the great presidents in American history. And you see that difference. I wanted to illustrate that difference at the beginning of the book by showing him, the 1936 convention. By then, of course, he'd become history's FDR. He was running for his second term as president, and his body was disabled from polio. And as he made, this is not something that a lot of people focus on, but as he made his way to give his speech that night at the Democratic Convention, he actually had one of his rare public falls. He was sort of pushed over. And just moments before he was about to give the speech, he was toppled to the ground and all of his pages for the speech he was going to give were strewn all over the place. And it's a moment of

real tension and fear for Franklin Roosevelt because the thing that he was always focused on as president was keeping people from seeing him in any position where he looked weak. But I think what you see in the end of that scene is that whatever polio had done to his body, weakness was not something he had to worry about. He gives his speech that night, which is one of his, his great speeches and he gives the unforgettable line, this generation has a rendezvous with destiny. And I thought that scene was really poignant because destiny is a word that comes to have a very different meaning in Franklin Roosevelt's life. And I wanted to show the story of how that came to be. The distinguishing, I mean, there's a lot of books about FDR, just like, you know, the other great

presidents, Washington, Lincoln, FDR is right up there. The very smart distinction of your book is that it focuses on the transition that occurs because of his, illness and looks at that as the tipping point, literally and figuratively. Let's name his illness. Let's talk about how severe this really was when it occurred and what was its effect on him. So he, as I said, got polio at age 39 in the summer of 1921. That's a year after he had been on that Democratic ticket in 1920. It was a losing ticket. They lost in a big way. But he was still sort of, you know, looking forward to a career in politics doing that Teddy Roosevelt's impersonation. And he gets gravely ill all of a sudden in the late summer of 1921 when he's at his family's summer

cottage on Campobello Island, which is a Canadian island that's off the coast of Maine. And in 1921, that's about as bad a place to get a new mysterious illness as you can be because it's incredibly remote. The island only had one telephone line. His house didn't have electric and the idea that you could get sort of world-class medicine is a far cry from what you're able to get on Campobello. So he gets gravely ill and he has this sort of torturous two weeks of not knowing what's happened to him losing the ability to move much of his body. Ultimately, he's going to be paralyzed below the waist, but at first he's paralyzed above the waist as well. And the people around him are worrying that he might die. And ultimately, he's

diagnosed with what was called at the time infantile, polio. It was called infantile paralysis because it was a disease that chiefly afflicted children. And to get that diagnosis in 1921 is basically to be told that you have one of the most frightening illnesses that was known to man at the time, but also one of the least understood. You know, I sort of analogize it in a certain way to the way that we felt about COVID in the first couple months after the pandemic started, where there's this sort of, constant fear around it, but there's not very much understanding of like how it's transmitted, you know, the period when we were all washing our groceries and all of that. And polio was sort of

like that in this country for decades. It had been an epidemic for about 20 years at that point, and it was something that filled people's hearts with fear. But they didn't really understand much about how it was transmitted and even what the right way to treat its symptoms were. So So that's, if you imagine what it's like to be Franklin Roosevelt, not knowing what's going to happen to you, understanding that your body has been transformed, and really, you know, wondering if you're going to live, it's a moment that I think a lot of us would be sort of overcome by the fear. But, you know, what was so fascinating to me as I started working on this is really that's the point where he starts to dig deep and become a better version of himself. It is a bit of a statement on how truly ambitious this man was that such a. a wipeout in life as getting polio and becoming paralyzed still did not defeat him. You mentioned several of his characteristics, but let's get a clear picture of FDR before polio strikes.

Where is he from? What kind of background does he have? He's a child of privilege. Right in the heart of the Hudson Valley, this man had a big life. That's right. I think that sort of key characteristics of his early life are extreme privilege, extreme adulation and adoration from his parents and extreme isolation. He was the only child of his mother, Sarah Roosevelt. His father had an older son, much older son from an earlier marriage. And so his mother sort of viewed Franklin Roosevelt as the most special, wonderful child in the world. And she made him the center of her life and the center of their family estate.

at Hyde Park. And I think that's really important to understand because a lot of women in her social class at that period in time, you know, they might have farmed off the raising of a child to nannies and governesses and all of that. Sarah Roosevelt, who was a very strong personality, she wanted to make sure that she was in charge of every aspect of her child's life. And that gives him this sort of sense of his own importance, of his own wonderfulness. But Sarah also has this sort of one giant expectation that's governing his childhood, which is that he should be pleasant at all times. And, you know, I think that's really important

in understanding FDR's psychology because when you look at him as president where he has this incredible ability to sort of intuit people's emotions, I think that has its roots in that rule of Sarah's, because if you're instructed to be pleasant at all times, you get very good at sort of sensing the first signs that you are causing displeasing.

