1 Boring Old Man

^{FDR’s Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia}

FDR died when I was three years old. I didn’t think of him as a real person when I was a child. I thought of him like I thought of King Aurthur, or George Washington – more myth than a man. After all, he defeated the Nazis along with his sidekick General Eisenhower, another bigger-than-life figure. A few years back, we were on a meander in middle Georgia and we visited the Little White House where he’d vacationed and treated his paralytic polio with hydrotherapy. We saw the room where he died, and the downstairs room where his mistress, Lucy, lived. There was a room for Elinore [front left window], but she was rarely there. It’s a small, comfortable bungalow, and somehow it humanized him for me. That picture of him on the right is one of the few he ever allowed to be taken of him sitting in a wheel chair. It’s on the back porch. He was no longer the hero of my youth nor the monster of his adversaries. He was just a crippled old man with a cold marriage. On that visit, I fell in love with him.

I don’t think he was a Socialist, or a Communist. I’m not even sure he was a Liberal in the way we might use the term today. From where I sit, he was a pragmatist with a keen sense of his moment in history, maybe moments. His solution to the Depression was simple. Remove speculators from the Banks by separating Commercial and Investment Banks. Limit the size of Banks and regulate them through the Federal Reserve. Regulate the Stock and Commodity Markets. Insure people’s savings and their old age. Put people to work in CCC and WPA until we had better times. Tax the hell out of the rich – after all, it was their greed that caused the whole thing even [if he was one of them]. All were simple solutions that spoke directly to the problems at hand. It was a daring approach that came from practical understanding, not an ideology. He just did what needed doing, because it needed doing.

I think there was as much political turmoil and wrangling back then as there is now. Many of the right wing political Think Tanks were founded around opposition to his policies – the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Family. A lot of the people who populate these anti-FDR institutions are my peers, but grew up seeing him as the other kind of bigger-than-life – the bad kind.