William E. Leuchtenburg, scholar of FDR and the presidency, dies at 102

Boston Globe

30-01-2025

Like his contemporaries Richard Hofstadter, Edmund S. Morgan, John M. Blum, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. — a lifelong friend — Dr. Leuchtenburg shaped America's conception of its past during the prosperous 1950s and '60s. His orientation was broadly liberal and internationalist, though he anticipated and responded to criticisms of Roosevelt from the New Left and from the ascendant conservative movement.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
The work generally regarded as his masterpiece is 'Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940,' published in 1963, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize by Columbia University and the Francis Parkman Prize by the Society of American Historians.
Advertisement
'He took an office which had lost much of its prestige and power in the previous 12 years and gave it an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done,' Dr. Leuchtenburg wrote, chronicling the enormous growth of the federal government under Franklin Roosevelt, his innovative use of radio and newspaper reporters to communicate his message, and his ability to make Americans feel 'the kind of trust they would normally express for a warm and understanding father who comforted them in their grief or safeguarded them from harm.'
Dr. Leuchtenburg did not brush aside the many problems of the New Deal: It failed to crush unemployment — only America's entry into World War II in 1941 would do that — and it favored farmers, industrial workers, and technocrats while excluding powerless groups including sharecroppers, the urban poor, and most African Americans. But he found that the New Deal — with its spirit of experimentation and pragmatism, and its orientation away from 19th-century individualism and toward collective action — helped save capitalism, and perhaps democracy itself.
Advertisement
Central to that achievement was Roosevelt.
'Roosevelt's importance lay not in his talents as a campaigner or a manipulator,' Dr. Leuchtenburg wrote. 'It lay rather in his ability to arouse the country and, more specifically, the men who served under him, by his breezy encouragement of experimentation, by his hopefulness, and — a word that would have embarrassed some of his lieutenants — by his idealism.'
His other major books include 'The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932' (1958), which traces the United States' transformation from an agrarian, moralistic, isolationist nation into an industrial, liberal, and engaged power involved in foreign affairs despite itself; and 'The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt' (1995), about the events surrounding the 1937 constitutional crisis set off by Roosevelt's effort to expand the court to as many as 15 justices. That plan was ultimately defeated, but only after the court shifted its jurisprudence to be more open to legislation regulating business activities.
William Edward Leuchtenburg was born in New York City on Sept. 28, 1922. His father, William, was a German American post office worker; his mother, Lauretta C. (McNamara) Leuchtenburg, had emigrated from Ireland as an infant. The younger William's fascination with Washington came early: At age 12, he rode a Greyhound bus for nine hours to visit the White House, the Capitol, and the recently built Supreme Court building.
He attended Cornell University, partly on scholarships he had won. At Cornell, he got a job cleaning test tubes for 30 cents an hour (a little under $7 today), via the National Youth Administration, part of the alphabet soup of agencies established under the New Deal. After graduating in 1943, he enrolled in Columbia, where he received his doctorate in 1951.
Advertisement
Dr. Leuchtenburg taught for three decades at Columbia and then for two more at the University of North Carolina before he was given emeritus status there.
He was never confined to the ivory tower. He was a New England field representative from 1945 to 1946 for a national council seeking to permanently ban racial discrimination in federal employment; served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1952; and joined other historians in marching to Montgomery, Ala., with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. He was active in Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal and anti-communist group that Eleanor Roosevelt helped found.
He also found time to serve as an election analyst for NBC News, first with anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, then with John Chancellor. And he joined lawsuits to stop President Nixon from destroying the Watergate tapes and to keep Secretary of State Henry Kissinger from sequestering transcripts of official phone conversations.
Dr. Leuchtenburg selected the quotations carved into the granite of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, which opened in 1997.
He contributed to Ken Burns's documentaries on Prohibition, the Civil War and baseball.
'I'm going to cry talking about it, but it's just this gigantic and unfillable hole,' Burns said of Dr. Leuchtenburg's death. 'He taught us well, though. He's imparted not just facts, but attitudes and relationships and methodologies that we'll save.'
Advertisement
Dr. Leuchtenburg's first marriage, to Jean McIntire, ended in divorce. He married Jean Anne Williams in the mid-1980s. In addition to his wife, he leaves three sons from his first marriage, Christopher, Joshua, and Thomas; a stepson, Christopher K. Williams; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Dr. Leuchtenburg published 'In the Shadow of FDR,' about Roosevelt's legacy for future presidents, in 1983, and he updated the book several times, taking it up to the administration of President Barack Obama. His last book, 'Patriot Presidents: From George Washington to John Quincy Adams,' came out in July.
He found that those successors did not quite match up.
'A millworker in South Carolina once said, 'Franklin Roosevelt is the only president we've ever had who understands that my boss is a son of a gun,'' Dr. Leuchtenburg said in an interview with C-SPAN in 2010, during the Obama administration. 'Obama has for some reason not been able to convey that same sense, that he knows what it is to be down and out, to be unemployed month after month after month with no prospect in sight.'
He was also critical of President Trump in early 2017, only weeks after Trump's inauguration.
'We really have no precedent for a chief executive with this sort of temperament — so careless about his statements, so quick to take offense,' Dr. Leuchtenburg told the North Carolina website NC Newsline. 'There is concern not just here at home but abroad, as I know from letters I'm getting from historians, particularly in Europe. There is great alarm about how irresponsible the man seems.'
Advertisement
This article originally appeared in