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Type of bind: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.917092
EAN num: 9780739369487
Format: Abridged, Audiobook
ISBN number: 0739369482
Label: Random House Audio
Manufacturer: Random House Audio
Quantity: 8
Printing Date: November 04, 2008
Publishing house: Random House Audio
Release Date: November 04, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 25467
Studio: Random House Audio
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Product Description:
A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the twentieth century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years, his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised, his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy in America during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II.
Drawing on archival materials, public speeches, personal correspondence, and accounts by family and close associates, acclaimed bestselling historian and biographer H. W. Brands offers a compelling and intimate portrait of Roosevelt’s life and career.
Brands explores the powerful influence of FDR’s dominating mother and the often tense and always unusual partnership between FDR and his wife, Eleanor, and her indispensable contributions to his presidency. Most of all, the book traces in breathtaking detail FDR’s revolutionary efforts with his New Deal legislation to transform the American political economy in order to save it, his forceful—and cagey—leadership before and during World War II, and his lasting legacy in creating the foundations of the postwar international order.
Traitor to His Class brilliantly captures the qualities that have made FDR a beloved figure to millions of Americans.
Amazon.com Review:
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: With Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, H.W. Brands penetrates the clenched grin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a masterful biography of one of America's most beloved leaders. Though born into the upper crust of society, FDR dedicated his career to fighting for the common good and the ideals of the American Dream. With the same exhaustive research familiar to fans of his biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, Brands provides a portrait of an unflinching (and often recalcitrant) figure whose unshakable confidence inspired a beleaguered nation. FDR's path may have been unorthodox (evidenced by an unprecedented 12 years spent as commander-in-chief) and arguably illegal (the New Deal didn't always work well with the Constitution), but his shared goal of a stronger America at home and abroad endeared him to voters of varying backgrounds. 'We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern,' proclaimed Roosevelt in 1937. 'The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.' -- -Dave Callanan
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Rated by buyers 
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Traitor to His Class is the new biography by Dr. H.W. "Bill" Brands of the University of Texas. Brands is notable for such acclaimed previous biaographies of American historical giants Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin. His books are notable for being academically sound and written with a felicitous and easy to comprehend style.
There is little that is new to historians in this 800 page behemoth of a well researched biography. Brands divides his book into three major sections.
Part One deals with FDR's birth as a rich child of an old man James Roosevelt and his much younger wife Sarah Delano. James died while FDR was a young man. His mother Sarah was imperious and doting. Sarah made life difficult for FDR's wife Eleanor. Until she died in 1941 Sarah ruled at Hyde Park! FDR attended Groton and Harvard where he was popular. He briefly attended law school and launched a career in New York politics serving in the state senate in Albany. He served as assistant secretary of the US Navy in the Wilson administration during World War I being mentored by Josephus Daniels. FDR was a buoyant optimist person enjoying stamp collecting and sailing. He was a master politican assisted by such able helpers as Louis Howe, Harrp Hopkins, Averill Harriman and his faithful secretary Missy LeHand.
In 1921 he came down with polio which strengthend his charaacter and made a man of him. He had earlier served as the Vice-Presidential candidate with James Cox the Democratic party candidate for President who was defeated by Warren G. Harding in the campaing of 1920. FDR
was unfaithful to Eleanor having a long term liason with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor and Franklin's marriage produced several children: Anna, James,
FDR Jr and Elliot. The couple stayed together because of their mutual love of the children and FDR's career. Eleanor later developed lesbian relationships with Lorena Hicock and other women. She was more liberal than her spouse in the area of civil rights and feminist causes. Eleanor and FDR had affection for one another but lived basically separate lives.
II. After serving as a popular governor of New York FDR won the presidency over the hapless Herbert Hoover. In the very first 100 days he began to lead America out of the Great Depression. Through such agencies and programs as NRA, AAA, CCC, FWP he helped the land recover from the horribl economic times. FDR did not conquer the Depression but he led America to better economic times. Due to him and his team such monumental legislation as Social Security and a GI Bill of Rights became law. Roosevelt helped Great Britain with Lend-Lease prior to World War II. He had difficulty battling isolationists The nation finally became a wartime ally of Great Britain following the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
III. This section deals with FDR's role as a world leader during World War II. Along with Churchill in Great Britain and Stalin in the USSR the Allies won decisive and unconditional victory over the Nazis and Japanese Empire. FDR made such key decisions as naming Eisenhower as Commander in Chief of Operation Overord planning and implementing D-Day and the invasion of Europe. He was also instrumental in getting the Manhatten Project going in our nation's quest to have an atomic bomb before Germany or Japan. The burdens of the war wore Roosevelt down and he died in Warm Springs in April, 1945 mourned by the United States and the world.
