{"id":11088,"date":"2008-04-06T21:34:28","date_gmt":"2008-04-07T01:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/06\/11088.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:14","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:14","slug":"book-report-dear-fdr-a-study-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/06\/book-report-dear-fdr-a-study-o\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Dear FDR, a study of political letter-writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I picked up Dear FDR: A Study of Political Letter-writing<\/a> at the library without any particular reason. Well, except that I’m interested in letter-writing, in FDR and in politics. Which I guess is a good reason, come to think of it.
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The book seems to me to be a dissertation turned into a book, which is a fine thing for it to be, even if it’s short by what I think of as dissertation standards. But then, things were different in 1963.
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Things were very different in 1932, and even earlier when FDR really put together a fascinating operation to write, receive, respond to and elicit gazillions of letters from an unimaginably wide range of people. He used the mails as a sort of mass media, but with individual letters, putting together a huge staff to deal with it. The thing about labor having been much, much cheaper keeps turning up in different ways.
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The thing I found really interesting was the way FDR used bulk mail to set up relationships that would later prove useful to him. For instance, after the (I think, I may be wrong here) the 1924 Democratic National Convention, he sent every single delegate<\/I> a letter saying how important it was to keep the Party connected and prepared for future elections, and asking for comments and suggestions to that end. Every person who responded to the letter got a response, and every response was unique (although few of them were written by FDR himself). Most of those people felt that they had a relationship with him, and were not only inclined to support him in the future but to volunteer for him and put him in touch with other people who would be useful to him. There’s a sense in which that was all incredibly cynical, and a sense in which it was valuable and communitarian, and provided him with the relationships and information paths that made him able to govern well. I’ll have more to say about that, and the idea behind it, in a separate note (because I know lots of people quite sensibly don’t read these Book Reports unless they’ve read the book, because of spoilers, and nobody has read this book) (he gets polio! And is crippled! But becomes President anyway! And then dies in office!), but it’s interesting how badly that idea has been mangled as it was copied and made normal.
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Another thing that struck me as totally different from These Latter Days is that the act of writing to the President, or to a candidate for the Presidency, doesn’t seem to have been anything like it is now. If I were to write to the President, or even a Senator, I would not imagine that the office-holder would read the note himself; I would be deliberately trying to add my voice to the tally on one side or the other of a particular topic. At best, I might hope for a particularly clever phrase to make it to some flunkie covering that topic, and then back up to a speechwriter or analyst who might get it back up, not to the President or the Senator, but to somebody who would be making a speech on the issue and need a clever phrase.
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Part of that is that I’m just some schmuck with a blog. But I don’t think that very many people think of themselves as important enough to expect the President or the candidate to personally<\/I> read a letter. If, for instance, the head of the University that employs me had an opinion on some matter of higher education policy, I don’t think it would occur to him to write to one of the candidates. Write to a Representative, perhaps. Have an association send out a broadside, sure. Attend a fund-raiser for a chance to corner the candidate for three minutes, OK. But a letter?
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I think it’s sad, in a way, that we the people are sufficiently clued-in to what the world is like that we no longer expect the President to read his own mail.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger just writes to say that her son has a chance at a job but doesn’t have any good work clothes, so if you and your boys have some old suits that you don’t wear any more, it would be greatly appreciated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18319,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11088\/revisions\/18319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}