American Experiment (407 page)

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. …”These words of Yeats have been quoted by every generation since he wrote them in 1920, but never more than today. In the late twentieth century many Americans sense an intellectual, cultural, and political fragmentation and trivialization that pervades our public and private lives. And there has been the usual overreaction, the breast-beating about the ignorance and distorted values of the American people followed by a feverish search for scapegoats. The two leading culprits are the mass media and education. Since there is a reluctance to challenge the independence of the media, given its protected position under the Bill of Rights, the easy, all-purpose target has been the
educator, whether the kindergarten teacher, the college dean, or the graduate school professor.

Once again, in the most recent “crisis of education,” all the old moth-eaten solutions have been trotted out. The most popular one is that we must read the Great Books. As a former teacher of some of the “Greats,” as one who believes that they should be at the heart of every liberal arts or humanistic curriculum, as one who knows that the great philosophers offer profound explorations of human nature, moral values, and political power, I balk at this cheap overselling of the classics. They are introductions to thought, not substitutes for it. They raise the enduring questions that confound humankind—they do not offer solutions necessarily relevant to our current plight.

Like Jefferson and Madison and Lincoln, like the many lesser “greats” who flowered in this country from around the second to the sixth decade of this century, we must
think
our way through our problems. This means drawing our values from the teachings of the past, arraying them in priorities based on human needs, and above all—and by far the most daunting intellectual and analytical enterprise—working out the
instrumental ends
and the
intermediate means
that enable us to apply our supreme values effectively and explicitly to everyday decisions and actions. This intellectual strategy calls for a structure of government—in essence for a team of leaders with the power to govern, an opposition party leadership with the power to oppose, full protection of procedural and substantive liberties by all branches and especially the judiciary—in short, majority rule, minority rights, and a constitutional system that fosters both.

“… The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats continued. It is above all the lack of moral conviction and of intellectual creativity that lies behind our present predicament, and this in turn stems largely from the decline of cutting conflict and controversy in our politics. As long as press and politicians prate about consensus and bipartisanship and centrism, both our ideas and our politics will be sterile and stalemated.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.…” So Yeats began his famous poem. The Berkshire hills and dales broaden out to the Taconic Range and the Green Mountains and the Alleghenies, and finally to the Appalachians and the Rockies and the great valleys in between. The mountainsides turn during the fall from dark green to brilliant red to brown and then to a blackness against the first snows. I reflect on a phenomenon that I will never fully understand—how the
lushness and softness of the summer is incomprehensible as one stands in an icy field, how the rocklike soil and all-enveloping cold of winter are incomprehensible as one sits amid the gentle grass and last wildflowers of autumn.

But, I reflect, at least there is the certainty of it even as we cannot quite grasp it. And I find some consolation in the thought that coping with both the killing frosts of winter and the droughts, floods, and bugs of summer provided Americans—whether Yankee tinkerers or eminent philosophers—with the kind of stimulus, the kind of contrasting challenges that spurred their inventiveness and creativity.

I think finally of the explorers—those who made their way across the Atlantic, who penetrated the Appalachian slopes and then, under men like Lewis and Clark, pushed their way across prairie and desert and mountain chain. And I think finally of the space explorers of today, human and robotic, and of a planned space platform that will be named Freedom, and of probes called Pioneer flying past Saturn and Pluto even as these words were written and are now being read.

My hills, like the stars, endure. And in college convocations to come, I will join in singing some words that express my most fundamental commitment—singing them with a fervor that still surprises me:

My country, ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the Pilgrims’ pride,

From ev’ry mountain side

Let freedom ring.

p. 3
[
Flight to Chicago
]: Ed Plaut Papers (RG 31-HH), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.;
New York Times,
July 3, 1932, pp. 1, 9; Chicago
Tribune,
July 3, 1932, pp. 1-5;
Time,
vol. 20, no. 1 (July 11, 1932), p. 10; Samuel I. Rosenman,
Working with Roosevelt
(Harper, 1952), pp. 67-77; Nathan Miller,
FDR: An Intimate History
(Doubleday, 1983), pp. 277-81; Gilbert Grosvenor, “Flying,”
National Geographic,
vol. 53, no. 5 (May 1933), p.586.

[“
I may go out by submarine
”]: quoted in
Time,
vol. 20, no. 1 (July 11, 1932), p. 10,

[“
One person in politics
”]: quoted in
New York Times,
July 2, 1932, p. 4.

4
[“
A good sailor
”]: quoted in Frank Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph
(Little, Brown, 1956), p. 313.

[“
Put it right there
”]: quoted in
New York Times,
July 3, 1932, p. 9.

[“
It
’
s all right, Franklin
”]: quoted in Rosenman, p. 76; see also Alfred B. Rollins, Jr.,
Roosevelt and Howe
(Knopf, 1962), pp. 346-47; Kenneth S. Davis,
FDR: The New York Years, 1928-1933
(Random House, 1985), pp. 333-34.

4-5
[
At Chicago Stadium
]:
New York Times,
July 3, 1932, p. 9; Chicago
Tribune,
July 3, 1932, pp. 1-3.

