H.W. “Bill” Brands is a storyteller as much as he is a history professor. Having published 22 books, including several that have reached popular audiences in the manner of academic historians such as Joseph J. Ellis and Sean Wilentz, Brands can be trusted to tell a story that entertains as it teaches. An example comes in his latest book when he observes, “Hitler, by comparison, was a sweetheart. . . .” In addition to encapsulating foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, it allows the reader a moment of wry release amid tense Nazi history.
Brands, '75, teaches at the University of Texas-Austin, and to see him at the coffeehouse where he sometimes holds office hours—with Crocs on his sockless feet—is to see the laconic success story for which this town likes to think it's become famous.
He wasn't exactly to the manor born, ending up with a history degree primarily because he didn't want to take a physics class required of math majors. He spent one year as a traveling salesman and then nine as a high school teacher. He earned his PhD in Austin in 1985. Rather than leave his South Austin home when he got a teaching job at Texas A&M in College Station, Brands arranged his schedule so that he could make the two-hour commute twice a week, leaving the rest of the week at home with his family and his writing. After many books, including The First American, a biography of Benjamin Franklin that was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize, he was hired by University of Texas.
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Doubleday, $35) is the latest in a series of biographies that will make up a history of the United States. The FDR book goes to great lengths—888 pages—to demonstrate how a child of the leisure class came to be such a staunch defender of the working class. Brands argues that Roosevelt's quiet but insistent Episcopalian faith and his battle with polio—especially because he was struck down well into what had been an exceedingly charmed life—help explain his antipathy to laissez-faire, let-the-market-work-it-out governing. In the Depression era's collapse of capitalism, people needed help, and Franklin Roosevelt believed government could best provide that help.FDR benefited from the road map provided by his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, subject of Brands's T.R: The Last Romantic. Franklin Roosevelt was one of the few (perhaps only, depending on your view of John Quincy Adams) U.S. presidents who could spend his entire adult life not just wanting to become president, but knowing it was possible. As a result, Brands says, FDR was probably the best-prepared president-elect the country has ever seen.
PETER PARTHEYMULLER is a writer in Austin, Texas.
