FDR

(Father’s Day Remembrance)

I have to admit that I’ve had a hard time focusing on my essays of late. Last weekend the idea was advanced to me that a fun topic to write about would be the phenomenon of "e-suicide" – people who fake their own deaths to glean attention from message board acquaintances. So I started an article on that.  A fellow poster on a board I frequent even aided me with research material of a sort when they provided me with links to their own fake suicide on a newsgroup a few years ago. But something, some crucial element of interest and humor, was missing.  So I set the article aside as I attempted to locate my supply of funny, which I usually keep stashed in bags of marijuana.

Next I turned my efforts toward an article I meant to write on still another e-acquaintance’s memorable flame war with a right-wing extremist group. This aggressive flame war with the group culminated with my source writing his own page accounting the group’s questionable tactics and Google-bombing them so that when the group’s name is Google searched, a link to his unflattering article is the first item to appear. However, after speaking with my source it became clear that this article might not quite be as timely and relevant as I wanted it to be – after all, my source himself had accomplished what he’d set out to do with his own article.

Then I became convinced that the tabloid press is waging a systematic, all-out campaign to make the public hate Angelina Jolie, and tried to start something about that. I have to admit that article might still appear here someday soon, but for the time being, it just seems too puffy.

I seemed to already be experiencing writer’s block only two weeks into writing my column. Then, with frustration mounting and laziness once again setting in as I planted my ass at my laptop, I happened to glance at the calendar and realized that today would’ve been the 81st birthday of my father, who passed away in 2000. I reflected on the man who, more than anyone else, has shaped my political views and values. My father’s political views were all over the map. He was an extreme libertarian who equated any request for government assistance with self-castration, but he repurchased his parents’ Depression-ravaged farm with benefits of the GI Bill. He railed against LBJ’s Great Society social programs, and when the Nixon-era Congress nearly passed a guaranteed national income, he scoffed at how pussified the country had become. But he only donated money to one politician in his life, our neosocialist Congressman, Bernie Sanders – and he laid his very life on the line for only one as well, the greatest noblesse-oblige liberal and most influential social engineer of the twentieth century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As our current President makes the most aggressive efforts to date to dismantle the social programs – AFDC welfare, Social Security, Supplemental Security for the injured and disabled – implemented by FDR to remedy the mass poverty created by the Depression, many citizens are giving him their blessing in doing so. The rationale is that the programs are outmoded, too expensive and too vulnerable to exploitation… the list of supposed ills of these programs goes on and on. As the last remaining generation of Americans who truly lived through and understands the reasons these programs were created are dying off, we’re losing sight of one of the harshest lessons that American history has taught us – that the price of all kinds of freedoms can be too high for many of us, in the most literal sense of the term.

FDR, a lifelong blueblood and career politician, created these programs for more reasons than mere necessity, although they were indeed necessary. History has already familiarized us with the tactical errors and cavalier attitude he displayed in the months that led to our embroilment in WWII, and the criticisms of these mistakes have been repeated ad nauseam by modern conservatives. He appeased. He sat on his hands about Hitler. He didn’t take the Japanese threat seriously until it was too late. Then, once engaged, he lied to the public about the severity of the damages our forces were sustaining in both theatres of operation, Europe and the Pacific Rim. Both time, and the good old American hawk adage that the end justifies the means have largely silenced his critics, who know when they can’t argue with results. But the legacy of FDR as The Wartime President has overshadowed the much more complex and haunting legacy of FDR the Social Architect.

To understand the full implications of why these programs were pushed so vigorously, we have to look even further back in time, past the Depression to the Roaring Twenties. Everybody was flush, the market was booming, and Roosevelt, in his capacity as the governor of New York presided over the New York Stock Exchange. Along with then President Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt pushed people to invest, citing rising stock values as a means of increasing personal assets. Briskly shoving aside the ultraconservative, unsexy, and somewhat tedious fiscal caution of the previous president, Calvin Coolidge, who’d urged government and individuals alike to sock away money in bank accounts that slowly but surely yielded interest value, Hoover and Roosevelt assured investors that the risk of investing in stock was more than outweighed by the increased profit margin over plain old ordinary mattress-stuffing interest earnings. The public bought into the promises, rich, middle-class and poor alike…and the rest is disastrous, tragic history.

In short, FDR created social programs, at least in part, as a mea culpa.

When our view of social programs is filtered through the prism of this knowledge, it adds shades of irony to an already complex legacy. How would FDR feel about being scornfully remembered as "the giveaway president" by conservative pundits? Probably just fine and dandy.   When we view the whole picture, social programs invented by a blueblood president become more than just crumbs tossed to the starving masses.  They are nothing less than one man’s desperate reach to right an unintended but monstrous wrong.

Far greater writers than I have set themselves to the task of deconstructing the passions, motivations and accomplishments of this iconic three-term president. There’s much more to him than what I’ve written here, and we all know it. But this was the most relevant portion of his legacy for my family, and as fitting an observance as any for my father, who paralleled his favorite president in his own conflicts and contradictions.