A FIGHTING PRESIDENT AT HOME AND ABROAD (1933–1945)

The film industry and FDR, the public man, made a natural fit. This tethering began with Roosevelt's overhaul of the presidency.Footnote ⁷ As “the first modern president,” he dominated politics as no earlier chief executive had. He built the welfare state and rebuilt the military, commanded Congress and a burgeoning bureaucracy, and inspired average people via radio. He also manipulated journalists, photographers, and newsreel cameras in order to achieve a favorable image and to camouflage his inability to walk without assistance.Footnote ⁸ As the historian Betty Houchin Winfield explained, newsreels and Roosevelt's radio addresses together provided “a singular recognizable voice and a single recognizable image. When FDR spoke, the people listened.”Footnote ⁹ White House reporters deemed him “the greatest show around.”Footnote ¹⁰

The President knew that Hollywood put on good show, although he had less influence over filmmakers than over the working press.Footnote ¹¹ Motion pictures were a popular form of nightly entertainment at the White House, and Roosevelt enjoyed watching himself in newsreels.Footnote ¹² The President relished celebrity gossip and even identified himself as an actor of sorts.Footnote ¹³ To be sure, Roosevelt's dealings with the film industry proved complex. Support for FDR's election in 1932 by Harry and Jack Warner did not prevent the Justice Department from filing an antitrust suit against their studio in 1935.Footnote ¹⁴ Nevertheless, the President remained sufficiently friendly with Jack Warner to ask him to make a specific film, Mission to Moscow (1943), during World War II. Warner complied, not unlike the cooperative reporters who downplayed FDR's disability.Footnote ¹⁵ Since the modern presidency emerged during the same decade in which Hollywood achieved some of its grandest successes, the destinies of the two institutions intertwined without much direction from the White House.Footnote ¹⁶

During the Great Depression, film studios, regardless of their political outlook, used Roosevelt's words, ideas, and leadership to boost faith in America's future.Footnote ¹⁷ This fact was especially true during the early New Deal when Hollywood, like much of the country, drew inspiration from the President's inaugural address and legislative enactments. In Universal Pictures’ cartoon Confidence (1933), a doctor, “F. D. Roosevelt,” prescribes a drug called “confidence” to barnyard animals whose farm suffers from economic depression. To the melody of “New Day Dawning,” the tonic works its magic and the farm revives.Footnote ¹⁸ Roosevelt's visage and rhetoric occasionally surfaced in feature films. In the finale to Footlight Parade (1933), a backstage musical made by pro-Roosevelt Warner Bros., “a troupe of sailors holds up flash cards that, on the one side, form an American flag and then, flipped over, form the face of FDR.”Footnote ¹⁹ In My Man Godfrey, socialite Carole Lombard competes in a scavenger hunt to be the first person to find a derelict – or “forgotten man,” a phrase coined by Roosevelt in 1932 to describe people “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”Footnote ²⁰ And, as the film scholar Harry Keyishian has observed, the title of Looking Forward (1933), a film by the conservative Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio, mirrored that of a collection of the President's writings. The opening credits of the picture, which dealt with a struggling family business, quoted FDR: “We need enthusiasm, imagination and ability to face facts – we need the courage of the young.”Footnote ²¹ Roosevelt's words surfaced in later films. The Edge of Darkness (1943), which addressed resistance to Nazism in Norway, closed with a quotation from FDR: “If anyone doubts the democratic will to win – again I say – let them look to Norway.”Footnote ²²

Themes of optimism, action, and effective leadership permeate a pair of documentary films that spotlight Roosevelt. In the featurette The Road Is Open Again (1933), Dick Powell struggles to write a song to promote the New Deal's National Recovery Administration (NRA). Inspired by apparitions of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, Powell eventually scribbles an upbeat ditty that proclaims, “All the world's on the way to a sunnier day ’cause the road is open again.” As the song mentions busy men and places, newsreel footage shows workers in forests, combines harvesting crops, and the face of a beaming President exhorting Americans to do their part. Produced by Warner Bros. for the NRA, the film sought to raise the nation's spirits, boost confidence in the recovery program, and link Roosevelt to past Presidents who had overcome great crises.Footnote ²³

The other documentary, Universal Pictures’ The Fighting President (1933), celebrated Roosevelt's vigorous leadership via a rudimentary biopic. Although FDR often gets lost in background footage on side topics, The Fighting President emphasizes Roosevelt's “keen mind and progressive thought” as reasons for his political rise and his “vibrant personality and flashing smile” as sources of his popular appeal. To showcase FDR's strength, The Fighting President evades his bout with polio and inability to walk without help, a sensibility in line with that of the national press. Stressing public issues over personal struggle, The Fighting President attributes the optimism awakening in the land to Roosevelt's “decisive strokes”: the bank holiday, first fireside chat, and emergency banking legislation. According to the narrator, Americans are returning to work, inspired by “the fighting President.” The film closes with military-style images of the American flag, a battleship, and a portrait of Roosevelt wreathed by stars.Footnote ²⁴ In so doing, it anticipates Leuchtenburg's argument that FDR employed the analogy of war as he formed new agencies to fight the Depression and rally public support.Footnote ²⁵

During the 1930s, negative remarks about Roosevelt rarely appeared in film. Hollywood studios such as Universal and Warner Bros. backed the President and his policies while MGM refrained from criticizing FDR during a time of national emergency. Since a variety of genres remained popular with moviegoers, including escapist musicals and screwball comedies, the film industry felt little pressure to address contemporary politics. And when it did, conservatives often suffered. In Holiday (1938), directed by George Cukor, independent-minded socialite Katherine Hepburn seeks refuge from her snobbish family, including a relative (Henry Daniell) who laments that an investment would yield greater returns “if we had the right kind of government.” “Like which country?” replies another character, alluding to fascism.Footnote ²⁶ In this scene, the business leader, rather than Roosevelt, receives scorn. To be sure, conservative politics influenced the film industry, as evident in the one-sided newsreels used to defeat leftist Upton Sinclair in the California governor's race of 1934.Footnote ²⁷ But MGM president Louis B. Mayer's well-known disdain for FDR was not widespread. “Even at MGM,” the writer Alvin Josephy remembered, “if you were a Roosevelt man, you were in the majority.”Footnote ²⁸

