"The test of our progress"

Life lessons and observations from a neighborhood vignette and a Presidential library.

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Last Saturday morning,  I set off on one of my leisurely walks round the new neighborhood. I’ve still been recovering from the car accident, the fractured sternum itself not as bad  as all the residual pain it has spread to the other side of my upper body, making work at My Good Old Desk especially uncomfortable on my back. Paula, whose injury was more painful and will take longer to recover  – though both fractures will heal naturally – is in a similar boat. So, I know that these walks are good for me. But I also truly enjoy them: I’m thoroughly digging this little slice of suburbia that we are calling home together, and the fact that I neither had ambition nor a plan to end up here, is just one more surprise in an uncoordinated life that has been full of them.

On these walks and occasional runs, I enjoy seeing the beautiful front gardens that, per the above example, occasionally remind me of England. I especially enjoy the wildlife that also calls “Rolling Meadows” home.¹ The family of wild turkeys, a number of woodchucks, the occasional deer straying from its usual hidden habitat, and rabbits. Rabbits, rabbits, everywhere, at least at dawn and dusk. Sadly, I no longer get to see our neighbors’ free-range chickens in our back garden, for the simple fact that the neighbors themselves inadvertently failed to shut the coop one night, resulting in a morning-after scene of carnage, with feathers and the occasional body part strewn across at least three gardens as either foxes or fishers did their worst. Nature is brutal, by its very nature.

On a more domestic level, I’ve come to recognize certain cats and dogs (and their owners), walkers and joggers and young-mothers-with-strollers, and am beginning to collect first names for those I seem to encounter more often than others. On a jog the previous weekend, I met a young couple co-hosting their daughter’s lemonade stand, a tradition as American as … well, a lemonade stand. When I found out that they were raising money for a local animal shelter, I came back and, with wallet, plus Paula and her younger son, contributed to the cause, and took with me one the little girl’s many home-made friendship bracelets. Experiences like this, and others around the world, tell me that most people are good neighbors – or at least, if not exploited by politicians, they aspire to be good.

Politics can unite us. But it can also pit neighbor against neighbor.

I say this in context of the fact that four or five of the houses here, out of what I still consider to be around 100 in all, are flying Trump flags. (And it’s always flags with the Trumpites, isn’t it?) While it genuinely baffles and disgusts me that anyone could possibly root for or trust such a habitually self-serving, abusive, plainly ignorant, criminal racist and sexist, I take comfort in the fact that they are far outnumbered by those sporting yard signs for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. Some had even optimistically put up Biden-Harris yard signs before the team, and momentum with it, changed to Harris-Walz. But this pro-Dem imbalance is as it should be, given Ulster County, where this is now my third home since moving out of Brooklyn in 2005, was the only rural county north of NYC itself that leaned towards Hillary Clinton in the watershed election of 2016. (The perception of New York as a surefire democratic state does not hold outside of the main urban centers.)

Besides, we need opposing political perspectives: history dictates that a one-party State soon becomes a dictatorship. I just wish that the Republicans, some of whom I am sure are lovely neighbors, did not kowtow to the worst in revisionist, nationalist and conspiratorial attitudes, and that the voting public in the US had more than two major parties to choose from. Perhaps that way politics would  not be seen through the prism of sport, with every vote, every debate, every issue, needing a winner and a loser.

After all, the role of President is far too important and influential to be considered in terms of a play-off match’s MVP, something further evidenced by Paula and I returning, last Saturday morning after my walk, to the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, across and overlooking the Hudson River. The previous, Labor Day Sunday, and after twenty years each of living in the area, we had  finally made the trip to the former President’s birthplace, library, museum, office, burial site – all set, as the Brits might call it, in the “country pile” that Franklin Delano Roosevelt called home at a young age, being a child of great privilege and wealth.² The need to return the rental car I’ve had courtesy of the insurance company ever since the car accident wiped out my prior Prius, meant driving past the Estate, and having run out of time that previous weekend to explore the grounds, we decided to do so on our way back.

