One Nation Under God: Sellers of Indulgences

Corporate America didn't like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or his successor, Harry Truman, and it hated the New Deal. In the years after World War II, a set of circumstances arose in which Big Business united with organized Christian groups (which tended to be headed by corporate bigwigs) to fight godless socialism (i.e., the policies espoused by Roosevelt and Truman) and communism and to make the United States a Christian nation under God.

Such is the subject of a book I've been reading for the past few weeks: One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America, written by Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse. The basic premise of the book is that Corporate America, aligned with and aided and abetted by a handful of preachers, created the civil religion (of which I'll write more in a subsequent post) that we find in contemporary America.

I'm only about one-third of the way through the book, but what I've read has been fascinating and enlightening. I didn't realize how much the baby boom generation (and therefore those generations that followed) took for granted aspects of American society and government that didn't exist before Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. Inaugurated in his two terms in office were things like the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, the insertion of the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, a pronounced mingling of politics and religion, and the adoption of the motto "In God We Trust," which of course is on all our money.

Grandpa during the Depression

As I read about the first true mingling of politics, government and religion in the late 40's and early 50's, I couldn't help but think that my Grandfather Broom - who didn't like Roosevelt and was a life-long Republican and Methodist churchgoer - and his ilk would have told their respective preachers and ministers to keep their damned nose out of politics. I also couldn't imagine any president before Eisenhower targeting "Christians" as a voting group. The whole concept would have seemed nonsensical.

What these men - these preachers, these presidents of large companies, and a growing number of politicians - did was to create a new "Other," which I would identify as those who did not and do not embrace the concept of a "civil religion" and the mingling of politics, government and Christianity. This Other came to be derisively termed "Secularists" by the preachers and, as the culture wars began to heat up in the 70's it was given new names and descriptions, such as "godless elements who want to drown our nation in immorality."

This new Other was created, then fear was whipped up among the "Rest of America" that this Other must be feared; we must protect ourselves from it. If there is no Other, then there is no object of fear, and if there is no object of fear, there is no way to empower those who seek to create fear.

What these fear-mongers know is that fear and the management and manipulation of it, are what leads to power and riches; for most people - or at least a substantial number of them - will give up something in order to feel special, protected, righteous and safe. These people - people like Ted Cruz - are in effect sellers of indulgences: Give me your money (and your mind) and I will protect you from the Other. I will lead the charge to save America from the Other.

I personally feel that these fear-mongers, these sellers of indulgences, are one of the greatest threats our society and our nation face today, and it's growing worse with each new Sarah Palin, each new Ted Cruz, each new Rush Limbaugh, and a certain news channel that lives and breathes off of fear. This fear divides America. It destroys and is never positive. It tears down rather than build up. 

It is high time that Americans remember and implement the words of President Franklin Roosevelt spoken 83 years ago at a time of great fear in this nation:

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

"People Can't Eat the Constitution": FDR, 1936 and Today

I've been reading a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt* which I started shortly after visiting his memorial in Washington, D.C. on Veteran's Day this past November (which I wrote about here). It's a long book, over 800 pages, and I'm a little over half-way through.

I have just read about the 1936 election and was amazed at how some of the rhetoric of that election - almost 80 years ago - mirrors conditions today. FDR is running for a second term, and his Republican opponent is Alf Landon of Kansas. The New Deal has been chugging along, transforming America, and the capitalists are starting to get really concerned.

I was frankly very surprised at how statements made in that election year - almost 80 years ago - by Roosevelt, Landon and others mirror conditions of today. 

As the nomination process played out, William Borah, long-time Republican senator from Idaho, made this statement: "Unless the Republican party is delivered from its reactionary leadership and reorganized in accord with its one-time liberal principles, it will die like the Whig party, of sheer political cowardice." (Sound familiar?)

The people were demanding change and the Republican party wasn't giving it to them. "They are offered the Constitution," said Borah. "But the people can't eat the Constitution." (Reminds me of how many so-called conservative reactionaries like to claim that they are self-appointed guardians of the Constitution.)

Alf Landon, the eventual Republican nominee, recognized that the days of Herbert Hoover's conservatism were over: "I do not believe the Jeffersonian theory that the best government is the one that governs the least can be applied today. [Keep in mind he was speaking almost 80 years ago.] I think that as civilization becomes more complex, government power must increase."

Compare that statement to statements by today's conservative talking heads, in and out of Congress, who frighten people into believing that the federal government has run amuck and must be drastically reduced in size.

