The danger of do-gooders

Helen Andrews, whose very good Lytton Strachey-inspired book Boomers I read just last week, has an energetic and fantastically cutting review of a new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt at the Claremont Review of Books. The review, entitled “Do-Gooder in Chief,” begins with an anecdote about Hillary Clinton’s attempt to contact Mrs Roosevelt via medium and leads into the subject with this incisive paragraph:

The irony of Eleanor Roosevelt, feminist political icon, is that her career was a 50-year vindication of every misogynist cliché about women in politics. Her politics were sentimental rather than rational. She was impulsive and easily swayed, a busybody who meddled in every issue under the sun without bothering to master anything intellectually. She honestly believed we could end poverty and war by all being a little nicer to each other.

While nodding to Eleanor Roosevelt’s better qualities, such as her self-sacrificial longsuffering and concern for others, which would have been commendable if put to other uses, Andrews catalogs her chain of blithely attempted failures—social, political, philosophical, and even, in her marriage to Franklin and her mismanagement of the White House, personal and domestic—and the doggedness with which she pursued solving intractable real world problems despite having no insights of any particular value to offer. All she had was a sentimental pity for the downtrodden and the optimism to try things, not to mention a name and position that afforded her plenty of guinea pigs. Andrews:

Her inability to graduate from sentimentality to principle meant that Eleanor was easily blown hither and yon by the gust of events. When Neville Chamberlain signed the peace deal at Munich, she applauded as a pacifist. When her husband advocated war against Hitler, she applauded as a humanitarian, with no sense of inconsistency.

So what? one might ask. Today Eleanor Roosevelt functions primarily as a talisman—like the portraits of Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright that Leslie Knope, another insufferable do-gooder, kept in her office—and an icon of sentimental goodwill, and there are certainly more pernicious activist figures one could invoke. Here are kids’ books about John Brown and Che Guevara, and a YA graphic novel about Emma Goldman.

But when all one has to offer is compassion and innocent goodwill, and these mere inclinations are never subjected to hard questions or challenged by the wisdom of experience, the results can be worse than if no one had meddled in the first place and all the more far-reaching precisely because they seem to be, in the person of the do-gooder, so unobjectionable. And worst of all, the do-gooder is an easy mark, something that every panhandler and swindler knows.

All of which brought to mind this passage from Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Leftism, a book perhaps even more scathing than Andrews’s review:

Was Mrs. Roosevelt deeply imbued with pro-Communist ideas or merely naive? Probably both. Witness an article she published in McCall’s (February 1952) about the President’s unease with Stalin at the Teheran Conference. “My husband was determined to bend every effort to breaking those suspicions down, and decided the way to do it was to live up to every promise made by both the United States and Great Britain, which both of us were able to do before the Yalta meeting. At Yalta my husband felt the atmosphere had somewhat cleared, and he did say he was able to get a smile from Stalin.” Indeed, how many people would not sell millions into slavery to get a smile from that dear old man?

Per Andrews, Franklin Roosevelt was a “glib charmer whose emotional default was to take and take without giving back,” a quality exemplified by his relationships with Churchill, the American people, and Eleanor herself. Between Franklin’s reliance on superficial charm to get by and Eleanor’s warm-and-fuzzy nicety, they were the perfect marks for an aloof and canny con-man like Stalin, and it was Eastern Europe that paid the price.