A nation in turmoil looks to a new leader for help — but it’s FDR
[Edward Cuddihy is a retired Buffalo News managing editor.]
History does not repeat itself, at least not in the popular sense of a giant carousel with a hundred or so figures bobbing up and down and coming around once each generation with a fresh coat of paint.
There never has been another Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte. Never have the likes the Hitler and Mussolini teamed up to murder and terrorize the Western World.
The human spirit is too complex to support such a charade. It is we, the professional overanalyzers, who discern the patterns, draw the parallels, and proclaim that Barack Obama is the new Franklin Roosevelt, when in fact he is — and is happy to be — Barack Obama.
Both men set their sights on the White House as early as their Ivy League days, although their roads to the Ivy League could not have been more diverse. Both men were unlikely candidates for the presidency, again for entirely different reasons.
Both eschewed ideology for pragmatic action, both were renowned for their oratory, and both turned out the ruling party in Washington at a time when the world economy was in mortal danger and when our nation faced threats from around the globe.
Here, the parallels hit a wall for we know what Franklin Roosevelt did, while the Obama story is yet to be played out. What we can only pray is that their stories don’t take the same turn.
Franklin Roosevelt was born to be president, or at least he was raised to be president much like the old European aristocracy trained the first son from the cradle to assume the crown.
He attended his first White House party as a Harvard undergraduate at the invitation of his distant relative, President Theodore Roosevelt. The occasion was the extravagant coming-out party of the president’s daughter, Alice, who became fabled in her own right. Of course, Franklin would marry Alice’s cousin Eleanor a few years down the road.
Thus, historian H. W. Brands sets the stage for “Traitor to His Class,” the biography of the Hudson Valley patrician who would battle big business, attempt to tax the highest income bracket beyond anything we can imagine today, champion the common man and pave the way for the American labor movement....
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History does not repeat itself, at least not in the popular sense of a giant carousel with a hundred or so figures bobbing up and down and coming around once each generation with a fresh coat of paint.
There never has been another Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte. Never have the likes the Hitler and Mussolini teamed up to murder and terrorize the Western World.
The human spirit is too complex to support such a charade. It is we, the professional overanalyzers, who discern the patterns, draw the parallels, and proclaim that Barack Obama is the new Franklin Roosevelt, when in fact he is — and is happy to be — Barack Obama.
Both men set their sights on the White House as early as their Ivy League days, although their roads to the Ivy League could not have been more diverse. Both men were unlikely candidates for the presidency, again for entirely different reasons.
Both eschewed ideology for pragmatic action, both were renowned for their oratory, and both turned out the ruling party in Washington at a time when the world economy was in mortal danger and when our nation faced threats from around the globe.
Here, the parallels hit a wall for we know what Franklin Roosevelt did, while the Obama story is yet to be played out. What we can only pray is that their stories don’t take the same turn.
Franklin Roosevelt was born to be president, or at least he was raised to be president much like the old European aristocracy trained the first son from the cradle to assume the crown.
He attended his first White House party as a Harvard undergraduate at the invitation of his distant relative, President Theodore Roosevelt. The occasion was the extravagant coming-out party of the president’s daughter, Alice, who became fabled in her own right. Of course, Franklin would marry Alice’s cousin Eleanor a few years down the road.
Thus, historian H. W. Brands sets the stage for “Traitor to His Class,” the biography of the Hudson Valley patrician who would battle big business, attempt to tax the highest income bracket beyond anything we can imagine today, champion the common man and pave the way for the American labor movement....