Roosevelt was in top form that year and very combative. He admitted that he had made some mistakes in his first administration, but, he said:

"[T]he immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weights the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference. There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

Roosevelt carried all but two states that year, winning 523 electoral votes to Landon's 8.

Interesting.

* Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H. W. Brands.

Re-Thinking Roosevelt

Sunset on the Clinton Building Monday afternoon

"Oh, you must go see the Roosevelt Memorial," our new friend Craig said to us a couple of weeks ago when he found out we were planning a trip to Washington. "It's beautiful." I had never heard of it, but I made a mental note.

I'm glad he mentioned it.

A bit of background ... My dad was a midwestern old-school Republican (i.e., before the religious right arose with the election of Ronald Reagan), as was his father, my grandfather (and his father before him). Dad was born in 1925 and so grew up during the Depression. He grew up on a farm in southern Illinois, listening to my grandpa complaining about all the make-work programs that President Roosevelt initiated, how they were "going to ruin the country," how men "stood around leaning on a shovel," etc. 

I, in turn, was exposed to my father's very Republican views and heard him make negative comments about Franklin Roosevelt, then later about Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society. I well remember the 1964 election in which Barry Goldwater ran against Johnson - mainly because I recall chanting around our neighborhood with other kids, "Goldwater, Goldwater, he's our man; Johnson belongs in the garbage man." (Interestingly, when I was taking a political science class at the University of Illinois in the late 70's, our professor related one time how, as a boy in New York City, he remembered chanting, "Roosevelt, Roosevelt, he's our man, Landon belongs in the garbage can.")

I grew up to be a good Republican like my father, and I was prejudiced against Franklin Roosevelt. I never studied him, I never read a biography about him. He was an "other" whom I never felt the need to learn about.

But many things have happened in my life in the past few years that have changed my social and political outlook. (I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece a little over 2-1/2 years ago about my political "coming out" that I republished on this blog here.)

I say all this because I approached the Roosevelt Memorial with a very different mindset than that which I would have had earlier in my life.

The first thing that should be said about the memorial is that it is beautiful, spreading tranquilly along 7-1/2 acres on the shore of the Tidal Basin between the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial. It is organized into four outdoor "rooms," each representing one of the four terms to which Roosevelt was elected. (He died shortly after his fourth inauguration.) If we had known this beforehand, we would have approached from the north side; but since we were coming from the south side, we went through the rooms backwards. As it happened, however, this increased my appreciation for the memorial as we "went back in time."

Each of the four "rooms" featured waterfalls

I was particularly impressed by the rooms devoted to Roosevelt's first two terms in which he grappled with the Great Depression.

Statuary depicting the massive unemployment of the First Term

Seeing this quotation was one of the number of times on Monday that I contemplated the on-going
battle to achieve full civil rights for America's gay, lesbian and transgender citizens

I think the above quotation is as relevant today as it was 80 years ago

I left the Roosevelt Memorial feeling fed - and changed. What I had read and experienced there made me want to learn more about this president, made me want to overcome my prejudice and learn why millions of Americans had loved him.

Continuing the theme of my last couple of posts, I also felt that a renewed sense of a different type of patriotism had been fed at this memorial. Mark expressed some of his thoughts on this subject in an email to his family: "We both pondered the meaning of patriotism most of the day and by the end of the day, for me I'm not sure what it means. Having an American flag up every Veterans Day? Saying you would be willing to die defending your country? Standing up for the civil rights of minorities? How about compromising the expectations you have for yourself as an individual for the good of the less fortunate or oppressed?"

I was and am glad for the experience I had that bright, sunny, beautiful Veterans' Day - an experience that continued to be shaped as we visited the MLK, Lincoln and Vietnam War Memorials, the subject of my next post.

Coming Out of the Conservative Closet

The following is another in a series of posts that I originally published on my former blog.  This one was initially published in March 2011.

I have chosen to write about coming out of a closet – the closet that hid part of who I really am, a part of me that I always knew was there but never wanted to acknowledge or accept. I guess part of the reason I never came out is that I was afraid of the names I might be called:  “liberal,” “left-wing wacko,” “commie,” “bleeding heart,” and, the worst of all – “Democrat.” It was just so much easier to go along with the crowd, pretending I was something I wasn’t, until the internal conflict became too great – and I snapped.  I could no longer deny who I was, who I am.

As was the case with my gay coming out, my political coming out was precipitated by an event which caused built-up internal conflict to finally erupt. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the controversy that erupted in the summer of 2010 over the construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque.” Regardless of the merits of the project, I was incensed that a number of conservative politicians and talking heads were blatantly seeking to make “political hay” by fueling the racist, Muslim-phobic hysteria that was sweeping through seemingly large swaths of America. I was outraged by the assaults launched on (true) religious freedom by the very people who purport to fight for and cling to it – namely, conservatives who happened to be – you guessed it - Republicans (Orrin Hatch being a notable, and lonely, exception).