displeasure in others. But what that also means is that he sort of becomes very adept at hiding his true feelings from the world. And that's another like essential Franklin Roosevelt characteristic. One of his speechwriters who became a biographer, Robert Sherwood, referred to it as his heavily forested interior. And I think any of us who write about FDR like become very familiar with that and feel sometimes like we're lost in that forest. But that makes him, sort of very adept at shielding from the world what's really going on inside of him. And I think that's another reason I was sort of drawn to the polio story because it's a rare moment where he sort of has to peel back the curtain and show what's really going on inside.

I don't think I really realized until I read your book that he was such tall man. He was six foot two inches. He was incredibly athletic, incredibly good looking. I mean, certainly a look for the day. You know, he was really of his time. That's right. I mean, he was made in every regard a figure cut for the moment to become the star he saw that he would be. And you mentioned psychologically, everything about FDR was the opposite of what he would have to become. It's a fascinating switch that happens. That's right. I mentioned the 1920 campaign. One of the reasons he got put on the 1920 ticket was that that was the first election in which women had the right to vote for president nationwide under the 19th Amendment.

And there was this sort of thinking among male political bosses that women voters were going to be fickle and that they were going to be drawn to an attractive young man. And the Democratic Party bosses looking around said, well, we've got Franklin Roosevelt. And yeah, I think, you know, his physical presence was such an important part of his whole identity. And again, it was very much sort of this idea that he had that he should just follow his cousin, Teddy's template, Teddy's path, and become the sort of Democratic Roosevelt, the Roosevelt for the next generation. And I think, you know, that's why it's such an interesting moment when he loses that ability. He knows fairly early on that that sort of political identity based in his

physical presence is something he's never going to get back. You look at pictures of him before and after, and it's sort of like he ages 10 years overnight. He goes from being a young-looking, middle-aged man to an old-looking middle-aged man. And that all really happens very quickly to him, so he has to find a new way. You mentioned the political bosses, the Democratic bosses he's dealing with. In those days, and really since Aaron Burr in the 70-100s, the machinery of the Democratic Party was Tammany Hall. This is the organization that's sort of based in New York City, and has always been the sort of political brokerage of everything that was state and national, certainly, politics coming out of New York. How did Franklin Roosevelt view Tammany Hall at the beginning of his

career? So, yeah, I think that that's the right way to put it, because his relationship with Tammany Hall changes and sort of changes several times. At the beginning of his career, Tammany Hall has this sort of national identity as a symbol of corruption. You know, you use those words in most parts of the country, Tammany Hall, and people know automatically what you mean, sort of machine-fixed bosses and all of that. Teddy Roosevelt, a big part of his identity that he had created for himself was as a sort of progressive reformer who was going against these bosses. And Franklin Roosevelt, even though he's in the Democratic Party, which the Tammany controlled in New York State, very early on tries to adopt

that same identity as someone who's going to crusade against Tammany Hall. He's in the New York legislature. That's his first stop in politics. And he sort of makes a big show for himself of going against Tamini Hall against their pick for the United States Senate. And it's a good way for him to get attention. So in the early stages, he sort of makes himself someone who is an anti-Tamini candidate. He gets put on the 1920 ticket in part because he was someone who Southern Democrats saw as a New Yorker, which was a key electoral state, who didn't have the Tamini Hall taint. But later on, I mean, FDR is a pragmatic politician. And I think he, because he, becomes much more pragmatic after polio, he understands that Tammany Hall, as someone who wants

to get elected statewide New York and ultimately get elected nationally, Tammany Hall is an important organization that he needs on his side. So in the later years, you see him constantly thinking about how do I sort of maintain my identity independent of Tammany Hall without irritating them and making myself someone that they can comfortably be allied with. I'll be back with more from Jonathan Dorman after the short break. an icon for his presidential years. We often forget the rest of his career before that. He starts as a New York state senator, 1911, serves in the Wilson administration, Woodrow Wilson, as an assistant secretary of the Navy until 1920. That's a good long period of time there. Yeah, and includes a world war. Exactly. And then becomes governor of New York in 1928 until his four presidential terms begin in 32. But it's that seven-year exile, I guess you'd call it, from 1921 to 28. which is very much what your book is focused on. Needless to say, recovering from a massive illness

