Great and good, or traitor?

The July 5th edition of the San Francisco Chronicle featured a remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the first Herb Caen column to appear in that paper. I started reading Herb Caen’s columns when I was a senior at Napa High School (Class of ‘62). My parents subscribed to the Napa Register so, for reasons I can’t recall, I began to read Caen’s Chronicle columns in the Napa High library. I’d leave home in whichever of my dad’s vehicles was available, often the ‘56 Chevy pickup which I still drive, arriving at the high school in time to walk through the main entrance, avoid stepping on the tile school emblem on the floor just inside the door, say hi to friends gathered around the senior heater, a radiator at which for some unknown reason a group of senior boys congregated, and then I’d head to the library for my daily dose of Herb Caen before heading off to my first period class.
The July 5th issue of the Chronicle included a reproduction of Caen’s first column. Under “FDRooms and Rumors” Caen noted that Mark Hopkins and the Palace were “in a veritable fever of anticipation over the arrival here this month of our great and good President, Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt.” He goes on to talk about all the rooms that will be needed at the chosen hotel to house the “G-men” who will accompany FDR and the $35 per day price of the presidential suite at the Palace. 
The phrase that stays with me is Caen’s description of Roosevelt as “our great and good President,” a description seemingly sincere and without irony. I recently read “Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” by H. W. Brands. While this substantial work is not a hagiography, it is obvious that Brands admires Roosevelt, especially as he rises above a charmed and indeed privileged early life to overcome polio and to become a transformative leader of this nation in a time of national and global crisis. Nevertheless, he chose for his title, “Traitor to His Class.”
Our great and good President, or a traitor to his class? My parents certainly thought FDR was great and good. They were married in Oklahoma in 1935 in the middle of the dust bowl and the depression.  The story is that they had $3 on the day of their wedding. My father died in Napa in 1989. He worked for decades as a machinist at the Basalt Shipyard which later became Kaiser Steel. He left my mother a house which they owned “free and clear,” and an income from pension, Social Security, and savings that made it possible for her to live comfortably until her death in 2000. They both believed that without Roosevelt’s New Deal they, and millions of other working class Americans, would not have been able to prosper as they did.
Great and good, or traitor? It would seem that the economic and political policies that made many people in the privileged upper class in which Roosevelt grew up say he was a traitor, are the very same policies that made my parents, and apparently Herb Caen, believe and say that he was a great and good President.
 
Canon Marvin Bowers is a retired clergyman and may be reached at

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