‘The Roosevelts’ by Ken Burns

Not that I regret spending 14 hours last week on PBS with The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. When it comes to immersing yourself in a subject of cultural significance — the Civil War, say, or jazz, or New York City, or baseball — few TV productions can measure up to the sure-fire Ken Burns formula. In the present case, we have hours upon hours of historical images blended with documents read aloud by celebrity actors (Meryl Streep as Eleanor Roosevelt, Edward Herrmann as Franklin), emotional if often anachronistic music (Copland’s Appalachian Spring of 1944 as background for FDR’s bucolic childhood of the 1880s), and useful present-day perspective provided by relatives, friends, and a politically balanced assortment of popular scholars (Geoffrey Ward, Jon Meacham, George Will, Doris Kearns Goodwin, et al.).

Terror of poverty

In many respects, a Ken Burns documentary is the ideal antidote for Santayana’s observation about the dangers of forgetting history. With the passage of time, the great traumas of the past often seem not to have been so traumatic after all, and the great leaders who confronted, say, slavery or Hitler or the Great Depression are taken for granted. Not long ago, a Newsweek columnist argued that Germany shouldn’t be judged solely by the Third Reich, “which after all lasted only 12 years” — which is easy to say if you didn’t live in Europe during those 12 years. In 2007, the conservative polemicist Amity Shlaes argued in her book, The Forgotten Man, that Franklin D. Roosevelt actually prolonged the Great Depression by promoting counterproductive economic policies that established today’s entitlement mindset — which, again, is easy to say if you were born in 1960 and enjoy the benefit of 75 years’ hindsight.

By contrast, the Ken Burns immersion experience vividly reminds us just how desperate and hopeless it felt to be poor and unemployed during the Great Depression, and the sheer terror of living in Hitler’s path during World War II, and consequently why so many people around the world embraced FDR as a savior for grappling, however imperfectly, with both of these awesome challenges. When you spend 14 hours with the Roosevelts as purveyed by Ken Burns, you actually start relating to them as flesh-and-blood people rather than icons.

‘Fifth cousin’ means . . .

It’s surely true, as The Roosevelts contends, that Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor were remarkable people who derived great strength from the emotional and physical traumas that they overcame. Each of these giants individually merits a Ken Burns film; so does the remarkable husband-and-wife team of Franklin and Eleanor, whose intellectual partnership (she the idealist, he the practical politician) bloomed long after their physical relationship had faded.

And yet . . . .

Tying Franklin and Eleanor to Theodore for 14 hours is a stretch, to put it mildly.

FDR, after all, was Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin. That is, you must go back six generations to find common siblings and seven generations to find a common ancestor. These men were neither close relatives nor close friends.

To be sure, FDR looked up to Teddy as a role model, and no doubt FDR’s political career benefited from his sharing a surname with his presidential distant cousin. (As The Roosevelts astutely points out, the family name played a key role in FDR’s nomination for vice president in 1920, when he was a mere assistant secretary of the Navy.) Also, to be sure, Franklin married Teddy’s niece. These connections are surely worth noting in passing. But they hardly constitute the basis for drawing broad generalizations about the Roosevelt family.

Sibling rivalries

As I wrote in April, the Tolstoyan concept of happy and unhappy families — not to mention rich and poor families, or virtuous and evil families, or functional and dysfunctional families — is immensely appealing but actually mistaken. (Click here.) Families are complex, constantly shifting organisms that defy simplistic labels. Some individuals are more capable, reliable, and creative than others. But it doesn’t follow that entire families can be labeled the same way. However much most of us love to generalize about family dynasties like the Kennedys, Rockefellers, and Bushes, recent studies have concluded that there’s often greater personality and income variation within families than there is between families.

Within any given family, siblings tend to carve out niches for themselves; the more numerous the siblings, the greater will be the variations among them, because each sibling naturally yearns to establish a unique identity. This explains why some people wind up as leaders while their siblings wind up as artists, rebels, soldiers, or crooks. It also explains why virtually every U.S. president has had some sibling whom he wanted to hide in a closet. Three recent national studies found that three-quarters of income inequality in the United States actually occurs within families.

Alcohol and scandal

The Roosevelts ignores this evidence. Instead it bends over backward to contend that Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor were driven to great achievements by their consciousness of their illustrious family heritage. There may be something to this thesis, but it fails to inquire why their siblings and cousins weren’t similarly driven, and why the same Roosevelt heritage failed to inspire their descendants to any remotely similar level of achievement.

Teddy’s son Kermit fought a lifelong battle with alcohol and depression and killed himself at age 54. Teddy’s daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth is perhaps best remembered as the tart-tongued Washington doyenne who originated such aphorisms as “If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.” Franklin and Eleanor’s three sons were constantly mired in legal and political scandals and divorce courts.

TR, FDR, and Eleanor were remarkable individuals who took advantage of the remarkable gene pool that was bequeathed to them. Their children were overwhelmed by the same legacy. That’s why, conceptually, The Roosevelts makes no more sense than, say, a documentary linking Abraham Lincoln’s presidency to his son Robert’s law practice. The Roosevelts is essentially an exercise in creative repackaging. It pours old wine into a new bottle. The bottle is very attractive indeed, and so are all the hors d’oeuvres that accompany it. The only thing missing is an original idea to serve as the main course.