The last of the historians from the FDR era has died. William Leuchtenburg, called by the Associated Press “the reigning scholar on Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal,” was 102 years old when he died on Jan. 28.

Leuchtenburg was heaped with accolades for his FDR worship, including the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Award for Distinguished Writing in American History, and the Parkman and Bancroft prizes for his book Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963).

Through history books, textbooks, teaching future historians, providing model scholarship to later historians, and serving as a senior advisor to Ken Burns’s documentaries (offered to teachers through PBS Learning Media’s “Ken Burns in the Classroom”), Leuchtenburg bequeathed to future generations the image of FDR that prevails today—that of a wartime “grand strategist” and “traitor to his class” who empathized with the “common” or “forgotten man.” In truth, FDR’s New Deal policies prolonged the Great Depression, and his ineptness and infatuation with Stalin expanded Communist tyranny across the globe. But Leuchtenburg remained ever grateful for the New Deal job (under the National Youth Administration) that enabled him to attend Cornell University, and that gratitude came through in his work.

Taxpayers continued to subsidize and promote the bow-tied historian’s work through PBS documentaries and textbooks like The American Pageant, which  instruct high school students to view Leuchtenburg’s thesis as the “most balanced historical assessment” of FDR’s New Deal—“as a ‘half-way revolution,’ neither radical nor conservative, but accurately reflecting the American people’s needs and desires in the 1930s—and for a long time thereafter.” Supposedly, programs like Social Security and public works prevented a violent revolution in America and another depression. It was then up to the next generation to complete FDR’s revolution. FDR’s loopy agriculture secretary/Vice President Henry Wallace, favorably quoted by Leuchtenburg, said, “We are the children of the transition—we have left Egypt but we have not yet arrived at the Promised Land.”

Leuchtenburg himself dropped out of graduate school at Columbia for a while to work in Democratic politics and progressive causes. Later, he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. and testified against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in the 1980s. In spite of his obvious bent toward left-wing activism, The Washington Post assures us that Leuchtenburg “was careful to distinguish between his personal political views and his work as a scholar.”

Leuchtenburg’s strategy for assuring that his narrative about FDR would eventually become the accepted one was to admit minor flaws, such as that the New Deal enhanced the power of interest groups and that at times Roosevelt seemed to have “absorbed and practiced all the teachings of Machiavelli.” But, FDR “arouse[d] the country” with his “hopefulness” and achieved “a more just society by recognizing groups which had been largely unrepresented—staple farmers, industrial workers, particular ethnic groups, and the new intellectual-administrative class.”  Sharecroppers, slum dwellers, and “most Negroes” were still “outside of the new equilibrium.”

Yet, Leuchtenburg claimed that African Americans were a significant addition to the FDR coalition. They had followed the advice of black newspaper publisher Robert Vann, when he told them to “turn Lincoln’s picture to the wall. That debt has been paid in full.” Leuchtenburg failed to note, however, that Vann, after being rewarded with the position of special assistant to the attorney general of the United States, found himself looking up land titles in a closet-sized office and soon quit in disgust. In 1940, as he was dying from cancer, Vann wrote a front-page editorial urging readers to vote for Wendell Willkie.

Leuchtenburg quoted “the foremost black intellectual,” W.E.B. Du Bois, who “concluded that Roosevelt ‘gave the American Negro a kind of recognition in political life which the Negro had never before received.’” But he did not quote from Du Bois’s Feb. 24, 1940, Amsterdam News column praising Russia for overthrowing “capitalist monopoly” and producing out of “a sodden, ignorant … and enslaved mass of people, extraordinary leaders and thinkers.” And—”I care not if in the face of this accomplishment they have murdered, suppressed thought and made ruthless war.”

FDR used black government employees to campaign, timed public works projects to coincide with elections, and offered “relief” instead of job opportunities. Black dependency grew as did the drop in black life expectancy, at a greater rate than for whites.

Leuchtenburg, however, insisted that Roosevelt’s “greatness as president” lay in sharing “the vision” of the New Dealers, “heirs of the Enlightenment,” who “felt themselves part of a broadly humanistic movement. …”

Succeeding presidents were assumed to operate “In the Shadow of FDR,” as the title of Leuchtenburg’s book put it. Then in 2016 came a candidate who was unlike any other.

Leuchtenburg joined Historians on Donald Trump, a group organized by Burns and David McCullough. In his video on the group’s Facebook page, Leuchtenburg warned that Trump posed a threat to the country. Trump, he insisted, was “abusive” to women and minorities, unpatriotic, with “no sense of the American past.” (Collaborator Ken Burns warned about the “existential” threat of a Trump presidency in a commencement address in 2024.)

Leuchtenburg later refused to write a fifth edition to In the Shadow of FDR that would have updated  the subtitle to From Harry Truman to Donald Trump. After Joe Biden was elected, Leuchtenburg changed his mind. Biden seemed to be auditioning for Leuchtenburg’s book. The American Climate Corps was modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps; the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was likened to the Rural Electrification Act; and Biden’s last State of the Union address lauded FDR’s Four Freedoms and compared attacks on “democracy” to when “Hitler was on the march.”

But by 2024, the American people were tired of FDR’s would-be heir, and his incompetent vice president.

FDR’s portrait, under which Biden gave his “Farewell Address,” has come down. President Trump told House Republicans, “We’re forging a new political majority that’s shattering and replacing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition.”

The Trump administration is uncovering wasteful programs that far exceed such New Deal boondoggles as sending men to count caterpillars and communists to write plays. These include Biden’s funding of dubious international organizations, the waste and fraud at the United States Agency for International Development, and over $100 million for transgender programs.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is slated for review, also. New Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Brendan Carr, is investigating public radio stations for violating federal rules against broadcasting commercial announcements. Often preventing the complete shutdown of CPB is the argument that PBS’s “educational materials” are needed, especially for disadvantaged children. But the Burns-Leuchtenburg “educational” videos are little more than pro-Roosevelt propaganda.

If we want to shatter the “Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition” we need to stop subsidizing the propagandistic history that William Leuchtenburg created.