During World War II, Hollywood went further by revering Roosevelt as the nation's benevolent, albeit somewhat distant, steward. Here, Warner Bros. played a leading role, for studio chiefs Harry and Jack Warner opposed isolationism, endorsed FDR's extension of aid to Great Britain, and leaped into making morale-boosting, patriotic movies following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.Footnote ²⁹ In one of those films, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), FDR's act of bestowing the Congressional Gold Medal on George M. Cohan (James Cagney) frames the film's flashback-driven narrative of the entertainer/songwriter's life. Roosevelt (Jack Young) only appears in a few strategically placed scenes that allow Cohan to reminisce about his life while in the President's presence. In those scenes, FDR exercises leadership magnanimously and majestically – as an elevated arbiter of wartime patriotism. He bears no grudge against Cohan, a New Deal critic, and praises Cohan's songs as “a symbol of the American spirit.” To maintain Roosevelt's dignity, the film shows Young from behind and in shadows. His voice (that of the impressionist Art Gilmore) eschews caricature. And closing credits list Young as “The President,” as if it were inelegant to use the name of the sitting occupant of the White House at a time when the country was at war and most Americans trusted their elected leaders.Footnote ³⁰ Unlike the close of the twentieth century, when Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky did much to demystify and personalize a sitting President, the institution of the presidency during the 1940s, as the film scholar Gregory Frame has argued, received “overwhelming reverence” from the country at large. It seldom became a “throwaway archetype in visual culture.”Footnote ³¹

Warner Bros. continued to reference and revere a rather remote Roosevelt. Michael Curtiz, the director of Yankee Doodle Dandy, brought Young back as FDR in the musical This Is the Army (1943). Featuring the songs of Irving Berlin and starring a later US President, Ronald Reagan, This Is the Army advanced the Warners’ veneration of country and President.Footnote ³² In the film, a barely visible Roosevelt surfaces at a performance of an all-soldier revue. Perched in the presidential box, he moves without assistance and stands throughout “Hail to the Chief,” after which a boy exclaims, “Gosh, just like he looks in the newsreels.” Earlier, Reagan exhorts the performers to excel, because in the house is “our boss, the President.” Idolized by people of assorted ages, and by soldiers, FDR is America's commander in chief and its father in chief.Footnote ³³

Roosevelt also is diplomat in chief, a theme in Warner Bros.’s Mission to Moscow (1943). Based on a book by Joseph E. Davies, US ambassador to the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1938, the film received sanction from the Office of War Information (OWI) and the President, who exhibited a “high degree of interest” in it – to the point of approving an actor's simulation of his voice. The final product “sculpts” FDR into an “omniscient internationalist.”Footnote ³⁴ In Mission to Moscow, Roosevelt (Jack Young) sends Davies (Walter Huston) to Russia to ascertain the prospect of war, which FDR foresees. Furthermore, Davies is to gauge which side the Soviet Union will take in any conflict and whether Josef Stalin's government has the wherewithal to withstand a German invasion. As in Yankee Doodle Dandy and This Is the Army, Curtiz shot no close-ups or headshots of Young, who appears briefly, pouring coffee and speaking in a confident tone to Davies.Footnote ³⁵ The film's whitewash of the Soviet dictatorship sought to arouse sympathy for an embattled ally, but instead stirred controversy.Footnote ³⁶ Writing in 1943, the historian (and New Deal liberal) Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. dismissed Mission to Moscow as a “fantastically silly film” for suggesting that “Davies and FDR fought single-handed against … all European governments except Russia[’s] in order to stop Hitler.” Schlesinger thought it “odd that Roosevelt should have allowed himself to be associated with the film.”Footnote ³⁷

Roosevelt's involvement in Mission to Moscow is unsurprising. He sensed the influence of film and understood the need to use emerging mediums to publicize his aims and to shape his image without overexposure.Footnote ³⁸ Accordingly, FDR avoided politicizing the war effort through a heavy focus on himself. Is it any wonder, then, that actors portraying Roosevelt appeared briefly, in the shadows, in the distance, off to the side, or from the backside in Yankee Doodle Dandy, This Is the Army, and Mission to Moscow? Yet Roosevelt did appear in those films.

A parallel story prevailed in government-produced wartime documentaries. The War Department's Why We Fight series, directed by Frank Capra, seldom quoted Roosevelt, cited his Four Freedoms, or featured him on-screen. Exceptions could be found in one installment, War Comes to America, in which audiences saw footage of the sagacious internationalist demanding repeal of the arms embargo against Great Britain and France and urging Congress to approve Lend-Lease aid to the Allies.Footnote ³⁹ Capra's sporadic invocation of FDR is unsurprising. His feature films often referenced Presidents in modest ways (the Lincoln Memorial appears in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and in It's a Wonderful Life (1947) a picture of Woodrow Wilson hangs in Peter Bailey's office). And Capra's veneration of common people and a benevolent state has been likened to the messaging of the New Deal.Footnote ⁴⁰ In contrast to Capra's Why We Fight, The American Scene, a set of documentary shorts made by the OWI, sought to bolster overseas support for the US war effort by extolling the democratic practices, ethnic diversity, and abiding virtues of Americans. The American Scene addressed Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, usually indirectly. The films also showcased such administration undertakings as the Tennessee Valley Authority in order to underscore how democratic countries solve problems. Nevertheless, Roosevelt almost always remained off-camera.Footnote ⁴¹

Missing from the movies of the Roosevelt era was any feature-length biopic of FDR. There was no precedent for Hollywood to make such a movie about a President while he was in office. Instead, filmmakers during the 1930s and 1940s used earlier Presidents to tell larger stories about American history and culture. For example, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), directed by John Ford, and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), based on a play by FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood, echoed the frontier interpretation of American history, reflected patriotic sentiments in a time of global war, and extolled the virtues of a widely beloved and long-deceased President before he entered the White House.Footnote ⁴² Such films occasionally carried New Deal overtones, with Lincoln (Raymond Massey) defending the right of workers to strike in Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Other films during Roosevelt's presidency featured fictional leaders, including judges, lower-echelon politicians, or Presidents, who represent FDR metaphorically as dispensers of social justice.Footnote ⁴³ And in William Randolph Hearst's production Gabriel over the White House (1933), President Judson Hammond (Walter Huston) adopts statist solutions to alleviate unemployment in ways that “anticipated Roosevelt's swift action during his first one hundred days.”Footnote ⁴⁴ But this fantastical film appeared early in FDR's term and was in no sense a biopic of Roosevelt.

