Black is right that FDR kept ideas of freedom and parliamentary self-government alive in a world where more radical and totalitarian ideas had more appeal. Arguably his international significance is greater than his importance to the US. Maybe we could have muddled through the Depression, but other countries needed an example that bad economic times need not lead to dictatorship. Then again, the Depression hit hardest here and in Germany, so we might well have succombed to tyranny as Germany did.
But Black is wrong in contrasting FDR with the appeasers who ran the rest of the Western world. FDR showed how much of an appeaser he really was in his dealings with Stalin. If some could believe Roosevelt was different from Chamberlain and Daladier, it's because the US wasn't involved in Munich and other European affairs. Had we been, there's no reason to think FDR's response would have been different from Chamberlain's. Appeasment was a common response, because the public didn't want another war. In the thirties the question was whether appeasement was to be a means of deferring the inevitable war until the Western powers had the weapons to win it, or whether the free world would delude ourselves into thinking that it could win Hitler over and permanently prevent war.
It's a mistake to assume that most people in the Thirties thought as we do now about capitalism and the alternatives. Roosevelt had to function at a time when very many people assumed that free markets had failed. So it's natural that he would have moved in a more statist direction. What hurts FDR's reputation today is that he came to regard his policies not as temporary expedients but as more permanent constructions. If he'd kept it mind that Americans couldn't retain their liberties if they had to permanently rely on the government for employment and fork over the lion's share of such money as they did earn to the tax man, we might think better of him today.
The idea of the "great President" is something we might want to rethink. A "great President" is someone who sees the country through a great crisis. He doesn't have to be someone that we'd agree with or find universally admirable. It's enough if he is able to preserve something essential at a time when it's threatened. But we don't need to seek such leaders in ordinary times and should count ourselves lucky if we can get by without them.
A "great President" is someone who sees the country through a great crisis. He doesn't have to be someone that we'd agree with or find universally admirable. It's enough if he is able to preserve something essential at a time when it's threatened.I think that this is one way to earn the mantle of 'great', but I don't think it is the only one. I do think a President can be great, even if not faced with a great crisis. Ironically, it may be more difficult to achieve greatness in the absense of greaet peril, but I do think it is possible. For example, I do not believe that the situation when Reagan came into power was dire. It was nighttime in America, not midnight. And I do consider Reagan to have been 'great'.