By BARBARA DeMILLE First published: Friday, April 18, 2008
On this 75th anniversary of the New Deal, it's a good time to remember another president and another grim time. It was March 1933 and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated amid bank failures and bread lines. In his speech to the country, he stressed hope and hard work, warned against inaction in a paralysis of fear, and his strong conviction we would remedy ourselves through fair treatment for all, collective effort and a united front.
Spending many summers in Maine, we've toured the Roosevelt summer house on Campobello Island many times: the iron beds covered with plain cotton spreads; the claw-foot tub, the white lavatory basin, the cistern above the toilet, the floors covered with rush mats, the stern wicker furniture in the living room. The sparse kitchen would be a challenge for any cook supplying meals for at least seven, and usually more. It is a spartan house, a family house; you can see that from the toys, knitting and magazines strewn about. It was an active house, the home of a busy, interested family whose intelligence and humanity influenced a world. You're told Franklin was carried, painfully, down the long lawn to a fishing boat, which transferred him to a train, which began the jolting trip from eastern Maine to New York City after polio struck that summer of 1921. (Nobody in the industrialized countries gets polio anymore. A helicopter would have made the trip in hours, not days, and much less painfully, too.) At this cottage on Campobello, expectations were less than now concerning what was necessary for comfort and ease. But hearing Franklin's speeches played in the Visitor's Center, listening to that strong voice, ringing with conviction, you know it is we, in our rudderless time of abundant materialism, with our widening gap between rich and poor, and our tightening climate of fear, that have less. For we have dulled our need for behaving well: that reverence for our humanitarian values necessary to rule our greedy, vengeful selves. Strong leadership does not thrive on the ups and downs of opinion polls. Reliant character is not formed by what is expedient. We have a dire need now of a leader who has thought and dreamed and wrestled with the dilemmas, angers and despairs of his fellow men and will offer hope and constructive, healing action. The irony has been noted before, but is most pertinent now: It was a wealthy man from a privileged family who rose to provide the moral leadership and the necessary convictions that gathered our country, without fear and coercion, and led us through the Great Depression and a world war. That same Depression in Germany fostered National Socialism, fascism, anti-Semitism and a holocaust for six million lives. Touring the Roosevelt cottage, I was wistful, for mine is the generation that still remembers first-hand. After us, the Roosevelts are figures in a history book. Perhaps then for my generation, our present downward spiral into the smoke and mirrors of propaganda, hype, disinformation and the gradual abrogation of our civil rights is most alarming because we can remember when those who governed did concern themselves with what ought to be. Of course there was skullduggery then, and chicanery, racial prejudice and cheating, and outright greed. But what is most grievously missing now is our public conscience, as it is reflected back to us by moral leaders. If we're to live, and live decently, together, we must learn to live in peace buttressed with humanitarian concern. Barbara DeMille is a writer from Rensselaerville.
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