FDR was elected to four terms; was the very first president to fly overseas in war and outdid his famous cousin and idol Teddy Roosevelt on the world stage.
Brands book is excellent and so was the man he decribes in detail! America hopes our new president Barack Obama can lead and inspire our people as did FDR the greatest president of the twentieth century!
Rated by buyers 
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I'd love to read this book, but I'm not paying $18 for any Kindle book. When are publishers going to learn that they have to start at $9.99. H.W. Brands is one of my favorite authors and I look forward to buying it when it drops down in price for the Kindle version.
Rated by buyers -
After reading H.W. Brands 800 page biography Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life And Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I know a great deal more about FDR than I do about any member of my family, and I love my family.
Brands renders elegant the full orbit of Roosevelt's life, replete with stirring descriptions of the constellation of out-sized bodies and satellite characters who exerted their cosmic pull upon Roosevelt's political revolution.
He had help. Victorian Age America conspired for Roosevelt's benefit, and Brands' narrative sketches a turn of the century political landscape where America and the world are organized to showcase the economic, military, and moral dignity of the governing class: Episcopalians living along the Eastern Seaboard. In this time, God and Government were in the able stewardship of Republican WASPs. These upright elites had routed the South during the Civil War and spent the subsequent few generations lording it over the nation, and from Brands portrayal, they sound not terribly unlike the World War II generation, combining "nearly all the the business interests of the country and added sufficient numbers of urban workers and mid-western farmers to lock up the White House and Congress." The Democrats, on the other hand, were a mixed stew of immigrants, leftovers, rubes, and hayseeds, "with its shotgun multiple marriage of country and city, of southern white supremacist and northern ethnics, of Bible-thumping conservatives and agnostic liberals."
The Roosevelt's set comprised the small group of good Republican Episcopalians who really ran the world. They had names like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ellery Sedgwick, Breckinridge Long, and Endicott Peabody- an appellation that can only give itself to someone very white, or someone very, very black, such a name does not admit of temperate hues or Jews. This East Coast elite ministered to the lower classes--including Catholics-- while at the same time reminding them of their place, a dual task requiring years of preparation. To this end, Groton boarding school and the Ivy Leagues produced civic minded Anglophile federal administrators, deputies, assistants, associates, and secretaries. For reasons of constitutional fidelity, Congressmen were culled proportionally from other states across the Union, but to be sure, their congressional offices were staffed with Yalies doing the heavy lifting. As a show of magnanimity, the good Republican sons and daughters of the Union allowed their Presidents to be harvested from Ohio: "Ohio grew Presidents like Iowa grew corn."
The Northern Democratic machines worked in the way of an syndicate, where party bosses doled out jobs to recently arrived immigrants, in exchange for votes. In the South, as Mark Twain penned, the Democrats political energies were spent waxing nostalgically of the era befo' the waw, or smarting over the dread realities durin' the waw, or lamenting their shrinking holdings aftah the waw. The Western Democrats were rogues, second sons and lawless pioneers. In the end, it was the well-mannered, landed Republican Episcopalians, those who sailed for leisure and said "bully," who made sure the people's business was done.
For Roosevelt, money flowed from both bloodlines. His father, James Roosevelt, was a chummy businessman in respectable society, a widower, and casual Democrat from an established Republican clan. His mother, Sara Delano, came from drug dealers. The drug was opium trafficked on the Oriental Sea, thousands of miles away, such that William Delano could consider himself a lucrative businessman in the independent pharmaceutical trade. William Delano approved of Sara's marriage to James Roosevelt, granting a special exemption from Delano's profound and good humored political prejudice, "I will not say that all Democrats are horse thieves," he declared in a moment magnanimity. "But it would seem that all horse thieves are Democrats." And from this political accident of birth, some would call it a defect, sprang Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a traitor to his class.
