Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and Barack Obama: A friend's reflections

I reprint below some thoughts of a close and thoughtful friend and fine poet, Richard O. Moore, replying to a Reckonings post I offered some time ago. My brief reply to his questions follows his remarks.

Reading your recent posting raised a number of questions, as follows:

1. You refer to Eleanor as your “greatest mentor” which, for me, opens up the question as to your grandmother’s influence on your view of your grandfather. Is this worth exploring? At the risk of over simplification, it strikes me that the President was the grand politician (the art of the possible) in contrast with his wife’s views which were moral rather than political, although not without political consequences. Whereas the President never lost his vision of America as first among nations, Eleanor moved on to think of the world and it problems in global rather than national states and “spheres of influence.”  To what extent were you aware of this difference?

2. Are there circumstances in common with the 1930’s and today which in any way limit what a President can and cannot do? The title of the Brands biography [H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt] gave me a clue. FDR was a symbol of the ruing class who responded to the collapse of an economic system from the position of a supreme insider. Regardless of his radical policies, his credentials as an oligarch

remained intact. In sharp contrast, Obama enjoys no such advantage. At the time of the Great Depression his mere existence as a Harvard educated lawyer and successful politician would have prompted an image of the Anti-Christ incarnate. To say that then and now America is a racist society is to state the obvious. The obvious, however, is frequently the most ignored element in our daily life. To be black in America still means that inherently a black man has no legitimate power. This view is visceral and mostly unconscious in today’s political discourse.

Obama, who thinks and acts as if in a post-racist world, commands legally mandated lip service. FDR, although a “traitor,” retained his authority as “one of us.” Fortunately societies sometimes change. The Republican strategies from the “birthers” to the Tea Party purists are doomed because the changing demographics in the  U.S. will eventually produce a different society with its own problems.

In some respects the Thirties and today, instead of sharing similarities, are the opposite of each other. While reading your post  I remembered visits to the local A & P. The shelves in many parts of the store were bare. The Depression was an economy of scarcity. Today, regardless of the collapse of the housing market and other financial losses, there does not seem to have been a corresponding drop in commodity production [or consumption]. The shelves are full. We have an economy of surplus, which is no less of an economy in crisis but for different reasons.

There were and are other forces at work in these two periods.  For example: the Depression saw the rise of a powerful union movement. Today, unions can be said to qualify for an endangered species list. The same holds true for heavy manufacturing. It was manufacturing related to WWII that brought us out of the Depression. Today those jobs are for the most part gone and will not return. A new and highly skilled work force is needed to meet the needs of the new industries of the information age, but that work force will be much smaller. A substantial portion of today’s unemployed is in danger of becoming unemployable and the core of a permanent underclass. Two of the the challenges of the near future are how to pay for the rising demands of the welfare state and how to develop new social organizations and practices that contribute to the health and sustainability of the planet.   

Richard, I am grateful for your thoughts, and substantially in accord with them. The challenges you identify in the near future are critical, interactive and daunting: the danger of a permanent and restive underclass, the rising demands of a welfare state, and the development of organization and practice to save and nourish the planet. There is revolutionary potential in the first: it is hard to imagine the voting public or the Congress supporting adequate welfare for a large and permanent underclass.  

As my greatest mentor, my grandmother spoke of the United Nations, the Democratic and Republican parties circa 1956-62, my own writing at Amherst College and Columbia University, and for the Collegiate Council for the United Nations, which I served as president between 1959 and 1961, but not of her husband, my grandfather. I wrote later, in A Love in Shadow (NY: Norton, 1978), about them both.

Still, from her own writing and that of her biographers — Joe Lash and Blanche Wiesen Cook, primarily — and my listening to her speak with Adlai Stevenson, JFK and others at Hyde Park and in New York, I agree with your sense of their basic differences. Of course she had the advantage of not having or choosing to serve as president of the United States; FDR would surely have been different in a less constraining political role.

But even given that, they were clearly of different temperament and inclination, he more the political strategist and tactician who like his admired cousin Theodore, loved the bully pulpit, she not without canniness — witness her taking Cardinal Spellman to the cleaners, and her influential support of Stevenson's candidacy in 1952 and 1956 — but more the moralist with strong political views and unwavering commitment to social justice. 

Stevenson, inscribing to her a book about himself titled Adlai Stevenson: Conscience in Politics, wrote "To Eleanor Roosevelt, my conscience."

So yes, I was more influenced by my grandmother than by my grandfather. I admired them both inordinately, but I knew him as a child knows his grandfather. I knew my grandmother as I was at least coming into my own adult life. I'm convinced that she loved him, but as is widely known if not often well represented, theirs was not a close marriage.