Louis Roney: The genesis of "The Giveaway"

When I was young, many people had a fascinating hatred for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the early ’30s my pro-Roosevelt Winter Park family possessed little “filthy lucre,” but much more of what we called the “more important things.”

Even as a kid, I was highly skeptical of Roosevelt, who seemed to me to be the great promiser of “something for nothing”— he parceled out publicly owned things to a grateful citizenry, many of whom were cajoled to believe that all the bountiful goodies stemmed from FDR personally.

Roosevelt wanted to be adored, and possibly succeeded in that wish more than any other president since Jefferson.

FDR was a rich, spoiled “mama’s boy” who lusted for a social position he was never quite able to achieve.

My friend, the late Cleveland Emory, in his 1947 society-scathing book “The Proper Bostonians,” wrote, “Much to his dismay, FDR did not succeed in his quest to join Harvard’s private Porcellian Club—having been blackballed by some unknown member. Fifteen years afterwards FDR was heard to remark that his failure to get into the Porcellian was one of the ‘greatest disappointments of his life.’ FDR’s wife Eleanor went even further, stating that FDR's inability to gain admittance had given him an ‘inferiority complex,’ though kindly noting at the same time that such failures had strengthened the character of the man.” (It must have been a shock to young FDR to find that there were things that even great wealth could not buy.)

FDR's schooling was received in the rarified air of Groton School, under the tutelage of the austere Rev. Endicott Peabody. Later FDR studied at Harvard College, where he was a “C” student, and lastly he graduated from Columbia Law School.

During FDR’s presidency, he was both loved and hated more than any president during my lifetime. He was worshiped by the poor, and vilified by his wealthy peers, many of whom called him “a traitor to his caste.” Along the way, he had for many years the guiding presence of his mother Sara, the doting “mama” of an obedient “mama’s boy” president. His constant wish was to please his mother much more than was his desire to please his wife Eleanor, the cousin he married who was a fine woman of high intellect and morality, though painfully homely.

Eleanor was especially attentive to, and admired by, the black citizens of her time. She had her own radio program and her own newspaper column, “My Day.” She certainly contributed to the growing art of talk radio. During the grueling days of his four-term presidency, FDR found much rest and relaxation in Warm Springs, Ga., where he had his own cottage. There is no doubt that FDR’s leg-paralysis had humanized the proud, socially-ambitious rich boy who had once been denied membership in a club because of his family’s “not quite kosher” social standing.

FDR was able to drive around Warm Springs in a specially built open car that allowed him to have close contact with the many people who wished to shake his hand and chat with him.

With his cigarette holder between his teeth, and years of New York state political chicanery in his head, FDR was viewed by many as a mountain of deceit.

Later Left-wing presidents have used the advantage of being generous with what is not their own, and have even outstripped FDR in his inventive, slick, vote-buying, “giveaway” tricksterism.

“We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.” — Thomas Jefferson