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Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship

by Frank Freidel

Summary

With FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: THE APPRENTICESHIP, Professor Frank Freidel of the University of Illinois launches his projected six-volume life of the late President -- a major work which is likely to become the definitive Roosevelt biography for our time. The material here presented will, of course, be invaluable for future generations. "But," says Dr. Freidel, "it is for this present generation that I am trying to write. Roosevelt looms so large in our immediate past that we need a full-scale biography of him as a contribution to the understanding of our own times."

Neither a fond memoir nor a partisan political tract, Dr. Freidel's FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT is the first biography of genuine scholarship based on the voluminous Roosevelt papers at Hyde Park, and the first to make extensive use of manuscript and archival materials elsewhere. The author bean work on the project in 1945; since then he has talked to and corresponded with the men and women who knew Roosevelt and worked with him and has uncovered important unrecorded material which might otherwise have been lost forever. His researches throw a strong, clear light on the many facets of one of the most complicated men of our age.

Because a biography of such breadth is only as valuable as it is dispassionate Professor Freidel's aim has been to write with complete objectivity. He presents such indisputable evidence of what Franklin D. Roosevelt did that, for the first time, it is possible to assess accurately his strengths and weaknesses. It is as though the author were writing about some outstanding figure of a much earlier generation, and comparison with such great works of biography as Dumas Malone's Jefferson and His Time, Douglas Southall Freeman's George Washington and James G. Randall's Lincoln become inevitable.

Volume One, THE APPRENTICESHIP, covers the period from Franklin D. Roosevelt's birth through the First World War when the future President was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Secretary Josephus Daniels and President Wilson. Roosevelt's childhood is completely treated, including new material on hs father, James Roosevelt, whose influence has up to now been almost completely ignored. Next come the years at Groton under the remarkable man and equally remarkable educator, Rector Peabody; the Harvard College and the editorship of the Harvard Crimson; law school; marriage; and a Wall Street practice. The influence of Theodore Roosevelt on his young cousin is thoroughly explained.

In 1910, Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped into politics for the first time in the campaign for state senator from Poughkeepsie. His election brought him into the battle with Tammany Hall, the battle which would spread his fame and bring him to his Navy Department post in the Wilson Administration.

Dr. Freidel devotes more than half of THE APPRENTICESHIP to Roosevelt's experience as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and his role in the First World War. In this period, we see the young FDR storing up "political, administrative, and diplomatic knowledge far beyond his years."