Franklin Roosevelt’s Republican Grand Design

In this Rising Tide Foundation lecture (the first of a two part series), my friend and colleague Pascal Chevrier introduces the figure of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from multiple dimensions: Family history, childhood, philosophy of statecraft, his entry into politics, battles with polio and his emergence as a world leader who fought a multi level war with powerful financier interests in both his own nation and London.

Pascal additionally outlines the structure of the New Deal, including the revolutionary bank reforms, crackdown on Wall Street, large scale development projects and FDR’s broader re-activation of the American System of Political Economy that had last seen the light of day under the martyred President William McKinley 30 years before the great depression was launched. Pascal ends this presentation with FDR’s clash with both Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes in the lead up to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference where a major battle was launched over the paradigm that would govern the post-war world.