In this season of President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, another name is invoked with surprising regularity: former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Trump tried to embrace FDR’s “nothing to fear” line to rationalize downplaying a public health crisis—something FDR would never do. Biden, meanwhile, is finding his inner Roosevelt. If he wins in November, his Build Back Better agenda could be a less transformational but still historic version of Roosevelt’s New Deal. And his foreign policy would be focused on restoring the architecture of alliances designed by FDR at the end of the Second World War.
Roosevelt’s first national campaign came 100 years ago in the election of 1920, when the young former assistant secretary of the navy—a year before he was stricken with polio—was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. The winner that year was Republican Warren Harding, who promised “a return to normalcy” after the Great War and the influenza pandemic of 1918, which cost about 675,000 Americans their lives. Biden’s campaign seems like a Democratic variation on the same theme—an argument to lower our voices and restore the soul of America.
