FDR: Phase II

Franklin Roosevelt is probably on the way to being the most-written-about U.S. president since Lincoln. Scheduled for release this fall:

As He Saw It, by F.D.R.’s second son, Elliott Roosevelt, with a foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt. (Says Elliott in an introduction: “I shared his most intimate thoughts. . . .”)

F.D.R.—My Boss, by former presidential private secretary Grace Tully.

Frontier on the Potomac, by former Press Secretary Jonathan Daniels.

The Roosevelt I Knew, by former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

Dinner at the White House, by Louis Adamic.

White House Physician, by Vice-Admiral Ross T. Mclntyre.

Obviously all the authors are admirers of the late President. The estimates of Franklin Roosevelt by his friendly contemporaries (now under way) will be Phase II of his rendezvous with history. They will join a sizable bookshelf of Rooseveltiana, about 100 books and scores of pamphlets published up to his death in April 1945, ranging from Liberty League squeals to pious campaign biographies.

While Phase II continues, there are others anxious to get themselves on record. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Dutchess County neighbor of F.D.R., is gathering material for a book. Also in the works: memoirs of Cordell Hull, and of the late Harry Hopkins, both scheduled for 1947. Jim Farley, who in 1938 got $68,500 for a not-too-revealing autobiography, is known to have a more critical book in mind, but is in no hurry; he wants to see what others tell first. So does Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, who says “I think I will just wait.” The late President himself, according to Mrs. Roosevelt, left no autobiography.

Sealed, but not Scattered. Phase III—the critical histories-in-perspective and full-dress biographies—can hardly get well started until: 1) the bulk of Phase II testimony is in, 2) F.D.R.’s papers as a whole are opened to investigators. One of the first to try: 28-year-old Pulitzer Prize winning Arthur M. (The Age of Jackson) Schlesinger Jr. who hopes to finish a New Deal history in the next two years.

Thanks to F.D.R.’s own interest in history and his place in it, his papers are not stored, like most presidents’, in a family attic or scattered casually in trunks here & there. The Roosevelt papers, gathered in the $350,000 Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, are already open, for the most part, to qualified scholars. Some letters and documents, dealing with state secrets and living officials are still sealed up, and will remain so for an as-yet-unspecified term—presumably for at least a generation. It took over a half-century to produce anything near a definitive biography of Lincoln. There are still Lincoln documents denied to historians: the Robert Todd Lincoln collection, which he gave to the Library of Congress in 1921 with the proviso that they remain sealed until 1947.