Where have you gone, FDR?

By Arthur Milnes
Canwest News Service

President Franklin D. Roosevelt prepares to begin his first fireside chat to the American people in this March 12, 1933. (Canwest News Service)

Our grandparents’ generation both survived the Great Depression and then fought a war.

In comparison, our own struggles today can be seen as minor. But for many, both in Canada and the United States, one hopes our elders will forgive our fears due to the market collapse of the last number of days.

Our pensions, RRSPs and so much more are under threat when the New York Stock Exchange drops more than $1 trillion in a day, and the S&P/TSX composite index plunges more than 800 points. The headlines are stark and the reports are only getting worse.

We are on the verge of crisis.

If our neighbours in Washington don’t soon put partisanship aside and work together, we could experience the sort of depression that hasn’t been visited upon North Americans since the Dirty Thirties our grandparents lived through.

But what is most clear right now, and especially considering both our nations are in the midst of national election campaigns, is neither Canadians or Americans today have amongst us what our grandparents had to guide them out of the darkness: a leader like Franklin Roosevelt.

"We are stricken by no plague of locusts," he said from the steps of the U.S. Capitol in his famous first Inaugural Address in March, 1933:

"Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men."

Americans – and Canadians – gathered around their radios as the new president continued. Like him, they knew full well that the barons of Wall Street they had put their faith in had let them down.

"Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money," FDR continued.

"Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish."

In John McCain and Sarah Palin, in Barack Obama and Joe Biden, it is hard to see a Roosevelt-like leader. To watch both McCain and Obama play politics in recent days with this crisis can only help one conclude how rudderless at the top our generation truly is.

"The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization," Roosevelt’s patrician voice announced that fateful day.

"We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.

The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men."

And immediately, FDR started his New Deal and changed his country, and ours, for what we thought was forever. Government was indeed part of the solution, not the problem and so we, led by Roosevelt, moved forward together.

Our grandparents, tested by year after year of hard times, learned the hard way that business and the markets could never again be left to their own devices.

In Canada, for example, men and women who had experienced those years sat at both Progressive Conservative, CCF and Liberal cabinets in Ottawa and provincial capitals an, these memories fresh, and created medicare, pensions and regulated the "money changers" FDR had warned them about.

In our untested generation, as is painfully obvious in the past week, we moved the other way. Were Roosevelt in Washington today he‘d know what to do.

Just remember your grandparents. And hope McCain, Obama and Harper, Dion and all the rest recall them as well.

Arthur Milnes, a Fellow of the Queen’s University Centre for the Study of Democracy, is editor of the forthcoming In Roosevelt’s Bright Shadow, a collection of Presidential speeches in Canada marking the 70thanniversary of FDR’s visit to Queen’s University in 1938.