Writing here on President’s Day last month, I engaged in the fundamentally disagreeable activity of taking issue with people with whom I always wish to agree and generally do, on the still very unsettled subject of Franklin D. Roosevelt. My contention for many years, advanced in my 2003 biography of FDR, is that Roosevelt was in fact, as he considered himself to be, a conservative—though a reforming one.
At the time, I was objecting to a televised exchange of nodding complementary agreement between Mark Levin and retired professor Burton Folsom. I usually agree with Levin and almost always do when he is discussing contemporary affairs. The only encounter I have had with Folsom was a very civilized disagreement about Roosevelt in writing with him about 15 years ago, and I have had the occasion to go over the same points with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, where Folsom was a faculty member for many years.
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