Also missing from Roosevelt-era movies was any discussion of the President's personal life. When FDR appeared, however briefly, in contemporary films, audiences saw the public man of the newsreels and fireside chats – charismatic and confident in handling problems at home and abroad. Following World War II, Hollywood explored the private FDR, albeit with propriety and familiar reverence. Representations of Roosevelt during the 1930s and 1940s cast a long shadow.

POSTWAR FILMS, BIOPICS, AND TELEVISION DRAMAS (1947–1980)

The first biopic, Sunrise at Campobello (1960), cast Roosevelt in a favorable light, opened a window into his private life, and influenced later portrayals of him. But it was a long time in coming. Early postwar efforts to bring Roosevelt's life to the screen became ensnared in politics, both partisan and familial. FDR's passing did not end the political attacks against him. And many Americans, as Leuchtenburg has explained, “were not quite sure what they thought about him – he seemed to have brought both good and ill.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The Cold War and the onslaught of McCarthyism raised questions about whether he had compromised too much with Stalin over the fate of Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, the Red Scare discouraged Hollywood from engaging in political messaging, especially the left-leaning variety. “Political films in general had a hard time being made in 1950s America,” the film scholar Ian Scott observed, save for such morally uplifting and intellectually empty movies as The President's Lady (1953), about the early life of Andrew Jackson.Footnote ⁴⁷ In this conservative era, it became financially risky to make a movie chiefly about Roosevelt, the father of the modern welfare state. Yet his legacy loomed large. Boosted by FDR's leadership, America had prevailed in World War II and entered a period of unprecedented prosperity. Historians such as Henry Steele Commager hailed Roosevelt as an outstanding President. Moreover, Eleanor Roosevelt remained on the public stage as a reminder of her husband's legacy.Footnote ⁴⁸ She and her children exerted influence over postwar films about FDR.

The Roosevelt family first asserted itself when MGM tapped Lionel Barrymore, a Republican, to play FDR in The Beginning or the End (1947), a film about the making of the atomic bomb. Roosevelt's three eldest sons – James, Elliott, and Franklin Jr. – objected to Barrymore portraying their father. They also disliked the film's script, which reflected standard conservative criticism of FDR as an opportunist and spendthrift. In a draft of The Beginning or the End, Barrymore cavalierly dismissed the cost of the Manhattan Project: “What's Two Billion Dollars more or less to me, since I'm so accustomed to tossing so many billions around.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Pressure by the Roosevelts led to Barrymore's withdrawal from the project.Footnote ⁵⁰ The final version of The Beginning or the End embodied change and continuity in its rendering of Roosevelt. In the film, audiences for the first time glimpsed the face of an actor (Godfrey Tearle) playing FDR. They also saw him in a wheelchair. As in the past, however, the script treated Roosevelt respectfully, as a perceptive internationalist who expresses a willingness to work with Great Britain and Canada to build an atomic bomb before Germany does. After FDR's death, authority over the bomb passes to his successor and the sitting President, Harry S. Truman (Art Baker), who, not unlike earlier representations of Roosevelt, appears from behind and in the shadows in the film.Footnote ⁵¹

Although the Roosevelt family's opinion of the final cut of The Beginning or the End is unknown, they sought control over any future FDR film. James Roosevelt, who had connections in Hollywood, entertained an offer from the Broadway producer John Golden, a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount Studios, to bring FDR's life to the screen. In the end, however, James deemed Zukor's cinematic methods and politics outdated. Moreover, the Roosevelts remained wary about making a presidential biopic so soon after the box-office failure of Darryl F. Zanuck's Wilson (1944). James thus insisted that his father's story had to be handled by a renowned director, such as Capra. But his sister, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, resisted “shopping around” the project. Eleanor Roosevelt, in turn, insisted that talk of a film remain out of the press “until we decide what we want to do.”Footnote ⁵²

By late 1940s, the film project had languished. Capra's interest in doing an FDR movie came and went. Meanwhile, FDR's sons, who sought to make money from the venture, argued with their sister, who did not want the family to profit by it.Footnote ⁵³ Complicating matters was Eleanor Roosevelt's refusal to be portrayed on-screen – an obstacle that made the project “impossible,” since her character would have to appear in any biopic.Footnote ⁵⁴ Partisan attacks discouraged the family from proceeding. In 1947, the columnist John O'Donnell claimed that the Roosevelts had approved making a film about FDR. But in commenting on the project, O'Donnell, a onetime isolationist, revisited the “double and triple-crosses” of the Roosevelt years. These included the “solemn” pledge made by the President in 1940 that American boys would not “be sent into any foreign war” and the allegedly favored position given Elliott Roosevelt, a US Army Air Forces officer, during World War II.Footnote ⁵⁵ Anna Roosevelt Boettiger cited O'Donnell's salvo as an example of why she and her brothers must avoid any “commercial enterprises dealing with father.”Footnote ⁵⁶

By the mid-1950s, the time for dramatizing some aspect of FDR's life had arrived. The rather conservative administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower was coming to an end, and a play or biopic about Roosevelt seemed likely to catch the public's interest, as a poll commissioned by Capra revealed.Footnote ⁵⁷ Accordingly, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. endorsed a radio biography about his father.Footnote ⁵⁸ And his mother decided to go ahead with a play or film.Footnote ⁵⁹ The reasons behind Eleanor Roosevelt's change of heart were twofold. She often entered into commercial ventures in order to help her financially troubled children.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, she was willing to work with a playwright or producer who would depict FDR with empathy. Eleanor Roosevelt found such a person in Dore Schary, a former screenwriter who had been president of MGM between 1951 and 1956.Footnote ⁶¹ Schary, a New Deal liberal, wanted to do a play or film about FDR so badly that he compensated members of the Roosevelt family for their assistance.Footnote ⁶² In 1958, his play Sunrise at Campobello opened on Broadway.Footnote ⁶³

