‘I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it’

I’ve watched two episodes of “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History” and it’s a seamless mix of talking heads and well cast actors reading speeches and letters – the usual Ken Burns treatment. It is, however, a believer in the Great Man theory of history. It doesn’t take into account the degree to which popular movements pushed the two Roosevelts into their progressivism. Harvey J. Kaye:

However, as much they remind us of the great progressive achievements of TR, ER, and FDR, Burns and Ward have not produced the democratic history that we so need, now especially.

They ignore the ways in which working people and the labor movement shaped their “heroes’” thinking and propelled their action. They note TR’s presidential intervention in the 1902 coal strike, but fail to speak of labor’s role in the Socialist and Progressive parties’ prewar battles against Gilded Age capital (labor unionist and Socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs is never named).

They emphasize Eleanor’s involvement with the League of Women Voters in the ’20s and her relationship with independent reform-minded women of the day, but barely mention her work with the Women’s Trade Union League. As a consequence, they ignore how her encounters and friendships with East European Jewish women labor organizers of Manhattan’s Lower East Side not only led her to shed the anti-Semitism and racism of her youth (attitudes that are never discussed), but also enabled her to educate FDR to the needs of working families and the politics of industrial and social democracy by bringing those women to Hyde Park to spend time with him.

And though Burns and Ward do clearly note how black labor leader A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement persuaded FDR to order the opening of war-industry employment to African Americans in 1941, they make no reference to labor’s role in propelling FDR to victory in 1936, 1940, and 1944. They say nothing about how labor pushed FDR to embrace Senator Robert Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act, which in turn positioned the federal government to bolster the AFL’s and, especially, the new CIO’s organizing efforts. Nor is anything said about the labor movement inspiring FDR to proclaim the Four Freedoms and call for an Economic Bill of Rights for all Americans (in fact, we never hear about the great labor leaders such as the Mineworkers’ John Lewis, the Clothing Workers’ Sidney Hillman, or the Autoworkers’ Walter Reuther, the last of whom ER reportedly yearned to see run for president one day). Ignoring labor and working people, Burns and Ward miss out on producing the history—even the “intimate history”—we could use today.

A theory: Great Men, the ones who become photos in history books and stars of Ken Burns documentaries, remain uncontaminated by the messy forces which created them. To get, say, Rick Perlstein or Sean Wilentz to discuss the labor movement and Huey Long, or Taylor Branch to explain A. Philip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters means offending a potential audience of George Wills. As Great Men, Teddy and Franklin are immune from criticism. The documentary mentions TR loved war; I hope it mentions that between 1914 and 1920 he was a menace, devoted to war as the force that gives men meaning and shattered when Germans shot down his beloved son Quentin weeks before the Great War ended; I hope it mentions what FDR said to Randolph when the Brotherhood protested the discrimination of black federal employees: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”