Franklin Roosevelt still fascinates. Partly this is because he governed for so long; his sheer longevity established him as a key figure in the history of the twentieth century. Partly this is because he governed during such interesting times; the Depression and the Second World War as cataclysms blessedly stand alone in history. Partly it is because history does in fact repeat itself, and we can look to his experience to enlighten and edify our own. And partly it is because he did so much to influence the nature of his times; there are many limits to history as told...

The metaphor of the “good neighbor” structured Franklin D. Roosevelt’s understanding of a properly functioning polity, which he understood as a community in which citizens were unified by their allegiance to a specific set of values. Those values included the primacy of transcendent goods above material goods, the moral value of work, and a commitment to social justice. Roosevelt is perhaps best understood as employing a “rhetoric of militant decency” that “revolved around the appropriate use of power, his concern for social order, the 26 Chapter One importance of work, the need for individuals and nations to exert social responsibility,...

Fdr used shared values as an inventional resource. This rhetoric allowed him to unite the nation as one neighborhood, enabled him to facilitate national thinking rather than local orientation, authorized his assumption of increased federal and presidential power, and set the stage for the American assumption of global power. But while shared values constituted a particular national political identity and politics, this rhetoric also had a mobilizing function. Good neighbors, for FDR, were active, not passive. In the previous chapter the focus was 58 Chapter Two on how this rhetoric constituted a certain kind of audience; the rhetoric of shared...

Roosevelt constituted the nation as a neighborhood united by shared values and mobilized on the basis of those values. His audience was both a congregation and a Christian army, organized and ready to defend their values and their beliefs. Sometimes these two understandings of neighborhood existed in tension with one another, and these tensions could create political and rhetorical exigencies with which the president was forced to deal. One way of dealing with these tensions was to establish certain relationships with his audience through specific forms of Roosevelt constituted the nation as a neighborhood united by shared values and mobilized...

Fdr employed a significant amount of political rhetoric toward the tasks of unifying and mobilizing the nation on the basis of shared values. He did so using specific kinds of argumentation that both reinforced his own political power and enabled a complicated, multifaceted political community based in a particular understanding of democratic citizens as rational, capable of making distinctions, and living in a global neighborhood characterized by relationships of political friendship. His polity was one in which citizens could agree on the basic values and broad directions of policy, social justice was the motivating force, and the nation provided an...

When Franklin Roosevelt took office, his concern was for the future of American democracy, and his primary actions were directed at internal matters. He sought to create a national consensus based on policies that enacted shared values and mobilized the nation to act in concert to protect those values. He wielded a variety of argumentative forms and authorized specific inclusions and exclusions through both rhetorical and policy choices. He understood the national neighborhood, however, within the context of a larger neighborhood and applied the same logics to the international realm as he did to national politics. His Good Neighbor Policy...

Franklin Roosevelt continues to captivate. His vision for the world remains both powerful and, in many ways, enticing. His pamphlet advertising the Good Neighbor League was titledDon’t You Want This Kind of an America,¹ and indeed, many of us do. That pamphlet offers the hope for a nation united by shared values, active in pursuit of those values, capable of participating in a rich range of democratically enabled debates, dedicated to protecting and nurturing the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, and at peace with the world. Sentimental and idealistic, even cloying in spots, Roosevelt’s America is a profoundly attractive place....