The Roosevelts

I’m watching Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts.  Burns is a lib.  He does a good job at documentaries, panning old still photos to suggest action, and photo selection to tell his story.  He does a great job with older history and did well with Country Music, but touch anything polically modern and his politics interferes. Both Roosevelts “thought outside of the box.” Progressive TR is viewed with disdain by most libs while progressive FDR is an unvarnished hero. Why?  Because TR championed Rugged Individualism which supports the conservative notion of limited government and Liberty.  FDR’s trial-and-error solutions of the Great Depression advanced Big Government and blaming selected groups. But the liberal big hate reason is that TR strongly favored American involvement in Spanish American War—warmonger! None of this was spoken to in Burns' first episode. Indeed political issues are rather glossed over.  No mention that Americans doing business in Cuba were detained and never heard from again.  No mention that Spain was oppressing the Cubans.  Those things angered Americans greatly and the explosion of the Battleship Maine was politically a last straw for people in USA. But hippie Burns tells a lot of psychoanalysis as always.   TR was judged to be fighting ‘inner demons’, that if he didn’t stop working hard and changing things, he would surely have died of depression as an alcoholic like his brother. Why his wife and mother died on the same day! And cruelly he ships his only daughter off to live with his sister.  No mention that Victorians separated men and women’s responsibilities and living with relatives was common.  But the dude TR he found himself in cattle ranching in the west.  Left unsaid is why his N. Dakota neighbors, who laughed at him at first, found great respect for him and his views.  Oh, wait, Burns advanced the explanation that TR slugged a guy who called him ‘4 eyes’ and somehow that gained everyone’s respect.  (Hmm.  My cowboying days seem to tell me that a guy like that could just as well be ostracized.) The audience might be left to wonder how the westerners admired a man who went spectacularly broke.  Unsaid is that that the disastrous winter of 1886-7 left 90% of the cattle dead in northern USA. Sadly everyone went broke.  So TR went home to NY, remarried, then got a job in Washington DC, eventually becoming Asst. Sec. of the Navy.  Sensing war was about to break out, TR directed Admiral Dewey to close in on Philippines. The result was a brilliant victory.  Then TR resigned to become commissioned as Lt. Colonel and recruited the ‘Rough Riders’ cavalry regiment. Burns indulges himself in proclaiming him a witless commander at Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, who flung his men carelessly and cynically into enemy fire in order to conquer another inner demon that TR thought himself a coward.  But historians I have read say that US command didn’t anticipate a new murderous weapon the Spanish had, the machine gun with a cooled barrel.  The only thing that saved the Rough Riders was their audacious commander who ordered a fast strike that overwhelmed the Spanish positions.  So TR returned a hero, but Burns selects cartoons of political opponents lampooning him as a crazy man.  TR thereupon ran for governor of NY and won handily.  Left untold is how he appealed to the working men who remembered his demands for good working conditions and reasonable pay when he was a state legislator.  His tireless work for McKinley’s election is seen as another inner demon.  Then his unbelievable effort to get McKinley re-elected with himself a VP is almost portrayed as demented. 

May I suggest theat TR’s inner demons were simple.  All young men struggle to prove themselves. If you have a dad who is close and gives you a thumbs up, it usually ends somewhere in the early twenties.  Without one, like TR, you seek affirmation of other accomplished men like the military, bosses, or coaches. TR struggled as a spindly kid with genius who had to also prove himself to himself.  It took longer.  His dogged personality seems not sick and demented, unless you are a hippie, who also suffered from absentee father, who chose to retreat from all male competition. 

            On the other hand, FDR, who grew up quite a Richie Rich in Hyde Park, a coddled child who had no friends in school, was locked in a valiant effort to save his elderly ailing father.  (James R. in his 50s had married Miss Delano, 20, who realized she could only have one child when old James had a stroke and became a helicopter parent of her son.) It is pointed out that FDR was utterly adored by both parents, never admonished for doing wrong.  But it isn’t noted that this is normally the perfect prescription for narcissism, unchecked ego. Ironically fortunate, polio humbled FDR.  

So the next episode will be all about TRs presidency and FDR’s polio no doubt.  Look for FDR to be aggrandized as a man who overcame all odds while TR went down in infamy in a quixotic attempt to have one more term in his presidency in 1912. FDR had a power-of-positive-thinking personality, perfect to inspire people in a Depression.  But many economists today blame  the Great Depression, which grew out of a financial crisis recession, as coming from government takeover and regulation of practically everything. Policies of TR and FDR then provide a great lesson on progressism doing well and doing badly by which course it takes.

            If Burns shines in his depiction, it is probably in telling the tale of Eleanor Roosevelt.  She was daughter of Elliot, TR’s brother, hence TR’s niece.  Elliot went mentally ill and then alcoholic and died young.  Eleanor, raised by her grandparents, struggled with this all her life.