The burial ground for Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt, in Hyde Park, New York, publicly accessible.

FDR’s cushioned upbringing makes it all the remarkable that with his New Deal, he was the most Socialist President this country has ever had, digging the country out of its perilous Great Depression through an ambitious program of Government spending that championed the Unions, created Government-funded jobs that not only built roads and dams, supplied electricity to millions of homes that had lacked for it, and planted trees to ensure the Midwest never again became a Dust Bowl, but also paid for Art of all mediums, on a scale of public patronage never seen before or since. Quite apart from leading the US out of that Depression and just about out of World War II also, a dual list of feats that make FDR  arguably the USA’s GOAT, his biography is full of firsts and lasts, only some of which include:

• First Democratic Presidential candidate to accept his party’s nomination at its convention in person.

• Last President to take office on March 4, four months after the election. (Financial calamities in the two weeks leading up to his 1933 inauguration meant that this arcane, pre-Industrialization rule was shortened to around 10 weeks.)

• The first President to drive to his Inauguration with his Predecessor. (One might hope this tradition could be renewed in 2024, with Biden sharing a car with Harris. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

• The first to invite the British Royal Family for a State visit.

• The first to use modern media as a medium to communicate with his constituents, his “fireside” addresses becoming the stuff of legend.

• The first to receive mail, perhaps as a result of the above, on a mass scale – mail that has been faithfully preserved and examples of which are on show at the entry to the museum.

Three sample letters to FDR and Eleanor, on display at entry to the Museum. Including advice on what to serve the British Royal Family for dinner.

• The first and last to serve, and travel extensively while doing so, crippled by polio.

• The first President to break with George Washington’s intended example and win a third term in the White House. And then a fourth.

• The last President to serve three terms, or begin a fourth. (Roosevelt died from a cerebral hemorrhage, just months into that fourth term, in April 1945. In 1951, the 22^nd Amendment limited Presidential terms to ten years and two elections; Presidents after all, are not meant to be Kings.)

FDR was also the first President to understand the potential public benefit of, and then set about creating, a Presidential Library, where his archives could be safely kept for study and scrutiny. It’s housed in a modest stone building next to his former home, his eventual resting ground, and the Museum, and it reflects an accessibility he tried to provide the public despite his social standing.

As much as anything, Franklin Delano was also the first President to allow the First Lady, Eleanor D. Roosevelt, to step out from the traditional feminine support role and be seen as a person of political education, principles and persuasions all her own. Indeed, the successes of FDR’s Presidency are often down to the quiet influence of Eleanor who, despite also growing up in a privileged background, suffered enough loneliness and loss in her early life as to develop an affinity with the underdog.

In no area of governance was Eleanor’s influence so apparent as in the battle for Civil Rights, as a concurrent exhibition to the Museum’s perennial Presidential-years one, entitled  Black Americans, Civil Rights, and the Roosevelts 1932-1962  - makes abundantly clear. The younger FDR, who as nephew of President Theodore Roosevelt had instant name recognition and was elected to New York Senate at the age of just 30, served  as the assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, and as New York’s Governor from 1929-33, was not seemingly  a racist per se. But between his inherited privilege, by which his interaction with Black people was initially limited to servants and maids, and raised as a member of the Elite in a racist and segregated country, he clearly failed to understand or clearly acknowledge the plight of Black Americans. When elected President, he preferred to ignore, and effectively wash his hands of, the inconvenient truth that the New Deal funds he designated to shore up the working (and unemployed) poor were not likely to make their way to the working (and unemployed) Black Americans in most States.

FDR’s Presidential hands were initially tied by the influence of the segregationist Southern Democrats (a 1932 Alabama Presidential ballot at the exhibition shows that State’s Democratic Party’s official logo, on the ballot itself, as reading “White Supremacy For The Right”), and he was reluctant to rock that boat. As such, and as the Exhibition makes clear, Black Americans, if they were able to actually cast a ballot at all in the face of poll taxes, literacy tests and the very real deterrent of public lynching, were more likely to vote Republican in 1932 than Democrat.

