Applying Franklin Roosevelt and Lincoln to today

Saul Friedman | Gray Matters

1:37 PM EDT, April 11, 2008

Today is another date that has been fixed in my memory, the day word reached me in my place of part-time work -- a Brooklyn photofinishing shop -- that the president of my youth, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had died.

I remember it was late in the afternoon, and work stopped and we stared at one another. There was no television to turn on and the radio voice told us too little. There was an odd feeling of helplessness. We were in a daze, even a bit frightened, wondering what will become of us? And when I went home, my mother was crying.

Only once since, in the days of shock after John Kennedy was killed, have I had that empty feeling. But it was not the same, for Kennedy had not been with us long. And the shock was the murder, not the end of history.

But Roosevelt, the greatest president of the greatest generation, had been with us for more than a dozen years, through the Depression and the rise of fascism, Nazism, communism and the greatest, most devastating war.

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He was, it seemed, a permanent presence in our lives. A soldier in Italy said Roosevelt's death in 1945 left him feeling as if he had lost his father. It was as if the nation had lost its father. People cried in the streets. And it's hard to believe now, that FDR was only 63.

Roosevelt's death a few months into his fourth term deprived him of seeing the moment of triumph when Germany surrendered a month later and Japan followed that summer. At least Abraham Lincoln, who was murdered on April 14, 1865, six weeks after he began his second term, lived to see the end of the Civil War.

In a sense, these two presidents, a Republican and a Democrat, had invented or reinvented their parties and had, in the words of the Constitution, "formed a more perfect union." Yet in the midst of the South's rebellion, Lincoln overruled the obstructionism of his Democratic predecessor, James Buchanan, and approved the 1862 Morrill Land Grant College Act to create the A&M colleges, which brought education to the working classes and eventually transformed the economy of the nation.

Roosevelt overcame 12 years of laissez-faire Republicanism and reintroduced the active presidency, which saved capitalism from itself with regulation and social insurance that has endured, for the most part, through 11 successive presidencies. But in the midst of World War II, from which America emerged as the world's leader, Roosevelt gave millions of us, including me, the GI Bill of Rights, which also transformed education and housing ownership in the nation for the working classes.

As Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois correctly said, only one other president, Ronald Reagan, has been "transforming," bringing classical conservatism to what he saw as the excesses of government, by which he meant Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." But Reagan remembered his youth under Roosevelt, and he strengthened Social Security instead of trying to kill it. Nor did he try to privatize Medicare. And he helped end the Cold War peacefully by dealing with the Soviet Union.

Roosevelt said proudly that he was a "liberal," but he was pragmatic. Reagan was a conservative, but he was more pragmatic and flexible than today's right-wingers who claim Reagan's mantle but would roll back advances in civil and women's rights and the New Deal.

Although the legacies of Lincoln and Roosevelt endure, so do their unreconstructed adversaries -- states' rights advocates and the free-market advocates.

This year, the legacies of Lincoln and Roosevelt will be at play in the presidential and congressional elections. Both were activist presidents who took greater powers to themselves, but left the union whole.

Now the fundamental role of the federal government is at the heart of all the palaver. Shall it remain benign? Shall it try federalism again, leaving it to the states to recover from disasters like Katrina or decide on such issues as civil rights and education? Shall we leave it to private insurance companies to provide health care? Shall we leave it to the stock market to provide retirement security? Shall we cut taxes and regulations for business?

Or shall government provide universal health care, undertake public-works programs and help rescue homeowners from the follies of the credit industry. Shall we tax the wealthiest to help pay for these programs?

The nation's safety is a major issue, as it was in the times of Lincoln and Roosevelt. Not since the War of 1812 was the nation in greater danger than during the Civil War and World War II.

But aside from some lapses, the national character and the protections of the Constitution did not give way to fear. And as far as I can tell, fear was not a factor in the two American elections held in a time of war -- in 1864 and 1944.

On national security now, we could stand astride the world like a paranoid colossus waging preemptive wars and curtailing some of our rights at home. Or we can resist the role of world cop and depend on diplomacy, good will and good sense and the use of force, truly as a last resort?

Lincoln and Roosevelt, in their inaugurals exactly 69 years apart had something to say about perilous times: "With malice toward none ... let us ... bind up the nation's wounds," said Lincoln. And, Roosevelt said famously, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."