Anyone who has endured an American public education is no doubt familiar with Roosevelt hagiography. The name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has remained sonorous in our political discourse. It is unsurprising that Democrats hail Roosevelt and his legacy of dramatically expanding government size and control. Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society was framed as the fulfillment and completion of the New Deal, while invasive and burdensome environmental regulations have been framed as a “Green New Deal.”
This kind of reverential treatment is not unique to Democrats. Ronald Reagan, supposedly a great champion of limited government and constitutional order, personally admired Roosevelt and even lauded his actions in facing the crisis of the Great Depression, seemingly viewing them as necessary at the time.
Similarly, Donald Trump proudly showed off the portrait of Roosevelt when the avowed socialist and then-mayor-elect of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, came to visit the White House in November of 2025.
When even his supposed opponents are operating largely under the revolutionary framework that he installed, it is hard to exaggerate Roosevelt’s impact, in the true sense of that overused word.
Roosevelt’s many outrages, mistakes, and negative innovations are no doubt broadly familiar to many readers, yet even 80 years after his death, he is still viewed with favor. The majority of the public still rated him as being “outstanding” or “above average” as recently as February of 2026.
Enter historian David T. Beito’s latest book, FDR: A New Political Life. Following on the heels of his other 2023 book, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, this succinct (215 pages before the end notes), yet thorough, volume provides a crash course into Roosevelt’s meteoric, and destructive, impact on America.
Casual Roosevelt loathers (or haters, as the youth say) will no doubt find many new and interesting tidbits to add to their arsenal of gripes. Beito covers all the expected things. Roosevelt’s terrible economic policies prolonged the Great Depression and generally served as a useful vehicle for bribing voters in important districts when election time came around. This is generally understood, at least among conservatives.
However, Beito also identifies a petty and vindictive streak in Roosevelt that undergirded many of his actions and made him stay on an ugly course no matter how many advisors tried to dissuade him.
Just as politicians today seek to master the rapidly evolving social media landscape to connect to voters, Roosevelt skillfully employed the radio to speak to the nation. But Beito sheds light on the darker side of Roosevelt’s mastery of radio technology: he used the regulatory power of government to browbeat stations into political compliance. If he wasn’t pleased with their tone or message, he was willing to blackmail them with threats not to renew their broadcasting license.
In Beito’s words, “Roosevelt had few if any scruples about hatching covert schemes to sideline dissenting radio voices. He was the master of behind-the-scenes intrigue, usually via private sector or governmental intermediaries, and adeptly manipulated the revolving door of regulators and industry executives.” His officials brazenly stated that radio stations had a legal and patriotic duty to toe the government line, especially by airing Roosevelt and administration officials, but also by rejecting advertisements and airtime for those who dared question the diktats of the National Recovery Administration or other administration policy.
In one such case, famed ace and airline executive Eddie Rickenbacker desired to make a radio address opposing Roosevelt’s scheme to cancel all air mail carrier contracts and hand the job over to the Army Air Corps. He was simply informed by an NBC executive that “orders had come from Washington” to disallow any opposition to air.
In that particular case, Roosevelt finally relented and discontinued the program, after a dozen Army deaths and his own son telling him the policy was “probably as great a mistake as you’ve ever made.” But he gave in only after mandating that no former air mail carriers could bid on the contract, which in turn led to a charade of all the companies changing their names. The incident fully exposed the pettiness that Beito finds throughout Roosevelt’s career.
Beito recounts how Roosevelt once spoke to his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, about his desire to form an “international cartel” that would, in effect, centrally plan the entire world. Shockingly, this planning was not limited to simply reallocating labor from one industry to another. He wanted to reallocate entire populations, stating that he would “tell England that she had too many people and she should move out ten million of her population.”
Beito’s book is a very useful tool for understanding one of the most mistaken and disastrous leaders of the twentieth century.
If this was how Roosevelt thought in peacetime, then it is little surprise that his megalomania played into World War II in deranged and destructive ways.
Once the war began, his ego first manifested itself in his harsh and cruel internment of Japanese Americans along the West Coast. Though intelligence reports, drawing on multiple sources of data, indicated that 90 percent of natural-born Japanese Americans “were completely loyal to the United States,” Roosevelt ignored all the data and insisted on the necessity of interment. These sources included Attorney General Biddle and even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Nevertheless, Roosevelt, in the words of historian Greg Robinson, “was willingly misled,” ignored information “from sources he trusted,” and “lent credence to the wildest and most unsubstantiated anti-Japanese rumors.”
Beito unrelentingly takes Roosevelt to task for his policy of uncompromisingly demanding Axis unconditional surrender, which Beito views as counterproductive and foolhardy, extending the war and leading to many more deaths on all sides. One could even argue that he may have handed Eastern Europe over to the Soviets.