Sunrise at Campobello was the first theatrical and cinematic representation of FDR's ordeal with polio. Mixing historical research, memory, and dramatic license, Schary wrote Sunrise as an ode to Roosevelt and his courage in the face of paralysis during the 1920s.Footnote ⁶⁴ The play opened a window into FDR's physical struggle and family life. Audiences heard Roosevelt admit to loneliness, saw him crawl up stairs, and watched him try to walk – realities that had been either played down or hidden during his lifetime. Yet such vignettes occurred months after the onset of polio in 1921. Schary declined to show Roosevelt during the early stages of the disease, when he was unable to move any part of his body.Footnote ⁶⁵ Theatergoers thus never saw FDR in a state of depression.Footnote ⁶⁶ Instead of despair and disability, family tensions drove the plot. Sunrise’s villain was Franklin's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who usurps Eleanor's authority, disparages Roosevelt aide Louis Howe, and insists that her son retire from politics. Such a portrayal of Sara aligned with contemporary jokes about overbearing mothers-in-law. In Sunrise, FDR argues with his mother, but never with his wife.Footnote ⁶⁷ Depicted as patient and loving, Eleanor at one point confides to Franklin, “You have always known a great deal about my heart.” He replies: “Cousin – wife – dearest.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Eleanor Roosevelt permitted this harsh treatment of Sara and sanitized depiction of her marriage. Before Sunrise’s premiere, she hosted a reading of the play at which Franklin Jr. objected to its characterization of Sara. Schary responded that “every play has to have its heavy.” Eleanor kept quiet during the exchange.Footnote ⁶⁹

Sunrise at Campobello pleased critics and audiences. Instead of focussing on political issues (except when Franklin affirms his commitment to internationalism and denounces anti-Catholic prejudice), Schary focussed on Roosevelt's moral fiber and sterling family life. He offered insights into FDR as a father and husband in ways that upheld parental (or paternal) authority and aligned with 1950s sensibilities. And Roosevelt's struggle “to conquer his illness,” according to one reviewer, was handled “with taste.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The critic Henry Hewes likened Sunrise to another drama about “an individual challenging misfortune,” The Diary of Anne Frank.Footnote ⁷¹ Both plays addressed misfortune moderately, for audiences never saw FDR paralyzed in bed nor Anne Frank imprisoned in a camp. What they did see in Sunrise inspired them. “The sight of this proud man pulling himself across the floor,” a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times noted, “is lightened by the knowledge of the courage behind it and by his own grinning jest.”Footnote ⁷² Ralph Bellamy's portrayal of FDR drew kudos.Footnote ⁷³ In 1958, Bellamy received the Antoinette Perry (“Tony”) Award for best actor, and Sunrise earned four other Tony Awards: Best dramatic production, play, director, and supporting actor. The play ran for 556 performances.

The film Sunrise at Campobello (1960) enjoyed some success. Schary took the play to Hollywood, where Warner Bros. gave him control over the project. He kept the same director (Vincent J. Donehue) and lead actor (Bellamy) but made some cast changes: Hume Cronyn succeeded Henry Jones as Howe and Greer Garson replaced Mary Fickett as Eleanor Roosevelt. He also exploited “the unlimited range of the camera,” which proved a mixed blessing.Footnote ⁷⁴ The camera enabled location shooting at the Roosevelt family homes, which gave a “documentary quality” to the movie.Footnote ⁷⁵ Unfortunately, close-ups accentuated Bellamy's FDR-like mannerisms and Garson's impersonation of Eleanor in ways that hurt their performances.Footnote ⁷⁶ In many respects, Schary simply filmed the play and added scenes that reinforced Roosevelt's resolve and good cheer.Footnote ⁷⁷ Overall, Sunrise’s script, cast, and direction came together effectively in what the Hollywood Diary hailed as “a work of affection, admiration, and inspiration.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Nevertheless, what had delighted a select group of theatergoers appealed less to the wider moviegoing public. At a time of beckoning social and political change, the film extolled traditional virtues “of self-reliance, courage and the manners of mutual respect.”Footnote ⁷⁹ It thus promoted a message of “moral strength in the face of adversity” more attuned to the Lincoln biopics of the 1930s.Footnote ⁸⁰

Sunrise at Campobello marked an end and a beginning. During the early and mid-1960s, political films shifted away from saccharine biopics and toward addressing complex situations and contemporary issues such as scandal (Advise and Consent (1962)), the pursuit of power (The Best Man (1964)), and the threat of nuclear war (Seven Days in May (1964) and Failsafe (1964)). Such films portrayed the struggles and actions of fictional Presidents, presidential candidates, and lawmakers in a rebuke, perhaps, to the character-driven biopics about real-life Presidents. Plays and feature films about strong, decent real-life Presidents vanished during the era of Vietnam and Watergate. “Hero worship,” the political scientist Bruce E. Altschuler has argued, “could not be sustained as American society became both more sophisticated and cynical.”Footnote ⁸¹ Sunrise at Campobello won few new admirers, and the play has never been revived on Broadway.Footnote ⁸²

Even with its flaws, Sunrise at Campobello inaugurated a more intimate glimpse of the Roosevelts. “Later film biographies of the Roosevelts have been far more frank about the actual state of their marriage,” Harry Keyishian has observed.Footnote ⁸³ The shift began in the 1960s, with the liberalization of sexual mores and with revelations of FDR's World War I-era liaison with his wife's social secretary, Lucy Mercer. The journalist and former Roosevelt aide Jonathan Daniels broached the affair in The Time between the Wars (1966) and Washington Quadrille (1968).Footnote ⁸⁴ Joseph P. Lash, a journalist and close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, later presented Eleanor's side of the story in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study Eleanor and Franklin (1971), which Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. had commissioned. A few years later, the director Daniel Petrie and the producer David Susskind adapted the book into a television drama.Footnote ⁸⁵ In so doing, they took advantage of new mediums: Television's steady audience removed the pressure to generate box-office profits, and the miniseries genre allowed for the making of detailed historical dramas. Several factors thus allowed Roosevelt to return to the screen in a major role: piquant revelations about his personal life, the economics and possibilities of television, and renewed interest in FDR's leadership during the 1970s – a topic addressed later in this article.

