Unveiling Roosevelt’s Pathway to the Presidency
Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths, by Mary Grabar, New York: Regnery History, 2025, 380 pages, hardcover.
There are plenty of venerating hagiographers of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and not enough who are willing to blow the whistle on him, his injurious policies, and the deceitful fictions that have been spun about him. No honest reader will charge Mary Grabar — a widely published author and resident fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization — of waxing too lyrically about FDR. Her perspectives are incisive, analytical, generally judicious, and well documented.
Yet, and this is also an error of editorial and publishing judgment, her book Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths ends too soon. In many regards, this feels as if it were the first of a multiple-volume set. Even as the reader is wondering when we will finally get to concentrate on the dramatic onset of the national era of collectivism, it turns out that the chapter titled “Presidential Aspirations” is the last one in the book, with the very final section of that being labeled with a (rare) New York Times disagreement about the coming “Dictatorship Over Gold,” when FDR (after he was in the White House) asserted that gold “hoarding” was unwarranted.
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