Strands of Reform

The veneration that surrounds the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt causes us to forget that, in his time, not everybody loved the man. To some of his opponents, he was downright evil. It was bad enough that this country squire had turned on his class by siding against the “economic royalists.” But his unforgivable sin was doing so in the name of liberty. He “stole” liberty, the most cherished word in the American political vocabulary, from its rightful owners and imbued i...