Eleanor and Franklin (1976) painted a sensitive, respectful portrait of the Roosevelts’ private life. Aired by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the four-hour docudrama received the sanction of Franklin Jr. and Lash, who consulted on the script and approved the actors for the lead roles: FDR (Edward Herrmann), Eleanor Roosevelt (Jane Alexander), and Sara Roosevelt (Rosemary Murphy).Footnote ⁸⁶ Franklin Jr. and Lash offered encouragement to cast members without micromanaging Susskind and Petrie.Footnote ⁸⁷ The end product revealed something about the hidden pain of the Roosevelts. Audiences saw Eleanor endure an unhappy early life, blossom into a confident young woman, and marry Franklin, who cheats on her in the 1910s. Eleanor and Franklin handles the extramarital affair tactfully, suggesting an attraction between Franklin and Lucy Mercer (Linda Kelsey) without showing physical contact between them. The tryst seemingly ends when Eleanor agrees to reconcile after Franklin and Lucy part ways. In the meantime, Franklin's troubles include an officious mother who exceeds Schary's Sara in malice, illustrating the enduring the strength of the domineering mother/mother-in-law stereotype. With respect to FDR's infirmity, Eleanor and Franklin provides greater candor and emotion, but fewer scenes, than Sunrise at Campobello. Bedridden, Franklin dreads the future, telling Eleanor, “It's not that I am afraid to try. It's that I am afraid to try and fail.”Footnote ⁸⁸ FDR does succeed, and the film concludes on that note by covering his decision to run for governor in 1928 and his first presidential campaign four years later. Yet those were among the few political moments in Eleanor and Franklin. The drama, the historian Christopher Lasch lamented, “invokes FDR's ‘greatness’ only in order to stir up unearned interest in his private life.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Eleanor and Franklin drew mixed reviews. Critics noted its stale dialogue, clichéd characterization, and exalting of private over public life. According to the New York Times, the film reduced the Roosevelts to “ordinary domesticity” while consigning FDR's “policies and grand schemes … to non-TV posterity.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The Baltimore Sun chided Eleanor and Franklin as a “Love Story for aristocratic cousins” that sanctified Eleanor, rendered Franklin a “mama's boy,” and caricatured Sara as a “pushy mother.”Footnote ⁹¹ Yet for an array of reasons – an interest in history stirred by the bicentennial of American independence, respect for the Roosevelts, and the appeal of a handsomely mounted period drama – the public loved Eleanor and Franklin. “At the press screening in Hyde Park,” the Baltimore Sun reported, “it had many in the audience in tears.”Footnote ⁹² The film received “exceptionally high ratings” and four Emmy Awards in the category of “special, drama or comedy”: Best supporting actress (Murphy), director (Petrie), original teleplay (James Costigan), and program.Footnote ⁹³ Encouraged executives at ABC decided to make sequel.

Eleanor and Franklin: The White Years (1977) achieved greater balance between Roosevelt's private and public life than the earlier film, and the result was a portrait of a President simultaneously idealized and humanized. Audiences saw Roosevelt privately complain of Eleanor's neediness and nagging. Yet White House Years also established FDR's presidential leadership and political/personal partnership with Eleanor. Scenes show Herrmann's Roosevelt reiterating lines from the first inaugural address, first fireside chat, and war message. He schools a reporter on his political philosophy (“I'm a Christian and a democrat, that's all”) and unveils the Social Security Act before newsreel cameras. And when he buckles to public opinion, such as in failing to defend the rights of Japanese Americans during the war, Eleanor, however softly and unsuccessfully, objects. As in earlier films, Roosevelt the internationalist questions policies to appease Germany, belittles American isolationists, and protests Stalin's moves to dominate Poland. Newspaper headlines and newsreel footage, authentic and otherwise, tie the story together, allowing time for the Roosevelts to interact and discuss their relationship in ways that strain credibility.Footnote ⁹⁴ As Lash observed, “There [was] great reticence between Mrs. R. and the President. He was, after all, the person who had hurt her the most.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Nevertheless, scenes showing such conversations remained in the film for human interest and explanatory purposes.

Like past Roosevelt films, Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years proved stately in tone. There were no new scenes of Franklin with Lucy. Instead, following Franklin's death, Eleanor questions her daughter, Anna, about Lucy's covert visits to the White House during the war. From their exchange, a reassured Eleanor learns that Franklin still loved her and that his recent encounters with Lucy entailed no more than a desire for companionship. Such portraiture validated Lasch's earlier claim that Eleanor and Franklin idealized the Roosevelts’ relationship as one “without pain, lasting conflict or irreconcilable differences.”Footnote ⁹⁶ By focussing tightly on the first couple, White House Years evaded many of their other associations. For example, the journalist Lorena Hickok, with whom Eleanor shared a loving relationship, never appears in White House Years (Lash had warned that including Hickok would overcrowd the cast).Footnote ⁹⁷ In the end, White House Years, according to the Washington Post, offered a visual “pageant” saturated with “reverence” for the Roosevelts.Footnote ⁹⁸ The New York Times dubbed it “a solid evening of television.”Footnote ⁹⁹ When rendered with empathy and without too much historical detail or analysis, FDR's presidency and personal life made for splendid television.

Executives at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) brought out their own version of the idealized and humanized presidency in F.D.R.: The Last Year (1980). Based on a book by Jim Bishop, the docudrama featured Franklin (Jason Robards), Eleanor (Eileen Heckart), and Lucy (Kim Hunter) in a production the Washington Post deemed “superior to the overly sentimentalized ‘Sunrise at Campobello.’” Yet it refrained from criticism of FDR: “The whole thing is not sour revisionist history or a glorified gossip column but instead powerful drama.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ “Questions that might arouse controversy,” the New York Times conceded, “are subordinated to a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a person.” The President is “strong-minded, moralistic and yet a political conman when necessary.” He juggles diplomacy and military strategy, exudes ebullience, and “laughs forcefully.” Away from newsreel cameras, he loves Lucy and maintains a “polite friendship” with his wife. Not unlike Sunrise at Campobello and Eleanor and Franklin, F.D.R.: The Last Year, according to the Times, managed to “seize the attention and hold the eye.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Although depictions of Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, Eleanor and Franklin, and F.D.R.: The Last Year began with family influence and favorable texts, their outlooks reflected other factors.Footnote ¹⁰² Before writing Sunrise, Schary claimed to be conversant with the historiography on Roosevelt, which would have included positive accounts by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Frank Freidel, and James MacGregor Burns.Footnote ¹⁰³ At the same time, New Left scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, which critiqued conservative aspects of the New Deal, failed to move members of the public and the entertainment industry.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ That was almost predictable. New Left criticism of Truman did not prevent flattering portraits of him in such films as Give ’Em Hell Harry! (1975), Harry S. Truman: Plain Speaking (1976), and Truman (1995). Moreover, during the 1960s, countercultural playwrights targeted Woodrow Wilson (Wilson in the Promise Land) and Lyndon B. Johnson (MacBird!) as Presidents who represented racism, militarism, and imperialism more vividly than Roosevelt had.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Yet those productions remained on the cultural margins. In contrast, FDR had enthusiasts in Hollywood including Schary and Bellamy, who relished portraying him, as did Edward Herrmann.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Others in the film industry clearly revered Roosevelt, including Petrie, Susskind, and Robards.

