That Traitor in the White House

Now don't get all excited. I'm not about to skein your grey matter with another tirade on the doings of Barack Hussein Obama. Obama is still fresh milk which the hourglass of time has yet to homogenize.


No, I am talking about another critter– long gone from the stage, not even in the wings. I speak of that silver-throated toad Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our longest sitting (in more ways than one!) president, the man whom "the Greatest Generation" lionized, the first true traitor to inhabit 100 Pennsylvania Avenue.


Yes, yes, I know. Most political science professors would disagree. Indeed they rank FDR in the top five US presidents, some even saying he was our greatest. But these puffin-headed savants are readily dismissed when one juxtaposes FDR's legacy with that of say Warren Harding and Teapot Dome.


To my mind the mort accurate assessment of FDR is the one being bantered around by the conservative right, the one that states that Roosevelt had nothing to do with lifting the United States from the depths of the Great Depression, that our collective thanks instead should go to a mass murder, to that mustachioed mesmerizer in Germany: Adolf Hitler. For Hitler did start World War II.  And it was World War II that finally pulled humanity out of the Great Depression– though we did lose some thirty-five million people in the process.


Sadly this is far from a profound or even a new line of enquiry. Indeed I first heard it expressed in high school by my civics teacher Mr. Bishop circa 1960. Bishop said flatly: "It took World War II to revitalize and invigorate the American people and, in turn, the US economy." In other words my civics teacher did not utilize an economic factoid to deprecate and disparage the most popular president in US history. Small wonder public school teachers bore our children to death.


Hmm... the most popular president in US history.  Did I really write that? Have I too been brainwashed and am now incapable of expunging that blatant falsehood from my consciousness? It would appear so. When all is said and done, when all the myths have been stripped away, Roosevelt stands before us naked with this singular, solitary fig leaf: he was elected to the highest office in the land not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. A a result, when he died of cancer in 1945, many Americans could not recall having lived under another president and wept openly.


But does longevity alone make a president great? Of course not. We don't even have to bring in other presidents to see the folly of this fallacy. FDR was hated and hated bitterly long before he and his egalitarian wife Eleanor stepped foot into the White House in 1932. Why else would Guiseppe Zangara try to shoot him in Miami when he was president-elect? Anton Cermak, the mayor of Chicago, took the bullet instead with these alleged and highly melodramtic last words: "I'm glad it was me instead of you." In the immortal words of a fellow professional football player upon learning that Pat Tilman had given up a three-million-dollar-plus contract to serve his country as a Ranger: "What a chump!"


Once in office FDR did move quickly– in the wrong direction. Embracing the economic babblements of John Maynard Keynes, he immediately set up government program after government program in a vain attempt to lower unemployment and stave off mass starvation and homelessness. For a man who claimed "the only thing we have to fear is Fear itself," FDR was bedeviled by two Keynesian ogres: 1) that an unmanaged, unregulated capitalist state would inevitably succumb to chaos and 2) that a modern industrial state could theoretically spiral into such an economic slump that recovery would be problematic at best.


How could FDR fall for such poppycock? How could he embrace ideas that flew in the face of time-honored truths such as Adam Smith's "the invisible hand?" The answer may come as a surprise: polio.


Yes, I said "polio." Polio is the key to the Roosevelt conundrum. On the plus side it made him a deeper and more thoughtful man. On the minus side it prevented him from mixing, from mingling with the masses. His public appearances were therefore not so much talks as staged events. Never in his extended presidency did he give a speech from a sitting position. Instead he was propped up behind a podium, sometimes holding on for dear life.


Polio then was the mother of Roosevelt's hallowed (or should I say hollow?) "fireside chats." Radio gave him a means too hide his malady and still talk to the American people, to go right into their homes and win over their hearts and their minds. And this is exactly what Roosevelt did. Of course the American people were not stupid. They knew it was all smoke and mirrors. No one hid the fact that Roosevelt was a cripple. Still it is best not to see the ugly side of reality– to present fantasy instead of truth. Don't believe me? Talk to an epileptic some time.


FDR knew all this. He was perfectly aware of all the pluses and minuses of his polio. He even knew that it gave him a degree of protection, that it made it harder for an assassin to kill him. "How so?" say you. "Here's how," says I. Hearing that the financial sharks of Wall Street were calling him "That Man in the White House," Roosevelt knew he had tipped his hand, that he had committed the sin of sins: he had betrayed his class.


Aye, that is the unforgivable sin. Once a family has made it, once a family has crawled out of the muck and the mire to the rarefied air of generational social elitism, there is no room to sympathize with the average man, much less the poor. Seldom is this simple idea every broached. But a mistake, a lapse, occurs every now and then. One such lapse can be found in Rafael Sabatini's novel Scaramouche. At the tail end of the book Scaramouche's father defends his brutal killing of his son's best friend with these words:


... you accuse me, sir, of murdering your dearest friend. I will admit that the means employed were perhaps unworthy. But what other means were at my command to meet an urgency that every day since then proves to have existed? M. d Vilmorin was a revolutionary, a man of new ideas that should overthrow society and rebuild it more akin to the desires of such as himself. I belong to the order that quite as justifiably desired society to remain as it was. Not only was it better so far as me and mine, but I also contend, and you have yet to prove me wrong, that it is better so for all the world; that, indeed, no other conceivable society is possible. Every human society must of necessity be composed of several strata. You may disturb it temporarily into an amorphous whole by a revolution such as this; but only temporarily. Soon out of the chaos which is all that you and your kind can ever produce, order must be restored or life will perish; and with the restoration of order comes the restoration of the various strata necessary to organize society. Those that were yesterday at the top may in the new order of things find themselves dispossessed without any benefit to the whole. That change I resisted.... 


This passage was penned in 1920– a good twelve years before FDR assumed the office of the presidency. How could he and his handlers miss it? But miss it they did. And in came Keynes with his twisted and traitorous thoughts on modernizing capitalism for he 20th Century. No wonder the Wall Street sharks dubbed Roosevelt "That Man in the White House." I'm sure they had even juicer epithets for him when cloistered together in the sanctity and purpled ease of their private chambers.