Did the New Deal Need FDR?

Although Winston Churchill once compared meeting Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the feeling of uncorking your first bottle of champagne, many who encountered the 32nd president as a young man would later express their great surprise at the role he came to play in American history. The principal of Roosevelt’s exclusive preparatory school described him as “a quiet, satisfactory boy…ot brilliant.” At Harvard, Roosevelt enjoyed beer nights, football, and shooting ducks, perfectly content with his B in history and D-plus in Latin. Frances Perkins, who would become his labor secretary, was distinctly unimpressed when she met Roosevelt in 1910, shortly before he was elected to the New York State Senate: “There was nothing particularly interesting about the tall, thin young man with the high collar and pince-nez…. He had a youthful lack of humility, a streak of self-righteousness, and a deafness to the hopes, fears and aspirations which are the common lot.”