The idealized/humanized Roosevelt of television biopics succeeded in part because the public longed for such a leader during the era of Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter. “The cinematic Roosevelt,” Keyishian explained, “gives what Americans have looked for but so often failed to find in their real Presidents – bold leadership, a feeling of compassion for those in need, and the capacity to instill belief that the nation would always overcome any problems it faced.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ If these films ignored such blemishes as FDR's failure to restore prosperity through the New Deal, his reluctance to back civil rights and antilynching legislation, and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, television watchers did not mind. They observed Roosevelt's flaws via his extramarital affair, a human interest story suited to television and one unlikely to offend viewers familiar with presidential dalliances. The idealized/humanized FDR beguiled Americans – and then resurfaced in assorted representations.

UBIQUITOUS FDR (1972–2012)

Over the past five decades, creative artists took Roosevelt and his image in new directions. With Roosevelt's greatness accepted and private faults acknowledged, he emerged across sundry film and television genres: comedy, musical, drama, film, and miniseries. In such works, he became a political (or cultural) marker for the 1930s and 1940s, a part of the national conversation about the role of government, a beacon of hope and of strength, an exemplary wartime statesman, and a humanitarian with a complicated personal life. Not unlike the films of his presidency, FDR appeared in ways small and large. Many times, he did not appear at all or was merely mentioned, quoted or referenced, occasionally in debates between characters about him or his legacy. In other films, he appeared on-screen, in either supporting or leading roles. Roosevelt's presence in popular culture flourished in the 1970s, a cinematically yeasty decade that saw television turn toward realism and film embrace fresh topics and techniques under the moniker “New Hollywood.” The idealized and humanized Roosevelt also appealed to many Americans during a decade of economic constraints and subpar presidential leadership.

Movies and television programs set in the 1930s invoked FDR's words and deeds, often without showing him on-screen. In the director Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973), a conman, Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal), travels with a sharp-tongued nine-year-old orphan, Addie Loggins (Tatum O'Neal). To recapture the 1930s, the film utilizes black-and-white photography and period songs, and it mentions the decade's President, whom Addie adores as a father figure.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ “Frank D. Roosevelt said we're all feeling a lot better,” Addie tells Moses. “It made me feel good when he said that, better than I felt in a long time.” In a later scene, she expresses the spirit of the New Deal by prodding Moses to help a poor farm family they see along the roadside: “Frank D. Roosevelt says we gotta look out for one another.” It is a compliment to FDR that the smarter and more likeable lead character likes him. Moses does not. Cynical about politics (like many people in the 1970s), he chides Addie: “Why don't you go write another love note to Saint Roosevelt.” The love note that appears in the film is a picture of the President hanging in a sheriff's office, a commonplace sight during the Great Depression.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The Waltons brought the Roosevelt era and image into American living rooms even though no actor ever portrayed the President. In this drama about a Virginia family during the Depression and World War II, The Waltons paid tribute to the kind man in the White House. The Homecoming: A Christmas Story (1971), the television film that launched the series, shows one of the sons, Jason (Jon Walmsley), playing Roosevelt's campaign song on his harmonica. And when, in another scene, the eldest son, John-Boy (Richard Thomas), mocks FDR's intonation of “My Friends,” his grandmother (Ellen Corby) reproaches him for his disrespect. Earlier, Grandpa Walton (Edgar Bergen) affirmed that “Roosevelt is gonna put this country on its feet again.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Waltons believe it. In the television series, a picture of FDR hangs in their front room. The family listens to Roosevelt's war message on the radio, shelters a runaway from FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, and hosts a writer from his Works Progress Administration, a relief agency to which only Grandma objects as boondoggle. “If you had your way,” Grandpa (now played by Will Geer) playfully scolds his wife, “Herbert Hoover'd still be President!”Footnote ¹¹¹

The politically charged situation comedy All in the Family, which mentioned Hoover in its theme song, discussed FDR twice. Using comedy and satire, the show explored a range of burning issues and contemporary challenges. Inevitably, Roosevelt's name surfaces. When the lead character, the conservative and bigoted Archie Bunker (Carroll O'Connor), worries as his union prepares to strike, his wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton), restates Roosevelt's maxim: “There ain't nothing to fear but fear itself.” Archie responds, “But he was working when he said [that].”Footnote ¹¹² It was a fitting application of a 1930s aphorism to another decade known for economic insecurity. Yet Archie's distaste for FDR belied the fact that the New Deal made it possible for workers to form unions and strike. Earlier in the series, Archie attacks FDR during a parley with Edith's cousin Maude (Bea Arthur). He assails “the first creepin’ Socialist” for holding onto the presidency “like a pope,” for shooting off his mouth “at them fireside chats,” and for dumping the country into World War II. Maude, in response, praises Roosevelt for keeping Americans informed via radio, for leading the nation out of the Great Depression, and for winning World War II. In contrast to Maude's mainstream understanding of Roosevelt's legacy, Archie, the butt of the show's liberal writers, errs in his facts. He believes that FDR left “secret sealed orders” to fire General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 and thinks Roosevelt surrendered Eastern Europe to Stalin at “Gibraltar” when the conference in question occurred at Yalta. In this one-sided exchange, the Roosevelt decrier gets the laughs, but the Roosevelt defender carries the day.Footnote ¹¹³

Another right-versus-left dialogue about Roosevelt's presidency emerges in the director Sydney Pollack's The Way We Were (1973). The film explores the love affair between a Jewish American radical, Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand), and a privileged WASP, Hubbell Gardner (Robert Redford), between the 1930s and 1950s. The story contrasts Katie's Roosevelt-era social conscience with Hubbell's self-absorption, a sensibility attuned to that of the “me decade” in which this film appeared.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet one discerns a left–liberal truce in Katie's affinity for Roosevelt, whose visage, as in Paper Moon and The Waltons, only appears in photographs. Early on, Katie addresses a peace strike on a college campus in 1937. Unlike rallies of the 1960s, however, she protests foreign aggressors more than the actions of the US President, who she believes favors peace. Later, during World War II, Hubbell spots a picture of FDR hanging in Katie's apartment and remarks, “Oh, your hero.” “Yeah,” she replies. In other scenes, Katie argues with Hubbell's conservative friends, objects to tasteless jokes about the Roosevelts, and deposits campaign leaflets for Republican Thomas E. Dewey in a trash can. And she mourns FDR's passing: “Jesus, I can't even remember when he wasn't president.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Like so many Americans in 1945, Katie thought that no other President mattered or measured up.