is the primary headline there. But there's a lot more going on in those seven years. So he gets polio and he understands that it's really changed the picture for him in a dramatic way. And most people around FDR are telling him, okay, you should give up on this sort of political life and think about, you know, a life as a comfortable invalid to use the parlance of the time at home in Hyde, sort of, you know, as a country squire. And there's one voice around him who is arguing the other way. And that's an incredibly important character in my book, his chief political advisor, Louis Howe. Louis Howe had been with FDR since nearly the beginning of his political career. And he was sort of, his whole life was in this idea that FDR could be president someday. And Howe had this sort of

wonderful emotional understanding. And he's around in this period and he's listening to the doctors talk about FDR's chances of recovery and of gaining the ability to have better mobility and maybe even the ability to walk. And he understands that so much of it depends on his psychology and his sense that there's something better in front of him. And so he goes to FDR and he says, look, I think you not only are going to return to politics, I think you're going to be president someday. And the way that that's going to happen is you're going to focus on your recovery for these years ahead. I and your wife, Ellen, are going to take care of your public profile in these years. You focus on recovery. And that's really what FDR spends those seven years doing in large part. He goes to Worm Springs,

Georgia in 1924. He's drawn there chiefly because he wants to regain the ability to walk. He's heard that the waters there have these magical powers. But what Worm Springs actually gives him is this connection with the part of him that can help others. And it happens in this sort of magical way. from the earliest moments he's there. He has this idea that if this place can help him, it can help other people. And you see it. I mean, I was really struck, you know, doing this research, seeing it in his letters, how very early on he's writing to other polio patients and he's saying,

you should come to Warm Springs, Georgia. It's a wonderful place. He ultimately puts a lot of his personal fortune into buying Warm Springs and turning it into a larger rehabilitative center for other polio patients. And I think, you know, you see him. sort of getting in touch with his ability to help others and really using Worm Springs not consciously as a laboratory for these ideas of how you can inspire hope and sustain resilience. At one point, I was looking at a medical report of a patient from Worm Springs where it was

describing that patient's progress and it said, you know, this person arrived here with this muscle was this size, now it's this size. He was only able to walk this far with crutches. Now he can walk this far with crutches. And then you look down at the bottom of the report and its author is revealed as Franklin D. Roosevelt. I mean, that was something that was surprising to me. He was that hands-on involved in other people's care. And I think it's because he really took a certain joy in helping other people to improve. And what's really sort of bittersweet about it in a certain sense is Worm Springs never gave him that same kind of progress for himself. But it gave him so much else, the sort of qualities of empathy and practical understanding of hope that we're going to

make him a great president in the Depression in World War II. How much of this was the public aware of? How much of his story was in that sphere? It's a really good question because going into this, you know, I thought sort of the main importance of polio in a lot of ways was the sort of lengths that FDR went to as president to keep his condition and really any talk of his disability out of the press, and we all have this sort of idea of this sort of code of silence that existed among reporters who covered the Roosevelt presidency. That's true in a certain sense, but if you look earlier in the 1920s and the early 1930s, polio is actually a big part of his public profile. If you were reading the newspapers in those years about Franklin Roosevelt, you knew that he had

infantile paralysis. You knew that he was devoting a substantial portion of his life to his recovery, spending a lot of times at Warm Springs. You could even see photographs of him showing off his body, which had been completely transformed by this illness, and his leg muscles dramatically depleted. All of those things were things that the public saw. And what was fascinating to me is when he ultimately makes his return to politics in the late 1920s and then runs for president in 1932,

polio is an important part of the story. It's this idea that he's someone who's been through hardship and persevered. Now he's a really inspiring comeback story. And that's something that he uses quite cannily in 1928 when he's running for governor. And he uses it, I think, really unconsciously in a certain way when he's running for president in 1932, which is this moment when the country is down and the country is looking for that sort of persevering spirit. And I think people understood that this was someone who knew what was involved in that. It's a story full of parallels. Some of which we'll still get to, but the nation and the Great Depression being knocked to its knees

and then electing a man who has lost the use of his legs is an incredibly almost poetic metaphor in a way. That's a great way of putting it, yeah. Franklin Roosevelt was married to Eleanor Roosevelt, as we all know. Today, we know this was a political partnership as much as a marriage, maybe more than a marriage from what we understand. But she, too, was transformed by FDR's polio. How so? Yeah, you know, the time that I spent working on Eleanor's story in these years was some of the most rewarding for me as a researcher in a lot of ways because in a lot of ways her transformation is even more dramatic than her husbands. In the years before polio, Eleanor was in her early and mid-30s and she was sort of lost. She had been in a deeply unhappy period in her marriage to Franklin after he had humiliated her and betrayed her by having a. an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer.

