Golis: The fight over the size of government began here

HYDE PARK, New York

At the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, you can see the last photographs ever taken of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Though only 63, he looks older. He is sick and dying, suffering from a range of ailments, including hypertension and heart disease.

Scenes from a special exhibit, FDR’s Last Campaign, remind us how ill he had become by the fall of 1944. A visitor is prompted to ask, why would he seek a fourth term when he was so sick?

But we already know the answer. Having led the country out of the Great Depression and having led it through a world war, he was driven to finish the job.

He would die on April 12, 1945, 82 days into his fourth term, 26 days before Germany surrendered and 122 days before Japan surrendered.

The World War II victory celebrations would be led by his successor, Harry Truman, nominated to be vice president in 1944 because moderate Democrats disliked Roosevelt’s previous vice president, liberal Henry Wallace.

Roosevelt, the exhibit tells us, barely knew Truman.

Ninety-two miles north of New York City, the Roosevelt library is situated on a sprawling piece of land, 16 acres carved out of Springwood, the Roosevelt family estate. FDR was born here in 1882. The national historic site dedicated to his wife, human rights champion Eleanor Roosevelt, is located on the same property.

Over time, the Hudson Valley estate would be expanded to almost 1,500 acres. (The Vanderbilt mansion, all 54 rooms and 211 acres, is located nearby.)

The Roosevelt Library became the first of the 13 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives. Having visited eight of the presidential libraries — nine if you count the nonprofit museum in Fremont, Ohio dedicated to Rutherford B. Hayes — we decided the Roosevelt library was among the most comprehensive.

The system of presidential libraries — repositories of millions of documents and pieces of presidential memorabilia — remains part of Roosevelt’s legacy. Speaking at its opening in 1941, he would say, “The dedication of this library is in itself an act of faith … A nation must believe in the capacity of its own people to learn from the past, that they gain in judgment in creating their own future.”

Roosevelt was an ambitious young man from a privileged family when, at age 39, polio left him paralyzed below the waist. To conceal his disability, he learned to walk short distances, dragging his leg and leaning on someone walking with him.

And he persevered, twice winning the governorship of New York and then the presidency, defeating incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1932.

A museum exhibit describes the hard times that came with the Great Depression: “In some industrial towns like Youngstown, Ohio, unemployment exceeded 60 percent. Millions of farmers faced the loss of their land as crop prices crashed. Hunger and homelessness increased. The suicide rate tripled.”

Hoover didn’t think government should play a major role in restoring the economy.

Roosevelt believed the opposite. He led an activist government that would become a touchstone for the perennial American debate about the appropriate role of government. (Echoes of the New Deal debate remain today as Americans choose sides in judging the Biden administration’s aggressive responses to a worldwide pandemic and to climate change.)

In a country racked by unemployment and bank failures — 1 in 4 American workers was unemployed and another 25% could only find part-time work — Roosevelt promised his New Deal would lead the country out of the Depression.

In 1936, he told the Democratic National Convention: “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Perhaps only Abraham Lincoln governed through such consequential times, and perhaps only Lyndon Johnson could claim so many legislative achievements.

Jobs programs, banking and financial reforms, rural electrification, farm credit, workplace safety, the minimum wage and other labor reforms, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Works Progress Administration and more — the Roosevelt administration would be defined by a rush of legislation and executive orders, all designed to help tens of millions of Americans get back on their feet.

“Some of FDR’s initiatives succeeded,” the exhibit says, “Others failed … But suffering Americans regained hope as they saw someone finally taking bold action to battle the Depression.”

The New Deal also introduced Social Security, legislation signed into law on Aug. 14, 1935. Today, more than 70 million older and disabled Americans receive benefits. (Conservatives who complain about an expansive government turn quiet when it comes to Social Security.)

Questions remain. Why didn’t Roosevelt do more to welcome Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany? Why would he agree to the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry, many of them American citizens? Did he concede too much to Stalin at Yalta? Why would he turn away from efforts to guarantee the rights of African Americans?

The answer to the last question is straightforward. Roosevelt was trying to hold together a Democratic coalition in Congress, a coalition that included white segregationists from the South. (By the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the die was cast. The South would become the most reliable Republican voting bloc in the country.)

What we can surmise is that FDR, right or wrong, was trying to hold together a restive and divided country in a world trying to navigate more than a decade of crisis, turmoil and war.

No one said it would be easy, and it wasn’t.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.

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