Traitor to his class

Drawing on archival material, speeches, and correspondence, H.W. Brands traces how a man born into East Coast wealth and privilege became the president who built the modern American welfare state and led the country through the Depression and the Second World War. The book follows Roosevelt from his sheltered Hudson Valley childhood and early political ambitions, through polio and personal crisis, to the presidency that remade the relationship between government and ordinary Americans.

Brands pays particular attention to the apparent contradiction of the book's title: a man of Roosevelt's class and background becoming the era's most consequential champion of the poor and working class, and what that tension reveals about his political character.