"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.