But for the occasional sickness, FDR matriculated breezily and with ruddy good humour through the cold showers, dawn revelry, and the Greek declensions of Groton; the social clubs and Crimson of Harvard; and landed on his wedding day to hear Uncle Teddy toast his union with all of the ego befitting the Rough Rider. Imagine Bill Clinton walking into your wedding, one wonders if the weak would faint from his charisma or from oxygen deprivation as the air drew from the room. "Theodore, who could never resist an audience, strode forward and hypnotized the guests in his usual fashion. Years later, Eleanor recalled the moment distinctly: 'Those closest to us did take time to wish us well, but the great majority of the guests were far more interested in the thought of being able to see and listen to the President; and in a ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Franklin Roosevelt led the Allies to victory in World War Two after tackling the economic crisis of the Great Depression. This book by master historian H.W. Brands has received strong early reviews. (I will include my own review once I finish reading it.)
KIRKUS REVIEWS said that this book "will likely be the go-to popular biography for quite some time... a thoroughly readable, scrupulously fair assessment of the one president who could inspire a Mt. Rushmore makeover... Roosevelt had so transformed the office and the country that not even his fiercest critics dared endeavor to roll back the change. The author explains the birth of that era and how the vast expansion of the federal government and executive power was attributable to the imagination, discipline, drive and, to the great frustration of his enemies, popularity of the 20th century's most consequential president."
The ECONOMIST Magazine called this book "impressive" and said that Roosevelt was "the man who saved his country and the world."
LIBRARY JOURNAL said, "According to the rankings of most scholars, FDR is the greatest American President of the 20th century. Brands helps us understand why. Bringing his historical and biographical skills to the task of sifting through a huge number of earlier books on FDR, he provides a broad yet nuanced overview. Though Brands does not break new ground, neither does he sensationalize the more controversial aspects of FDR's personality and politics-contrary to what the subtitle might suggest. Rather, FDR is presented as a man who, in mapping his own career, relied heavily on the political career of Theodore Roosevelt and learned from the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson, in whose administration he served. The President's ordeal with polio tested and matured him so that he was ready to inspire a crippled nation during the Great Depression. Though he would blunder in the 1937 Supreme Court packing plan, which Brands labels "the biggest mess of his presidency," by 1942 he is considered by Brands to have been "the most powerful man in American history." The overall portrayal here reinforces the views presented in two first-rate recent biographies: conservative journalist Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and liberal political scientist Jean Edward Smith's FDR. All three are very readable and necessary for a full appreciation of America's 26th president. Highly recommended for all libraries."
After pulling USA from isolationism and leading America to victory in WWII, FDR laid the international foundation for a post-WWII world based on collective security, an engaged U.S. foreign policy, and freedom based of FDR's Four Freedoms and Atlantic Charter, hastening the demise of colonialism and providing the international framework to lead the world as a superpower.
The American people gave Roosevelt four astonishing landslide election wins of over 80% of the electoral votes every time, including the third-largest electoral landslide (98.49% in 1936) ever in American history. (Only Washington at 100% and Monroe at 99.57% won bigger).
I have read extensively about American history and American presidents, and Brands is one of the greatest writers of history, including a Pultizer Prize-finalist biography of Ben Franklin, an outstanding biography of Andrew Jackson, a fine biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and others. Brands said on C-SPAN that he is telling the story of America through biographies of important people from each era. With this biography, Brands covers the epic era of the Great Depression and World War Two. The "radical" title of this book and a previous remark by Brands that his Republican father did not care much for the New Deal (but liked FDR's handling of World War Two) suggests that this book may be overly-harsh on the New Deal. Then again, Brands is highly authoritative, which is why I highly recommend this biography without reservations.
My perspective from which to judge this book is that the financial system had collapsed under Hoover and the Republican Congress (10,000 banks failed), money flow in the economy had sharply contracted, and the economy fell into a very deep Depression. FDR restored the financial system and ended a constrictive, flawed gold standard that had been enacted when Coolidge was president. The economic contraction was stopped by FDR, and strong economic growth ensued in his very first term. GDP grew 63% from the beginning of 1933 through 1937. Personal income grew 46% from 1933 to 1937 -- money in the hands of consumers after taxes. (Check the numbers on the Internet for 1933-1936.) According to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in his excellent economics book "Essays on the Great Depression" (on page 248), "Between 1933 and 1937, employment in U.S. manufacturing rose by 3.4 percent per QUARTER, and output by 5.0 percent per QUARTER."
FDR reduced the high unemployment ... Read More
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