And Eleanor is someone who's sort of afraid of the world in a certain sense. She doesn't really know what her purpose is in it. And she doesn't have any idea that she can be a big public figure. When Franklin is running for president in 1920, a reporter comes to Eleanor and asks her what she thinks about women's suffrage, which was a big topic in the news that year, because it's the first year that women are voting nationwide. And Eleanor's response was, I don't have strong feelings either way. Personally, I'm content with my husband and my children.

You know, Eleanor Roosevelt saying that. It's remarkable. And in just a few years' time, she's not only going to have opinions about whether women should be in politics, she thinks they should. She's going to be in politics as one of the most consequential women in the Democratic Party with a power base and an agenda that's totally, separate from and independent from her husband. And a lot of that happens because of polio. There is this need when he's in the years, when he's off chasing recovery, to have someone representing the Roosevelt's in the public sphere. And Eleanor is the person who, you know, sort of jumps into that void. And very quickly she discovers that the sort of big world of ideas and of

action is the place that she was always meant to be. And so it's really wonderful to see her becoming her true self alongside him becoming his true self and they're renegotiating their partnership to sort of fit who they both become. His decision to run for governor in 28, was this seen as a stepping stone directly to the presidency or was this perhaps the platform he would stay at? I mean, it had to have been daunting for him to be running for office given what had happened. think that he always thought, and it was a reasonable expectation that if he could run for governor of New York and get elected governor of New York, that he would be in a good position to be the Democratic candidate for president at some point in the future. Because New York was an incredibly, it was the largest state in the country at that point, and it was a perennial presidential battleground.

So a candidate who came from New York and was able to get statewide support in New York was someone that the National Democratic Party was going to be interested in. But it's this sort of, it's another sort of bittersweet moment in 1928 when he makes the decision to run. Because according to the plan that he and Louis Howe had worked out, it wasn't supposed to happen that fast. They had this idea that he would run for governor in 1932 and then run for the presidency in 1936. But in 1928, Al Smith, who was the sitting governor of New York, was running as the Democratic candidate for president. and he sort of was pressuring FDR to run as governor in that year because he wanted FDR's sort of help getting votes upstate. And FDR at first resisted him because he said, no, I need more time to focus on recovery. And in his mind at least, at that point, it was still possible that

he was going to regain the ability to walk fully on his own without aid. It probably actually wasn't medically possible. But that's what FDR. our thought. So in his mind, when he ultimately gives in to Al Smith's entreaties and decides to run for Governor of New York, in his mind, he's really making a choice between his political life and walking again, because he knows that once he gets back into the arena, he's closing the door on sort of making that dramatic recovery that he had been hoping for over those many years. Before I read your book, I really was one of those people who just thought of a man who was in total denial, emotionally, physically, politically. He had to have been seen as a standing, walking man, or not perhaps

walking, but at least upright, faking his arrivals. There's a secret elevator under the Waldorf Astoria that famously his car would be driven from the railroad onto the elevator. This whole deception. Your book turns out around for me that there was more honesty and more openness, certainly from him to the world, never mind the newspapers. That's right. And I think you can see it in the earliest moments. I didn't actually set out to write a book about polio. I set out to write a book about FDR's presidency because I wanted to sort of get at this question of how does a president form a bond

with the American people during difficult times in order to inspire hope? And I thought that that book would look at the presidency. And it was only when I really dug into it that I understood how important the polio story was in. developing that incredible ability he had to help other people find hope. And a moment that sort of really revealed that to me was looking at the letters that he wrote to other polio patients, starting in the first days after his illness was announced publicly in the fall of 1921. It was this sort of story in the press because that, you know, Franklin Roosevelt, the young man in a hurry,

gets infantile paralysis. And there was a lot of, you know, what we would today call spin, you know, very confident assurances from FDR's doctors and his friends saying, oh, he's going to make a complete recovery. And as in response to that, other people who had polio or who had family members who had polio, a lot of them wrote letters saying, what did you do? And then other people wrote letters offering him advice on how he could get through this experience. And there was one man whose letter really affected me. He was someone who had been fully paralyzed by polio and had spent seven years in a hospital. And he described the ways that fear and anger and shame had impeded his recovery. And he wrote a letter to FDR and he said, Mr. Roosevelt, whatever you do,

