The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ

Columbia Studies in Contemporary American History

by Michael Janeway

In the 1930s a band of smart and able young men, some still in their twenties, helped Franklin D. Roosevelt transform an American nation in crisis. They were the junior officers of the New Deal. Thomas G. Corcoran, Benjamin V. Cohen, William O. Douglas, Abe Fortas, and James Rowe helped FDR build the modern Democratic Party into a progressive coalition whose command over power and ideas during the next three decades seemed politically invincible.

This is the first book about this group of Rooseveltians and their linkage to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Vietnam War debacle. Michael Janeway grew up inside this world. His father, Eliot Janeway, business editor of Time and a star writer for Fortune and Life magazines, was part of this circle, strategizing and practicing politics as well as reporting on these men. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of events and previously unavailable private letters and other documents, Janeway crafts a riveting account of the exercise of power during the New Deal and its aftermath. He shows how these men were at the nexus of reform impulses at the electoral level with reform thinking in the social sciences and the law and explains how this potent fusion helped build the contemporary American state. Since that time efforts to reinvent government by "brains trust" have largely failed in the U.S. In the last quarter of the twentieth century American politics ceased to function as a blend of broad coalition building and reform agenda setting, rooted in a consensus of belief in the efficacy of modern government.

Can a progressive coalition of ideas and power come together again? The Fall of the House of Roosevelt makes such a prospect both alluring and daunting.

Genres: Presidents, Politics, History

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 21, 2004

Reviews

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very odd book, as much family history as social history. However, what the book seems to capture well is the ambitions of the American center-left in the mid-20th Century. For those of us who came of age in the American west during the age of Reagan, it is hard to comprehend a time when liberals where not a beleaguered and marginalized segment of the electorate. If nothing else, the book is a testament to the time when liberals strove to the polls confident of victory, and when voters could discern a difference between the liberal strands of Truman and William O. Douglas (let alone the conservative Eisenhower and reactionary Robert Taft). Once in a time long ago, we were kings of America.

[Connor Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging tour of the makers and unbridled optimism of the men (with a few exceptions) that, ebulliently, unabashedly, shone with excellence in personality with the new promise of a better tomorrow, and the shared promise of FDR in the imaginations of Americans. Backroom deals, unofficial advisors, and political hardball are nothing new to DC; to hear it done so for a greater good is tantalizing, and sobering, as their moment is come and gone.

[Stan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good, compact 284 page-book (126,000 words).

Michael Beschloss wrote a good essay-review of it, available here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/bo...

This book recounts the exploits and debates of a dozen Democratic party stalwarts who rose to power with FDR’s election, fought tooth-and-nail to build & retain their influence-peddling careers and thereby preserve their economic stations, but eventually fell out of favor or fell into ill-repute.

The stories filling these 284 pages and 569 footnotes (including those involving the author’s father) are almost universally unflattering, giving the reader to pause often and wonder just how other-directed the New Dealers were.

(This book often brought to mind Mike Madigan, protégé of Richard J. Daley and recently resigned speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, who (according to Wikipedia) was “the longest-serving leader of any state or federal legislative body in the history of the United States.” Illinois’ credit-rating is near-junk and the state near bankrupt.)

Here are some paragraphs from Janeway's last chapter:

Like [Clark] Clifford, my father continued on as if age, and the collapse of the [influence-peddling] networks in which he’d been so influential, could be denied. Also like Clifford, he’d added traffic in other people’s money to his repertoire: he’d become an investor of clients’ and friends’ savings, pooling these resources for greater leverage in making deals. For a while he managed them with a decent return, but in the 1970s he began to falter. The more he did, the less he could admit to himself what was happening. Large amounts of these clients’ investments vaporized. So simultaneously did most of his. He engineered increasingly stretched credit arrangements with obscure banks....

My parents still entertained in style. The townhouse on East 80th Street remained a living monument to their professional achievement, if you didn’t check the underpinnings and back bills. “Vienna,” my brother called it, suggesting the charade-like effort to hang on to the great days. ...

But [dad] was no longer smiling ironically as he toiled at the pulling of strings. He was fighting for solvency and new toeholds and, as the debts mounted, he was losing. The mortgages on the townhouse grew in number and amount. The chauffeured Cadillac was long gone. ... [M]anaging the grand 80th Street townhouse has become too much. My brother covers the astounding debts....

Henry Luce, in his inarticulate way, was perhaps worrying about power corrupting, or at least about it coming apart, in remarking to my mother in 1946 that “Eliot knows too much.” But for years the point about my father seemed defined by performance, energy, tour de force: how uncannily [my father] found his way to centers of power and deployed his instruments of influence upon them; on the side, offering up thrilling, or chilling, accounts of how it works there.

“Other people’s money” was one of Justice Brandeis’s great phrases, appropriated by Roosevelt and the young New Dealers in their rhetoric. It referred to unconstrained license and greed on the part of capitalist financiers. Fortas’s, Douglas’s, and Corcoran’s ends smacked of such excess. Then, at the start of the 1990s, came the catastrophic ruination of Clark Clifford, a power broker who made the others look like pikers, in an international banking scandal. None of these Rooseveltians, men who had once had such enormous influence, seemed to know how to leave their active association with power. The Rooseveltians’ great chain of dealing had become its own end. Lyndon Johnson, more or less willing the end of his life on his ranch, was the perverse exception.

Oct. 10, 2021
Dec. 28, 2019

[Steve Schinke · Rating 2 out of 5]

You have to be more than casually interested in the politics of politics (which I am not), to really appreciate this book. I was reading it to, hopefully, gain some insight on how we went from great leaders (whether you agree with their politics or not), to what we have as the front runners for president today - Bozo the Clown and Cruella De Vil. The book did reinforce my belief that politicians, and their minions, are in it for themselves, with the primary objectives being gaining, maintaining, and wielding power and influence, to their own benefit.