Michigan State University Press The Good Neighbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power (Rhetoric & Public Affairs)

About the Author Mary E. Stuckey is Professor of Communication and Political Science at Georgia State University, USA, specialising in political rhetoric and American public address. Product Description No modern president has had as much influence on American national politics as Franklin D. Roosevelt. During FDR’s administration, power shifted from states and localities to the federal government; within the federal government it shifted from Congress to the president; and internationally, it moved from Europe to the United States. All of these changes required significant effort on the part of the president, who triumphed over fierce opposition and succeeded in remaking the American political system in ways that continue to shape our politics today. Using the metaphor of the good neighbour, Mary E. Stuckey examines the persuasive work that took place to authorise these changes. Through the metaphor, FDR’s administration can be better understood: his emphasis on communal values; the importance of national mobilisation in domestic as well as foreign affairs in defence of those values; his use of what he considered a particularly democratic approach to public communication; his treatment of friends and his delineation of enemies; and finally, the ways in which he used this rhetoric to broaden his neighbourhood from the limits of the United States to encompass the entire world, laying the groundwork for American ideological dominance in the post–World War II era. Review "Very few scholars, dead or alive, have the talent and the tenacity to offer a synoptic yet detailed understanding of FDR's remarkable rhetorical presidency. Mary Stuckey's The Good Neighbor is an extraordinary gift to a reading public still living in a world Roosevelt made."--Davis W. Houck, Florida State University Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Good NeighborFranklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American PowerBy Mary E. StuckeyMichigan State University PressCopyright © 2013 Mary E. StuckeyAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-61186-099-3ContentsAcknowledgments............................................................viiIntroduction...............................................................1CHAPTER ONE. A Neighborhood of Shared Values...............................25CHAPTER TWO. Mobilizing the Neighborhood...................................57CHAPTER THREE. Argument in Roosevelt's Neighborhood........................95CHAPTER FOUR. Roosevelt's Moderate Neighborhood............................131CHAPTER FIVE. Constituting a Global Neighborhood...........................167CHAPTER SIX. A New Deal for the World......................................201Notes......................................................................213Bibliography...............................................................283Index......................................................................295 CHAPTER 1A Neighborhood of Shared Values* * *A democracy, the right kind of democracy, is bound together by theties of neighborliness.—Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Address Before the NationalConference of Catholic Charities," October 4, 1933The metaphor of the "good neighbor" structured Franklin D. Roosevelt'sunderstanding of a properly functioning polity, which heunderstood as a community in which citizens were unified bytheir allegiance to a specific set of values. Those values included theprimacy of transcendent goods above material goods, the moral valueof work, and a commitment to social justice. Roosevelt is perhaps bestunderstood as employing a "rhetoric of militant decency" that "revolvedaround the appropriate use of power, his concern for social order, theimportance of work, the need for individuals and nations to exert socialresponsibility, and the importance of character for both individuals andnations." He argued that "decency" would most properly flow withina community of people who did not have to be equals mate