This policy of unconditional surrender was announced by Roosevelt at the conclusion of the January 1943 Casablanca Conference. The decision to go public with the plan shocked Winston Churchill, who wrote in his diary that the policy would weld the Axis powers together in their desperation. Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels agreed, considering the declaration to be manna from heaven. Meanwhile, German dissenters plotting to overthrow Hitler viewed it as a catastrophe, notably Admiral Canaris, head of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, and one of the highest-ranking plotters against Hitler. He lamented that he could not see any solution now in the face of such an uncompromising declaration. Dwight Eisenhower put it succinctly when he declared, “If you were given two choices—one to mount the scaffold and the other to charge 20 bayonets—you might as well charge 20 bayonets”.
Beito identifies the invasion of Italy as the first to bear the “bitter fruit” of this foolish policy. With the Allied landings in Sicily, the Italian Fascist regime began to crack, with Mussolini replaced and arrested, and the Grand Council of Fascism dissolved. The Italian government began to negotiate in secret with the Allies, and figures such as Churchill and Eisenhower tried to downplay the demands of unconditional surrender, hoping to effect a rapid defection and the saving of numerous lives. Yet, once again, Roosevelt plowed on ahead, declaring in a radio broadcast that nothing other than unconditional surrender would be accepted from the Italians. This drew out surrender negotiations long enough to ensure that the Germans would realize what was happening, spring Mussolini from prison, and proceed to fortify the peninsula, ruining any chance for rapid Allied advance. There were at least 70,000 casualties in the under-resourced slog that ensued.
The bogging down of the Italian campaign was the nail in the coffin of Churchill’s “soft-underbelly” strategy that would have emphasized striking from the south into the Balkans, rather than a cross-channel invasion. Such a move would have threatened to knock out the third-tier Axis powers in the region years earlier, potentially curtailing Soviet domination of Southeastern Europe after the war, but FDR paid no heed to the multiple warnings that Stalin, or “Uncle Joe” as FDR fondly called him, was not to be trusted.
Beito is especially critical of Roosevelt’s failure to engage with the German resistance movement, in particular the case of the aforementioned Admiral Canaris, whom Beito brings up time and time again. Once more manifesting his vindictive pride, Roosevelt declared that the aristocratic Junker class that formed the core of the military opposition against Hitler was just as bad as he was and had to go. Roosevelt would not consider even engaging with Canaris, or with his offer to smuggle out a member of the German general staff to help plan an invasion of the mainland.
The “ideological cousin,” as Beito calls it, of the unconditional surrender policy was the “rescue through victory” policy towards European Jews. This policy maintained that the best way to help Jews was to win the war and forbid any attempts at negotiating with Axis powers regarding their treatment, including potential prisoner exchanges. Roosevelt sicced the FBI on the prominent American Jewish activist, Peter Bergson, who was working to change US policy and engage diplomatically to save Jews. There is no telling how many lives could potentially have been saved had FDR not shut down any efforts at negotiation.
Alternative history is impossible to know, but it does not take a wild imagination to envision an alternative course to the Second World War, perhaps the most calamitous event in the history of Western Civilization thus far, had Roosevelt not insisted on unconditional surrender. The end result of our efforts to prevent Nazi Germany from establishing European regional hegemony was to empower the Soviet Union, whose post-war domination stretched from the Elbe to Kamchatka, leading into the Cold War and all its negative effects on domestic American life, including the ever-expanding scope of state power. One may even wonder to what extent FDR’s vast expansion of government under the New Deal was solidified in American politics thanks to the perpetual crisis of the Cold War.
Though he would not live to see the end of the war, Roosevelt revealed his own preference for how the post-war world would look in the form of the Morgenthau Plan. This rather astounding plan for post-war Germany would have reduced it to a pre-industrial fief, including the export of Germans as forced labor in foreign countries. When reasonable concerns were raised about the potential for the German population to adequately meet its caloric needs, Roosevelt opined that if the population needed food beyond what their subsistence agriculture could provide, then they should be fed army soup. (Beito does not mention it, but Herbert Hoover would write in a 1947 report that indefinitely tabled the plan that “it cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out” of what remained of Germany.)
Recalling Roosevelt’s earlier flippant comment about desiring to order millions of English people to be uprooted from their ancestral homeland for the sake of his whim-based economic planning, or his shameful internment of Japanese Americans despite overwhelming advice against it, it is little surprise that Roosevelt saw little issue with such a brutal plan.
Beito has much more to say about Roosevelt’s many blunders on all fronts, from economic policy and race relations to foreign policy in East Asia, but alas, the past is the past. All we can do is learn from these mistakes and seek to avoid them in the future. Beito’s book is a very useful tool for understanding one of the most mistaken and disastrous leaders of the twentieth century. In addition to its wide breadth, its succinct length makes it an especially attractive option for not only students and academics, but the interested public as well. Beito has done a great service to crack the destructive Roosevelt myth on both the domestic and foreign policy fronts; hopefully, younger generations will listen.