Nostalgia for FDR perhaps climaxed with the musical Annie! (1982). Based on the long-running comic strip by Harold Gray (an FDR critic) and a 1977 Broadway show, the film told of a spirited Depression-era orphan. Annie! paralleled Paper Moon in a few ways. Both movies featured captivating urchins who locate father figures in men ruled by money – Moses Pray and the billionaire Oliver Warbucks (Albert Finney) – and in a most humane President. Differences between the films are plain. Annie (Aileen Quinn) is a singing sweetheart, Addie a streetwise cigarette-smoker. Paper Moon’s monochromatic photography, character-driven storyline, and youthful director embody New Hollywood artistry while Annie! tethers an established genre (the musical) to familiar heroes: Annie and FDR (Edward Hermann), who appears in a supporting role. In one scene, Roosevelt hosts Annie and Warbucks at the White House. He explains the aims of his Civilian Conservation Corps and requests organizational assistance from Warbucks, a small-government Republican who resists, and Annie, who is game. The scene ends with Annie and FDR singing “Tomorrow.” The synergy between the two optimists contrasts with Warbucks's dour conservativism, until Roosevelt orders all to join in. Warbucks sings and succumbs to the President's will.Footnote ¹¹⁶ If the film's rendering of Roosevelt is saccharine, FDR's sense of hope during hard times no doubt resonated with many Americans who, in 1982, had experienced three recessions over the preceding decade.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Common themes emerged in these 1970s-era films and television shows. While the overall portrait of Roosevelt is positive, all these productions introduced someone who disliked the President or his policies. Conversations about FDR broke along gender lines. Female characters (Maude, Addie, Katie, and Annie) support Roosevelt while males (Archie, Moses, Hubbell, and Warbucks) express skepticism. (The exception was The Waltons, though one might contend that Grandpa Walton is a more nurturing, feminine character than his stern wife.) It remains unclear whether or not this pattern reflects commentary on the Democrats as the “Mommy Party” – that is, favorable toward welfare-style assistance – and the Republicans as the “Daddy Party” – insistent upon individual responsibility and self-reliance.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At minimum, these representations acknowledged that Roosevelt had stirred controversy.

Television miniseries continued to find FDR's personal side appealing, with NBC's Backstairs at the White House (1979) being a prime example. Based on the memoir by Lillian Rogers Parks, a long-serving maid at the White House, Backstairs explored the largely African American domestic staff's interactions with all presidential families from William Howard Taft to Dwight Eisenhower. In the miniseries, Roosevelt (John Anderson) appears in a few scenes, exhibiting confidence and concern for folks in need. At one point, a wheelchair-bound FDR spots Lillian Rogers Parks (Leslie Uggams) walking with a crutch and tells her, “You and I, we know what it's all about.” Roosevelt grows close to Lillian, whom he chats with, calls “little girl,” and invites to use the elevator rather than the staircase. Unfortunately, Backstairs at the White House often stoops to caricature, rendering Eleanor Roosevelt (Eileen Heckart) a relentless do-gooder and her husband a jovial chatterbox with his ever-present cigarette holder and pince-nez eyeglasses. Backstairs does, however, address a little-known aspect of FDR's policies: His sporadic attempts at fiscal conservativism.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In the series, audiences saw the domestic staff at the White House complain of salary reductions but never mention the New Deal.

By the 1980s, a politically conservative era, television preferred to show FDR as a wartime, rather than a reform-minded, President. Moreover, popular works of the 1980s and 1990s revered World War II as the “Good War” waged by the “Greatest Generation.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Roosevelt's wartime leadership thus benefited from fond memories of the battlefield heroism, national unity, and moral clarity associated with World War II.Footnote ¹²¹ One discerns as much when Ralph Bellamy cameos as Roosevelt in The Winds of War (1983), an ABC miniseries about the family of fictional US Navy captain Victor “Pug” Henry (Robert Mitchum) as World War II approaches. The FDR of Winds of War reflects and departs from past portrayals. He remains a farsighted internationalist, sharing Pug's view that America must enter the war, and a political conman, albeit in the worthy cause of halting Hitler. In Winds of War, audiences saw Roosevelt sail stealthily to Newfoundland to meet Churchill, sign the Atlantic Charter, and align America with Great Britain. As a band plays “God Save the King,” FDR quips, “I never heard ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’ played better.” At the same time, he frets over the plight of European Jews: “When I've got a Congress ready to disband the army, can you imagine my going to them with a bill to admit more Jews?”Footnote ¹²² With such statements, Winds of War, unlike past films, alludes to FDR's relative inaction with respect to the Holocaust, as does its sequel, War and Remembrance (1988), in which Roosevelt rules out the bombing of extermination camps by explaining that the way to save Jews is “to smash Nazi Germany as soon as possible.”Footnote ¹²³ As with earlier films, the President receives scant criticism even on subjects, like the Holocaust, where it might have been justified.

