That damned Roosevelt

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington The 30th of the month marks the 100th anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt's birthday, but in this city of monuments there is none to commemorate the public career of the only American who has been or ever will be elected President four times.

In Washington there is al ,a James Forrestal building, and structures named after J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Russell and Everett McKinley Dirksen, an Illinois Senator famous for nothing so much as the sneaky way he took his bribes. But not a slab of marble marks the existence of the nation's greatest 20th-century statesman. Thirty- seven years after his death FDR is still so ex- ecrated by the moneyed circles from which he himself sprang that he is begrudged the smallest cenotaph in the city that he, more than any other modern politician, shaped.

A figure as hated now by the people who dominate the mass media and the nation's public• life as when he was a live political power, the observance of his birthday will be short and modest. Many a speaker will use him as a warning, an example of what to shun, as if Roosevelt had ruined the country instead of saving it.

Few men have less deserved their posthumous reputation. FDR was not a lover of big government, he disliked deficit spending and had the most profound misgivings about the exaltation of federal power over state sovereignty. He was not an American Gracchus or a New World Marius pillaging and rewarding his followers from what he had stolen. Despite the talk about confiscatory taxation ushered in by the New Deal, the statistics reveal there has been no significant change in the distribution of wealth in the United States in this century. No revolution in the ownership of property has taken place nor is there any evidence to believe he ever wanted such a thing or even toyed with the thought. In such matters Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an exemplar of his class, a conservative son of an ancient Dutch patroon family, a Harvard man, a Hudson River squire, a practising Christian, but a private one, an aristocrat to the extent that word is applicable to American society.

Nevertheless, he left this nation changed for the better. In so doing he earned the en- mity focused on him. How he changed his country is described by Joseph Alsop, for years one of America's most widely published political columnists and a distant cousin of the President's. A few excerpts from a recently published Roosevelt ap- preciation (FDR: A Centenary Remem- brance, Thames and Hudson) catch the heart of it:

`The truth is that the America Roosevelt

was born into in 1882, and the America I was born into in 1910, and even the America of 1932 (the year of FDR's elec- tion), was an entirely white Anglo-Saxon nation by any practical test... WASPs owned

while almost everyone else .rented, WASPS hired while others took jobs; and WASPs made loans while others borrowed. Even at

Harvard College, a numerus clausus of IO per cent was still imposed on Jewish all'

plicants for admission ...At the time of Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration close to 50 per cent of all Americans were in some degree excluded from the full rights enjoyed by all WASP Americans...Franklin Delano Roosevelt included the excluded.'

Roosevelt himself did not live to see the end of lynching and poll taxes but he had set the climate and taught the nation that

merit alone shall set the limits of what a Per- son may do. In the country clubs where the

resentful Reaganites go, they say it was that damned Roosevelt who let the blacks and the Jews and the Mexicans 'in' — and they are right.

So it happens that on FDR's 100th birth- day some Americans are coming to chilli(

they must fight Roosevelt's fight a second 'time. The triggering event was, the joint an' nouncement a few days ago by the Treasury

and Justice Departments that, henceforth, private schools and colleges which refuse to admit blacks will be granted a Federal in- come tax exemption. Jim Crow, the ancient symbol of legal segregation, is flying in our

skies again. The decision to grant subsidies to racist schools is but the most recent of a series of acts by the Administration which form an

ignoble pattern. First there was the decision to oppose school integration by `busing''

which by itself would have been arguahlY sensible if it had been accompanied by other measures to help black children get an education. No such other measures were

forthcoming. After that came the an- nouncement that the Administration would go to court to have 'voluntary affirmative action programmes' declared legal. (A number of companies and universities and

colleges which had discriminated in the hir-

ing and promotion of blacks and women In the past have adopted programmes reserv-

ing a certain number of places for people In

those categories as a means of catching 1.11).) On top of this the Administration has gone along with white Southern amendments of the Voting Act which would effectively disenfranchise millions of blacks from local and state representation. Taken in its entirety the Reagan Ad- ministration has compiled the worst record

on civil rights since Woodrow Wilson, an

unashamed bigot who fired black clerical workers from government jobs and resegregated Federal offices after Theodore

