SOURCE: "Franklin D. Roosevelt in Historical Writing, 1950-1957," in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. LVII, No. 1, Winter, 1958, pp. 104-26.

In the following essay, Watson offers a critical overview of historical monographs on Roosevelt of the 1950s.

Almost ten years ago, David Potter contributed an article to the Yale Review entitled "Sketches for the Roosevelt Portrait."¹ Potter pointed out that rarely had there been an opportunity to document so well the life of a public figure as prominent as Franklin D. Roosevelt. Almost all the major figures associated with him save Stalin, Marshall, and, of course, the President himself, had already contributed their memoirs. Roosevelt had made his contribution by providing for a magnificent research center at Hyde Park in which an almost unbelievable cubic footage of documents on the Roosevelt era had been housed. Since then, although Stalin has died almost as inscrutably as he lived, Marshall has...