By Bill Stewart
Contrary to popular opinion, history does not repeat itself. It is certainly true that there are often points of similarity between current events and those of the past. But that is not the same thing as a repetition of history. At best, history allows us to ask the right questions. Whether we ask the right ones is another matter, which may be why historians and politicians alike argue so fiercely over the meaning of the past and its relevance for the present. What seems indisputable , however, is that those who refuse to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
It has become a truism to note that the current economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The bank failures, steeply rising unemployment and decline in industrial output indicate the economy continues to collapse. But we are nowhere near the crisis of 1932 and early 1933, when 10,000 banks had collapsed, unemployment had climbed to some 25 percent, foreclosures had risen dramatically and soup kitchens were the order of the day. School teachers in Chicago had not been paid for months. Thousands of hungry and unemployed World War I veterans descended on Washington from across the country to demand their pensions, camping out on the Mall. They dispersed only when President Herbert Hoover sent Gen Douglas MacArthur and the army to drive them out. So much for a grateful nation.
Many Americans thought revolution was in the air, while still more believed that newly arrived communism, fascism and socialism had the answers. For them, democracy and the free market had both failed. In the election of 1932, the Socialist party led by Norman Thomas received more than one million votes. "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime" was the country's most popular song when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933. When the veterans returned soon after the inauguration in further protest, the new president didn't send the troops. He sent his wife Eleanor to meet them. She didn't bring guns; she served coffee. In a matter of a few months, the appeal of Roosevelt's New Deal was so great that the siren calls of revolution, communism and socialism soon fell on deaf ears. A new era had arrived.
What links the first 100 days of President Roosevelt with that of President Barack Obama is not the depths of despair in 1933, but a sense of genuine crisis and the need for action. Many Americans in 1933 thought the country needed a dictator to lead it in such terrible times, and that Roosevelt was just the man. "Dictator" in those days had yet to acquire the terrible connotation it later gained. But Roosevelt believed deeply in the American constitutional system and stuck by it. Initially, he hadn't a clue as to how to get the country out of the Depression. At that time, his economic and social views were conventionally conservative. But he was open to change when the conventional was failing, and he grew steadily more liberal.
In this he was helped by Eleanor, who had become his eyes and ears. Most of all, he knew something had to be done, that the country had to be given a sense of action, that Americans needed to know that their government cared. And Roosevelt did care, even if his caring sprang from a deep sense of noblesse oblige. He was, after all, an American aristocrat. Most of all, for that moment of crisis in 1933, Roosevelt was an inspirational figure. And that's what the country really needed - to be inspired, to be reassured. In the opening lines of his inaugural address, Roosevelt said: " So, first of all, let me assure that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself..." The words are among the most famous in any inaugural address in American history, and they did the trick. The country's mood changed overnight, even if conditions were miserable, and were to remain so for years to come. Hoover represented a failed past; Roosevelt represented the future.
President Obama, too, is an inspirational figure. He appears not to be afraid of change or of making mistakes, admitting them when he does. Obama is restructuring the American social contract with his call for universal health care, whatever the form it may take. The same is true of his call for remaking American education and his drive for clean energy. There will be compromises along the way, angering both the left and the right. There will be charges that he is leading us to socialism or that he is reneging on his campaign promises. But, as with Roosevelt in 1933, he is leading. In the dynamics of a constitutional democracy, leadership is what counts; policy comes second.
Roosevelt would appreciate the current scene. The same charges were made about him. The most significant difference between the two leaders is that Obama is almost certainly the more intelligent of the two. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that Roosevelt had a second class intellect but a first class temperament (though modern historians think he may have meant Roosevelt's cousin, Teddy). So far, Obama has shown he is first class in both. You don't get to be President of The Harvard Law Review through affirmative action. Roosevelt would have agreed. Eleanor would love it.