Fleming - The New Dealers War

E very time I walked through the vestibule of my family home in Jersey City in the 1940s, I saw Franklin D. Roosevelts face on the wall, where many devout Irish-Catholic families hung a portrait of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. FDR was the hero of my youth, the almost mythical figure on whom the political fortunes of my father, leader of the gritty working-class Sixth Ward, a vital cog in the citys powerful political machine, depended. The name Roosevelt had a magical aura, inducing total admiration of him and equally total loyalty to the Democratic Party.

But memories, hero-worship, the loyalties of youth, are the stuff of novels, not history. This book owes its existence to my painfully acquired belief that the historians chief task is to separate history from memory. In our understanding of the cataclysm that historians call World War II, we are in the final stage of celebrating the riches of memory. We are saluting the generation that won the titanic global conflict. There is nothing wrong with this impulse. These men and women deserve the literary and cinematic cheers we are giving them.

But memory is not history. It is too clotted with sentiment, with the kind of retrospective distortion that we all inflict on the past. History gives us, not the past seen through the eyes of the present, but the past in the eyes, the voices, the hearts and minds of the men and women who lived through a particular time, as they experienced it.

For some people, this kind of history is a disturbing experience. When I wrote 1776: Year of Illusions, which described the unreal assumptions that confused the founding fathers and their British adversaries in that seminal year, as well as the illusory golden glow in which Americans viewed the Revolution thereafter, I was accused of lse majest, sacrilege, unpatriotism. One man rushed up to a platform as I finished speaking about the book and roared that I was one of those people who said a glass was half empty rather than half full.

I could have replied (but I didnt) that if the rest of the glass was full of hot air or some other ingredient that altered the contents, it was not a bad idea to know this. That is a somewhat crude way of explaining why history is more important than memory. I also believe history is valuable because it makes us more sympathetic (or at least, less apocalyptically judgmental) toward the politicians of our own time. They too grope into the future that becomes their history with the same or similar confusions and weaknesses.

This is the spirit in which I have written The New Dealers War. The title has a special significance for me. I first saw it in 1952, when I was working for Fulton Oursler, a many-sided writer who also had an extraordinary career as an editor of national magazines and friend of presidents. I recall the encounter as one of those primary moments that impelled me to become an historian. In a flash the phrase challenged me to think of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and World War II not as sacred entities but as historical experiences, to be studied, explored, and eventually understood, like the American Revolution or the Civil War. The words remained alive in my mind throughout the next four decades. I hope this book will give them life and meaning in the minds of my readers.