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The Study of Man:
On the Economics of F.D.R.
- Abstract
A young Columbia University scholar, Mr. Daniel R. Fusfeld, who is now on the faculty of Hofstra College, has just completed a careful investigation of the economic ideas to which Franklin D. Roosevelt was exposed in school and college and in the years prior to his becoming President—The Economic Thought of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Historians, the author regretfully points out, are taking a very poor view of F.D.R.’s economic knowledge. They tend to conclude, as a result, that his economic program was based on extensive improvisation or even downright opportunism. Evidence to support the point has come not only from Roosevelt’s enemies, who have jubilantly proven that he knew less than nothing about anything, but also from his friends. Frances Perkins, for example, has said that Roosevelt did not read much in economics, and she has also told of the reciprocal bewilderment which afflicted the principals after the famous meeting between J. M. (later Lord) Keynes and Roosevelt in 1934. Keynes was distressed that Roosevelt was not “more literate, economically speaking,” while Roosevelt hazarded the puzzled guess that Keynes “must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.”
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