Interest in World War II led to further representations of Roosevelt. To a greater extent than Winds of War, War and Remembrance stresses FDR's ability to assemble a team of capable commanders and subordinates from Dwight Eisenhower to Pug Henry. At one point in the miniseries, Roosevelt likens himself to a “traffic cop trying to direct the right men to the right jobs.” Unlike the earlier series, War and Remembrance highlights FDR's declining health, a task aided by Bellamy's advanced age (eighty-four). It also considers Roosevelt's diplomacy, showing him at Casablanca demanding the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.Footnote ¹²⁴ Foreign affairs receive more substantive treatment in NBC's World War II: When Lions Roared (1994). The film combines newsreel footage with dramatized conversations at Tehran and Yalta among FDR (John Lithgow), Churchill (Bob Hoskins), and Stalin (Michael Caine). In between conferences, the film employs a split screen and dialogue gleaned from correspondence to simulate further discussions among these leaders. The President's internationalism remains evident. FDR sends aid to Great Britain and the Soviet Union, placates Stalin by opening a second front in France, and keeps the Grand Alliance united at Tehran and Yalta.Footnote ¹²⁵ Overall, When Lions Roared was, according to the New York Times, a “dud firecracker” overstuffed with historical detail.Footnote ¹²⁶ The Washington Post deemed the miniseries “passable, if familiar.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Familiar, but hardly passable, was the critically panned Pearl Harbor (2001), in which FDR (Jon Voight) appears briefly to provide historical context for this period romance.Footnote ¹²⁸ At a meeting with the military brass, Roosevelt rallies support for a retaliatory raid on Tokyo by locking his leg braces, rising from his wheelchair, and asserting that nothing, including the proposed attack, is impossible.Footnote ¹²⁹

Filmmakers never forgot about Roosevelt's disability, which Warm Springs (2005) explores. The Home Box Office (HBO) production focusses on Roosevelt's efforts to fight polio and build a rehabilitation center for victims of the disease. The portrayal of FDR (Kenneth Branagh) as a private-sector humanitarian marks a culmination, beginning with Sunrise at Campobello, in which films gradually lifted the veil on Roosevelt's physical struggle and its ramifications. Warm Springs shows Roosevelt striving to walk in a swimming pool, to revive his political career, and to reconnect with his wife (Cynthia Nixon), who seeks a public life of her own. With its depiction of an overbearing Sara Delano Roosevelt (Jane Alexander), sentimental take on Franklin and Eleanor's marriage, and upbeat ending (FDR renominating Al Smith at the 1928 Democratic convention), Warm Springs varies only modestly from the flattering portrait painted by Schary in 1958.Footnote ¹³⁰ That is hardly surprising. The character-themed presidential biopics that had fallen from favor in Hollywood had migrated, first to network television and then to cable with HBO's Truman, the LBJ docudrama The Path to War (2002), and Warm Springs.Footnote ¹³¹

Hyde Park on Hudson (2012), another Roosevelt film with a place-name in its title, differs greatly from Warm Springs. By the twenty-first century, the pervasiveness of sex in film and television facilitated a far more intimate exploration of FDR's personal life. In Hyde Park on Hudson, the director Roger Michell and the screenwriter Richard Nelson insist that President Roosevelt (Bill Murray) enjoyed multiple sexual partners. In addition to his distant cousin Margaret “Daisy” Suckley (Laura Linney), a lead character in the film, these include his secretary Missy LeHand (Elizabeth Marvel), the publisher Dorothy Schiff, and Lucy Mercer Rutherford (both mentioned in passing). Eleanor (Olivia Williams) knows about the affairs; Sara (Elizabeth Wilson) enables them by summoning Daisy for a visit; and Franklin pursues them, wooing Daisy by inviting her into his study to look at his stamp collection. One scene suggests that FDR and Daisy engaged in a sexual act in an automobile. Overall, the film privileges private over public life. Murray's soft-spoken Roosevelt, unlike Bellamy's boisterous gadabout, longs for respite from the presidential duties that the FDR in Sunrise at Campobello and Warm Springs has not yet assumed.Footnote ¹³² In Hyde Park on Hudson, the President who once vetoed a tax bill that helped the greedy rather than the needy seems emotionally needy and romantically greedy, if not seedy. Unlike earlier FDR films, Hyde Park on Hudson conveys no sense of grandeur about its subject or to its audience, which partly explains why it flopped. The New York Times noted that Roosevelt's “life and deeds scarcely register in this amorphous, bafflingly aimless movie.”Footnote ¹³³

REFLECTIONS

Roosevelt's legacy in film and television underscores the link between statecraft and stagecraft in modern American politics. Presidents know that performing well, and remaining in office, mean initiating successful policies, handling crises adeptly, and communicating clearly. FDR was among the few Presidents to excel in all these areas. Generally speaking, he knew what to do, what to say, and how to say it as he constructed the welfare state and led America toward an enlarged role in international affairs. He also understood that media savvy is key to projecting leadership, minimizing setbacks, and achieving a positive image. “Roosevelt was impressive,” the historian Alonzo L. Hamby has maintained. “His charisma, rhetorical talents, and dynamism made the New Deal more than the sum of its parts.”Footnote ¹³⁴

Few Presidents could match FDR's skills or generate such recurring interest in popular culture. Roosevelt became a favorite presidential subject for filmmakers, eclipsed perhaps only by another charismatic, media-skilled President with a checkered personal life: John F. Kennedy. (In recent decades, Hollywood has given less attention to great Presidents of the distant past, such as Washington and Lincoln, who led unblemished personal lives and did so before motion pictures and broadcast sound made Presidents accessible to average people.) Of course, favorable renderings of FDR derived partly from design, as the influence of the President's family and friends in Sunrise at Campobello and Eleanor and Franklin illustrated. These portraits also occurred somewhat spontaneously, for academics and assorted opinion shapers shared a common outlook. “Scholars and the cinema,” Harry Keyishian explained, “are at one in recognizing the significance of the thirty-second president's leadership.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Roosevelt's popular appeal sustained his positive image. His enduring bond with average folks remains rare among Presidents. It began in the 1930s, when “victims of the Great Depression credited FDR with rescuing them,” and continued thereafter.Footnote ¹³⁶ So, despite all the scandals and cynicism associated with the modern presidency, Americans continue to long for another FDR. “Millions of television viewers watching Ken Burns’ The Roosevelts [2014] for seven consecutive nights,” Leuchtenburg has observed, “bore witness to the nostalgia many felt for a time when lions roamed the land.”Footnote ¹³⁷ If the political system has failed to produce a new Roosevelt, the entertainment industry has filled the void. The result is an idealized, celluloid substitute who fights crippling disease, loves his wife (in his own way), and conveys comfort, reassurance, hope, and possibility to a yearning public.