The Good Neighbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power by Mary E. Stuckey (review)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt prized the spirit of neighborliness. In his First Inaugural Address, he described only one policy: “the policy of the good neighbor.” He pledged that the United States would be “the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.” Seven years later, when introducing his Lend-Lease proposal in a December 17, 1940, press conference, FDR used a similar metaphor to describe the United States’s obligation to Great Britain: “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose....If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.” Roosevelt’s argument was simple: just like a good neighbor would lend a hose to extinguish a burning house next door, so, too, should the United States help Great Britain ward off a German invasion. These two well-known examples, often cited by rhetoricians as evidence of the president’s ability to describe complex foreign policies in simple language, showcase the important role neighborliness played in FDR’s conception of the United States’s role in the world. However, as Mary E. Stuckey writes, “the rhetoric of the ‘good neighbor’” extended beyond foreign policy; in fact, this rhetoric “operated as an overarching governing philosophy of Roosevelt’s administration” (16).

In her ambitious book The Good Neighbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power, Stuckey argues that FDR’s presidency “can best be understood through the “metaphor of the ‘good neighbor’” (2). “Roosevelt conceived of the nation as one large neighborhood,” she continues, “an understanding that allowed him to unite and mobilize the nation on the basis of shared values, wield certain kinds of argumentation, and define the nation in terms of specific inclusions and exclusions” (2). Stuckey documents how FDR utilized the “good neighbor” metaphor to define “his audience as national neighbors” and extend this neighborly spirit to the world (26). Stuckey adopts a holistic approach to FDR’s rhetoric, examining the entire corpus of Roosevelt’s political speechmaking— close to 600 texts—instead of focusing on one specific address or group of addresses. This method allows Stuckey to trace how the “good neighbor” metaphor characterized “the overall arc of his rhetorical leadership” from 1933 to 1945 (4). Although many books address certain elements of Roosevelt’s speechmaking and his presidency, none takes as its “starting point the entirety of his political rhetoric” (2). As such, Stuckey’s work fills an important gap in current scholarship on Roosevelt’s rhetorical skill and demonstrates the central role neighborliness played throughout his presidency.

In the introductory chapter, Stuckey describes the “elements of neighborliness” that characterized “the good neighbor as a structuring philosophy” and organizes the rest of her book around these five themes (18). First, Roosevelt believed that members of his national neighborhood shared specific values such as mutual respect, shared hardship, sacrifice, and interdependence, values rooted in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition (93). Roosevelt saw these values as universal and applicable on the global scale. “Because the United States was the exemplary case of their enactment,” Stuckey writes, “this conception of politics also authorized the establishment of a global neighborhood patterned after the American example” (26). A second element of Roosevelt’s neighborly philosophy was his mobilization of the citizenry around these shared values. “Good neighbors, for FDR, were active, not passive.... Neighbors, for FDR, did not merely reside near one another and share certain predilections. They also acted as neighbors” (57–58). This action took on several forms. During the Great Depression, Roosevelt called on his audience to “examine facts objectively” and “make rational decisions” instead of giving into fear (60). He used martial metaphors to help his audience “participate in the battle” against the Great Depression “and thus to feel part of the national...