As the only president elected to four terms and who saw the country through two of its greatest cataclysms — the Great Depression and World War II — biographies of Franklin Roosevelt were certain to treat him as a magnificent figure of enduring accomplishment. In many respects he deserves this exalted regard: He transformed American government in fundamental ways, led the nation in the Second World War, created the building blocks for the postwar world order and left behind the durable New Deal Democratic Party coalition that dominated American politics for most of the next half-century, ending more than 70 years of Republican sway.

And academic history and the major publishers in the mid-20th century were largely populated with sympathetic liberals who easily found FDR a subject for a Whig interpretation — that is, FDR and the New Deal represented a major leap forward in the inexorable progress of human history.

By the 1950s, there began a steady stream of best-selling biographies and chronicles that bordered on hagiography.

He restored the nation’s confidence and tackled the Great Depression and then led the world to victory over totalitarianism.

The tiny handful of critical biographies were largely ignored and disappeared without a trace.

But this scene has started to change as a new generation of scholars — left, right and in-between — have begun offering more critical assessments of FDR and his legacy.

This revision has reached critical mass at a critical moment and with a large irony, as President Trump is in the midst of reversing some of the core constitutional changes FDR’s New Deal wrought — and doing so through the exercise of executive power nearly identical to how FDR wielded the power of the presidency to change the nation’s course.

One of the best critical assessments of FDR occurred while he was still in office, when one of his top political assistants, Raymond Moley, published “After Seven Years” in 1939.

Moley, a Columbia PhD economist, helped the president assemble the famous “brain trust” of liberal intellectuals and drafted some of FDR’s major speeches, including his first inaugural address.

“Tell-all” books from insiders on serving presidents is a common feature today, but Moley’s book was among the first in this genre, and his tale of disillusionment with both FDR and New Deal policy was bracing — but was overlooked and is largely forgotten today.

(Among other Moley revelations: The memorable inaugural phrase “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” apparently came from a department-store newspaper ad.)

An early critical account of FDR was John T. Flynn’s 1948 “The Roosevelt Myth.” Flynn, who had been a leader in the isolationist America First movement before World War II, produced the first themes that........

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