I think the most transformational movement of the twentieth century was the constitutionalization of the New Deal. Therefore, Roosevelt would be high on my list of important presidents. When I think about Roosevelt’s presidency, I am attracted to explanations that have less to do with him than with how Americans came to accept the idea of the New Deal and its social welfare state—a set of arrangements that many Americans had been hostile to before. People didn’t know objectively how bad his polio was, but they knew he was a person who understood suffering. And that allowed for a kind of
...more
