Remembering FDR

I am old enough to remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president of this country. I lived in a small Kentucky town just south of Mammoth Cave, which was cleared by Roosevelt's C.C.C. workers. The area benefited from the Rural Electrification program, too. He brought the country back from the Great Depression, and brought millions of Americans back from unemployment and poverty and bankruptcy to work and stability.

I also remember that Roosevelt was hated by large numbers of Americans, Republican and Democrat alike. My aunt worked in Washington, starting in 1939. She regularly sent home carbon copies of hate material distributed quite openly in the Commerce Department, where she worked. They were type-written, and the biggest letters were no more than twelve-pouint caps--LIKE THESE. But they were big enough that you could see the venom, and hear the hate.

You could hear it on the radio, too. And read it in the newspapers. And your neighbors talked it. What was said on the radio and in the press wasn't so bad as the not-so-very-underground smears that my aunt sent us from Washington, but they were often hateful, too. The neighborhood hate was almost mild, because even if you were (or had been) rich, Roosevelt was saving your tail. But you knew it was wrong, because of the way he was doing it--and because he was doing it. And what he was doing was Socialist and therefore bad. He was making everybody work together, and even if he and his Socialism saved us, we knew that he and his Socialism were wrong.

The vicious stuff called Roosevelt a "Jew," or sometimes just a "Jew-lover." The hate-mongers called him "Roosenvelt," as though that made him as Jew. They called him a traitor because he insisted that Black Americans were not only human, but just as human as White Americans. They hated his wife, Eleanor, too: she was a loud-mouthed, ugly woman, and like her husband, a Socialist. And of course she was a "Jew-lover" too. No telling what Americans would have thought or done if they had known that somewhere in Eleanor Roosevelt's background there are most probably Black ancestors.

Americans hated the Roosevelts because they were intelligent, because they spoke in sentences, because he had a "snooty" accent. Americans hated the Roosevelts because they told us what to do. They didn't insult our intelligence; they simply noted it, silently, and tried--for our sake and the country's--to overcome our ignorance and stupidity.

Because Roosevelt and his policies got us out of the Great Depression, we could only hate him; we couldn't vote against him. Our selfishness told us that. We had to put up with him, and re-elect him. We were like stupid, incompetent boy scouts, lost in a woods, and having to trust a compass--which in our ignorance we couldn't possibly trust--to find our way out.

President Obama's situation is a lot like that of President Roosevelt. And the best we can hope is that he can survive all the stupid attacks, and save us in spite of ourselves.