don't worry, it won't help any. And that was the moment where the book sort of revealed itself to me, because I can see a straight line from those words to the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yeah, the idea of empathy. You know, the idea of the present. presidential empathy being a guiding force in the office was primary to FDR's terms. There are those who, even today, will attribute the decline of America to the legislative achievements of certainly the 1930s, the New Deal, the birth of the social safety net, social security, the Fed, you name it. Do you think that FDR would have pursued those objectives had he not suffered so much from polio? Was that his political agenda without the disease? I think he was someone who was a progressive in a very abstract sense before polio.

He had this idea and it was instilled in him early on by his father that as a sort of member of the privileged class, he had a duty to look out for the people who had less than he did. But it was always pretty abstract. And in the early years of his career, he could always just sort of focus on his own advancement because if he wanted to do good things for others, he first had to become great himself. And it's only when he gets polio and he understands for the first time in his life, really, what suffering is like for the sufferer, that he gains this sort of moral mission to help other people. I think you see it at beginning at Warm Springs. You know, think about it. It's the 1920s.

And everyone in FDR's social class and his friends and people all around him are making a lot of money by, you know, not doing very much, just by sort of riding the Great Bull market. FDR instead takes a substantial portion of his fortune to buy Wormsprings. He had sort of vague ideas that that could be a moneymaker, but that wasn't the point. It was about helping others. And I think he gets this sort of awareness and this sort of moral righteousness in a certain sense, in the best sense of the word, that there's fundamental wrongs that he can help to write. So he might have pursued what we would call a progressive agenda as president if he'd never

gotten polio, but it wouldn't have worked when he comes to understand what people need to hear when they are downtrodden and what they need to sort of be able to sustain hope over a long period of time. That's really the heart and the genius of the Roosevelt presidency more than anything else. And to be clear, you don't chalk it all up to one particular thing. This is an entire era, politically speaking, of massive change and a redefinition of the federal government, its presence in our lives and so forth, and all of these forces are at work. And Roosevelt is riding that whole train, really, into reshaping America. It is jolted forward by certain events, such as the Great Depression in World War II. He's a part of all of this, but this is definitely a changing

era. Polio plays a major part in this personally to him. There are profound parallels to be drawn from Franklin Delanoa Roosevelt's America and today. The American in 1930 coming out of the Depression, later World War II, it was a land of political and social polarity. I mean, more so, more starkly so than even today. Fork in the road stuff here. It was literally being reformed by those FDR administrations. You can draw a lot from this time about what we're going through today. Did you sense that writing this book? Yeah. And honestly, there were some moments, you know, I was writing this book during the pandemic. I was finishing it during the 2020 election. and its aftermath.

And there were some days where I would sort of look to, you know, the way that Roosevelt was able to inspire the country in the darkest depths of the Depression, looking for solace myself. You know, one speech I turned to a lot was the speech that he gave at the 1932 Democratic Convention accepting the nomination. And there's a line in there where he says, out of every crisis, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge of higher decency. and of purer purpose.

And I would read those words, you know, after something like January 6th. And I would think to myself, I mean, gosh, I really hope that's true. Because I think we all feel that, you know, we're living through a time of crisis, but the greater knowledge and the higher decency and the pure purpose are pretty elusive. But you think about FDR saying those words in the summer of 1932, which in certain ways was an even scarier moment for the American Republic than the one we're living in today. And he said those words and people believed it. And they believed it because he believed it and he believed it because he had lived it in his own life.

And I think my biggest takeaway from all of this is that that's the way we should think about politicians today when they talk about hope. when did they need hope in their own lives and what did they learn from it and how are they going to apply that in the public arena? There is a school of thinking about American history, certainly American presidents, that we get what we need. You know, this sort of magical thing that happens between Washington and Lincoln and FDR and, you know, maybe more recently we've gotten what we deserve. FDR is a high bar in that discussion. Many people would disagree with that. There is a whole bunch of people who don't feel that way.

but it seems amazing that American history seems to be defined by these presidents that were fighting their own battles, pulling us along up to or down to where they are. It's incredible. The book is called Becoming FDR, The Personal Crisis That Made a President. The author is Jonathan Darmine. Thank you very much for joining us. This is really fascinating. It was great to be with you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit.

I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.