Roosevelt had integrated them. Ronald Reagan is the only President since Wilson

to try to roll back the civil rights 01 minorities once they had been won' Coolidge and Eisenhower, two men without a particle of sympathy for people of other backgrounds, did not attempt what Reagan is doing. This is a unique attack on the post- Rooseveltian world: it is not an effort to economise or make government more effi- cient or an effort to stimulate business which might have a temporary adverse ef- fect on the position of minorities. Reagan is g°ing for the legal basis of their citizenship. One is not allowed to ask any questions which might suggest that Reagan doesn't like non-white people, although his record 21. oPposing all civil rights measures goes 'lack at least as far as 1964 when he came out against the Civil Rights Act which gave blacks access to restaurants, theatres and Petrol station rest-rooms. When challenged he loses his temper, as he did when running for Governor of California in 1964. During the campaign he spoke to a meeting of the National Negro Republican Assembly (there still were Republic negroes in those days) where he was asked: 'How are negro Republicans going to encourage other negroes to vote for you after your statement that You would not have voted for the Civil Rights Bill?' Reagan's answer was: 'I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in Y nature. Don't anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anYone imply that — in this or any other glIMP.' With that the future president slam- med a fist onto the palm of a hand and walked out of the hall.

Rut his decision to give government sup- Port to schools founded on a bigoted princi- ple Makes it impossible to be politely cowed

Y his indignant bluster. In the light of what the man has done he, and his kith and kin, how become suspect. Are we to accept it as a laPsus linguae when Nancy Reagan begins aspeech for political fund-raising in Chicago by telling the audience how delighted she is to see 'all those beautiful White faces'? Guilt by association is guilt by use of the nastiest and most dubious circumstantial evidence, but one may legitimately form e!,rtairi opinions about the highest of e.ected public officials by looking at whom hey spend their time with. By all accounts, including his own, Mr Reagan has been in- IMenced and shaped by people like his Wife's father, Dr Loyal Davis, a very suc- `hessful Chicago surgeon. He actually spent is honeymoon with the man, so that the following item, printed in the Los Angeles !Nerald-Examiner, has a claim to be con-

tiered as indicative of the social world this President inhabits: `A local doctor who studied under Loyal

DavisJ recalls him as "one of the meanest, j°11,ghest, Commie-hating, narrow-minded, °'11-1 Birching, ultra-conservative hellions" he'd ever met. Which explains why medical :.students, after delivering babies in Lhicago,s black ghettoes, would get back at b4,vis by convincing mothers to name their abies after him.' Not only did FDR make it public policy and Principle to include the excluded but he Proclaimed and had it accepted that the na- t,1°nal community would take care of the least fortunate of its members, that no one would be allowed to starve and suffer so

long as government, at one level or another, had the means to help. For Ronald Reagan this has come to mean, ...Many New Dealers actually espoused what today has become an epithet — fascism — in that they spoke admiringly of how Mussolini had made the trains run on time. In other words, they saw in what he was doing a planned economy — private ownership, but government management of that ownership and that economy.' (Mr Reagan is historically incorrect: the Mussolini lovers at the time were to be found in the US Chamber of Commefce and among men like Bayard Swope, the chairman of the board of the General Electric Corporation. It was they who held up Mussolini's model and it was FDR who resisted the idea of it.) In place of a commitment from society to help the helpless, Mr Reagan is proclaiming a doctrine of what he calls 'voluntarism', which turns out to be the charity of the soup kitchen. In a speech delivered in New York the other day he held up as an exam- ple eleemosynary groups which go out into the countryside to glean the remnants of the harvest, take the food back to the city and give it to the poor. Such endeavours, he told an audience which included David Rockefeller, 'could lick the hunger problem in this country and maybe the world'.

It remains to be seen if America is ready to go back to the Jim Crow privatism of the Twenties. Writing in the New York Times the other day, political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, a senior fellow at Stanford University's right-wing Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace, observed: `Disillusionment with Ronald Reagan's per- formance has grown faster and is more widespread than for any other newly- elected President.... In December, the President's standing in the polls was lower than that of his predecessors at the same point in their administrations.'

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's birthday may yet be celebrated by the children and the grandchildren of the millions whom he brought to full citizenship and to whom he gave a faith in this land's better destiny.