I guess it took something like this to finally jar myself loose from my inherited political moorings and for me to accept who I truly am. My father was a staunch Republican, as was his father before him. I inherited a loathing of labor unions, left-wing pinkos (i.e., Democrats) and nutters like the Kennedys, George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Because of the way I was raised, and because of a desire to please my father (it’s complicated), I embraced establishment Republicanism as my own and identified strongly with this party and its policies for most of my life.

While being raised in an environment of establishment Republicanism, however, my hidden truth was that I secretly admired the vision of such great Democratic leaders as Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy; I secretly pined to be part of a cause that was more exciting and inspiring than, say, reducing capital gains tax. I harbored largely hidden beliefs in the freedom and liberty of the individual, in the importance of community and the need for a just society. 

I secretly admired Thomas Jefferson, and got goose bumps when I stood in his Memorial in Washington, D.C., and read these awesome words: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” And the goose bumps turned into an embarrassing level of excitement (tongue firmly in cheek here) when I contemplated these words:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

I don’t know where these tendencies toward democratic ideals came from; I think I must have been - in the immortal words of Lady Gaga - born that way. They seemed to always be a part of me, to be preset; and try as I might, I could never overcome them. Part of me felt that being conservative was the sensible and responsible thing to do, but another part of me longed to campaign for Ted Kennedy and join Greenpeace; and sometimes the temptation to join the ACLU became almost overwhelming.I never acted on any of these secret impulses, however. I had occasional opportunities to hookup with liberal causes, but I was too afraid to take advantage of them, afraid of living openly who I really was inside.

Then, during the midst of the Reagan years, I moved abroad and lived, until halfway through the Clinton years, outside the United States [in Canada]. During this period, I lived in several countries that some would call “social democracies” [France and Canada]. Here, I had my first really serious identity crisis: instead of seeing mass unemployment, complete subjugation of the individual and a hedonistic society – things I had been told would result from social democracy – I saw networks of community centers, affordable health care available to all, tolerance of other races, cultures and faiths, and a comparative absence of crimes committed with guns. I saw value attached to the concepts of communitarianism, equality and belonging to a world-wide community of nations. I saw secularism and religion existing side by side, each knowing their place, each content to fill it and stay in it.

I became very confused.  I couldn’t understand what I was seeing and experiencing. I had feelings I couldn’t explain.  I mean, I was experiencing strong attractions to social democracy – something I had been taught since infancy was “impure and unnatural.” Nevertheless, I couldn’t deny that something was stirring deep within me. I tried to turn away from these attractions, but they kept becoming stronger and stronger. For the first time in my life, I thought that – perhaps – I could overcome my upbringing, come out of my conservative Republican closet, embrace authenticity and live life as an openly liberal democratic man. 

Then, we moved to Utah. For the first time since joining the LDS Church, my political affiliation (i.e., orthodox Republicanism) became an additional gauge of worthiness and orthodoxy. Suddenly, I knew I must abandon all thoughts of embracing my true identity and instead redouble my efforts to hide what by now I had admitted were latent Democratic tendencies. I knew this was something I could never confess to my bishop. I must maintain my Republican persona for my own sake as well as the sake of my family and do everything in my power to repress these tendencies.

At first, it wasn’t too difficult to blend in with the Republican crowd. But occasionally, comments would be made that would cause anger to swell within me; situations would arise where I felt forced to act totally contrary to my true nature. 

Over time, these conflicts and tensions became almost unbearable – until I finally snapped, deciding I could no longer go on living who I wasn’t. And so, I came out: as a liberal Democrat. 

There, I said it!  I am a liberal Democrat. That is my truth. For years, I lived in denial of who I really am. But I finally came to a point where I knew I could no longer live a lie, and I have (in part) Sarah Palin to thank for that.

For the first time in my life, I put a yard sign in front of my home on behalf of a Democratic candidate. For the first time in my life, I gave voice to my true, innermost political feelings. It felt so liberating! So real! So authentic! I was told I couldn’t live as an openly Democratic man in Utah – that it was one thing to confine my politics to the privacy of a voting booth, but it was quite another to live my politics out loud; but I know others have done it, are doing it, and so can I.

I still haven’t worked up enough courage to actually join the Democratic Party(*) or attend a convention or meeting; I don’t think I’ve been out long enough yet. But I know that day will come.

* I am now a registered Democrat.