The Alabama Democratic Party’s logo in 1932.

Much credit for the fact that this balance shifted under Roosevelt’s four terms to its current standing, whereby Democrats all but assume the Black vote, and sometimes to their peril, goes to Eleanor. While FDR preached the standard Presidential practice that progress demands patience (as anyone who has watched the movie Selma will realize, Lyndon Johnson read from the same textbook 30 years on), Eleanor engaged in correspondence and conversation with Civil Rights leaders, especially women like the fiery Mary McLeod Bethune, and left her husband nightly notes in a basket by his bedside summarizing her day’s most important conclusions. (The Roosevelts appear to have slept alone; rumors of extra-marital affairs have haunted the legacies of them each, leading to films that have taken such speculations onto the screen in recent years.)

Both Franklin D. and Eleanor Roosevelt understood the importance of pro-active communication, favoring the then-dominant medium of radio.

Of course, the real credit goes to the civil rights campaigners themselves – the Union  leaders, the activists, and occasionally the musicians, all of whom came up against real discrimination and violence such as FDR could never experience for himself. I wrote about the latter intersection a couple of times in All Hopped Up and Ready To Go: Music from the Streets of New York, 1927-77. Specifically, there was the role of the part-time singer Bayard Rustin, alongside A. Philip Randolph, in the threatened March on Washington in 1941, called to protest discrimination in the defence industry. The prospect of Black people marching into  what was then a segregated D.C., very much still part of The South, with an all-white, racist police force to match, and the unwillingness of Randolph and Rustin to back down from that threat, frightened FDR into affirmative action that this country should not regret.

Rustin, who was also openly gay, had performed on Broadway with Paul Robeson, and recorded as a back-up singer for Josh White, one of the few Black men on the Greenwich Village scene. White’s album Southern Exposure, released later in 1941, had a profound impact on the Roosevelts, especially its song “Uncle Sam Says,” which was written after White visited his brother at boot camp in New Jersey and found himself appalled by the conditions in which he saw the segregated Black soldiers forced to live. Though not mentioned at the Museum exhibition, White was invited to perform the song in person to the First Couple at the White House, and Eleanor became Godfather to his son, Josh White, Jr. the following year; I suspect now it was Eleanor who issued White with the invitation in the first place, figuring her husband needed to hear the message in person, and perhaps in song, so as to sweeten its appeal. Eleanor Roosevelt’s own activism continued almost right up to her own death in 1962, hence the closing date of this specific side exhibition, much of the latter part of which is given over to her writings and campaigning in those widowed years.

It's to the credit of the FDR Museum’s board that both this side exhibition and the main one, which is of course full of incredible information and imagery of itself, ask questions and raise concerns about FDR’s contemporaneous attitudes, and ask necessary revisionist questions. Our attitudes evolve over time, and our policies tend to reflect those times; they can be effective, but do not always seem perfect through the prism of history. Nonetheless, FDR’s achievements were unmatched by arguably any other American President, and as with Eleanor, some of his sayings (listen to his address stating “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” via that link) are woven into the national lexicon.

I’m also grateful to learn of his Four Freedoms unveiled in his State of the Union address of January 1941, during which time Europe - but not yet the USA - was at war again. We could do with posting those Four Freedoms - Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear - in certain classrooms, in place of the Ten Commandments. All in all, thanks to this frank examination of FDR’s attitude towards Black Americans, I feel that much better informed than when I wrote All Hopped Up and Ready To Go over 15 years ago. I would encourage anyone either living in the Hudson Valley (or traveling through New York State) to make a point of stopping in and learning for yourself – especially before December 31, when this side exhibition will close.

1. It was pointed out to me once that subdivisions, estates and the like are always named after the thing they replace; there is absolutely something to this, and it seems equally true in the UK.

2. Admission for guided tours of the Home are an extra ticket. Admission to the Presidential Museum itself is well-priced and tickets are valid for two days, which you pretty much need to see and read everything.