5
[
Acceptance address
]:
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 1, pp. 647-59, quoted at pp. 648, 649, 659.

[
Roosevelt in 1932-33
]: Adolf Berle Papers, esp. containers 15-17, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Raymond Moley Papers, Roosevelt Library; Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Roosevelt Library; Moley Papers, esp. boxes 1, 8, 63, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

The Divided Legacy

6
[“
In an airplane
”]: Chicago
Tribune,
July 3, 1932, p. 1.

[
FDR
’
s early years
]: Geoffrey C. Ward,
Before the Trumpet
(Harper, 1985); Kenneth S. Davis,
FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928
(Putnam, 1971), books 1, 2; Frank Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship
(Little, Brown, 1952); Miller; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
The Crisis of the Old Order
(Houghton Mifflin, 1957), ch. 29; James MacGregor Burns,
Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
(Harcourt, Brace, 1956), chs. 1-2; I have used occasional phrases or passages from this earlier work in my treatment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the present volume.

[“
People one knows
”]: quoted in Burns,
Lion,
p. 5.

7
[
Sources of political ambition
]: Harold D. Lasswell,
Power and Personality
(Norton, 1948); Joseph A. Schlesinger,
Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States
(Rand McNally, 1966); Abraham H. Maslow,
Motivation and Personality
(Harper, 1954); Stanley Renshon,
Psychological Needs and Political Behavior
(Free Press, 1974); Gordon Black, “A Theory of Political Ambition: Career Choices and the Role of Structural Incentives,”
American Political Science Review,
vol. 66, no. 1 (March 1972), pp. 144-59.

[
FDR and the
“
nouveaux riches
”]: see Freidel,
Apprenticeship,
pp. 12-14; William D. Hassett,
Off the Record with F.D.R., 1942-1945
(Rutgers University Press, 1958), pp. 13-15, 88-89, 124-25.

7-8
[
FDR
’
s maturation during Progressive era
]: see Davis,
Beckoning,
chs. 8-12; Daniel R. Fusfeld,
The Economic Thought of Franklin D Roosevelt and the Economic Origins of the New Deal
(Columbia University Press, 1956), ch. 3.

8
[
Eleanor Roosevelt
’
s early years
]: Eleanor Roosevelt,
This Is My Story
(Harper, 1937), chs. 1-4; Joseph P. Lash,
Eleanor and Franklin
(Norton, 1971), book 1; Burns,
Eton,
pp. 26-27,

[“
Honneur oblige
”]: letter of Sara Roosevelt to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, October 14, 1917, in
F.D.R.: His Personal Letters,
Elliott Roosevelt, ed. *(Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1947-50), vol. 2, pp. 274-75, quoted at p. 274.

[“
Lived like that!
”]: quoted in Lash, p. 135.

[
FDR
’
s rising ambition
]: see Joseph Schlesinger, esp. pp. 8-10. 

[
FDR as
“
farm-labor
”
legislator
]: Freidel,
Apprenticeship,
ch. 7; Burns,
Lion,
pp. 41-46.

9
[“
Listened to all his plans
”]: Eleanor Roosevelt, p. 166.

[“
Making ten servants
”]: quoted in
New York Times,
July 17, 1917, p. 3,

[“
Proud to be the husband
”]: letter, July 18, 1917, in
Personal Letters,
vol. 2, p. 349.

[
Lucy Mercer
]: Lash, pp. 220-27, quoted at p. 220.

[“
I faced myself
”]: quoted in
ibid.,
p. 220.

[
Polio
]: Frank Freidel,
Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal
(Little, Brown, 1954), ch. 6; Lash, chs. 26-27; Davis,
Beckoning,
chs. 21-22.

10
[
Eleanor
’
s issues in the 1920s
]: see Lash, chs. 25, 27-28, 30; Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Training for Public Life: ER and Women’s Political Networks in the 1920s,” in Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, eds.,
Without Precedent
(Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 28-45; Maurine H. Beasley,
Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest
f
or Self-Fulfillment
(University of Illinois Press, 1987), chs. 1-2
passim.

[
Franklin the politician, Eleanor the agitator
]: Lash, p. 348.

[
Governor Roosevelt
]: Davis,
New York Years,
chs. 1-6,
8, passim;
Bernard Bellush,
Franklin D. Roosevelt as Governor of New York
(Columbia University Press, 1955); Freidel,
Ordeal,
chs. 15-16; Freidel,
Triumph.

[
Hearst and the League
]: Freidel,
Triumph,
pp. 250-54.

[“
Hasn
’
t spoken to me
!’ ”]: quoted in Lash, p. 347.

11
[
Schlesinger on FDR
’
s assets
]:
Crisis,
p. 279.

[
Democratic primaries, 1932
]: Freidel,
Triumph,
chs. 17-19; Burns,
Lion,
pp. 123-34; James A. Farley,
Behind the Ballots
(Harcourt, 1938), pp. 58-112.

[
Democratic convention, 1932
]: Freidel,
Triumph,
ch. 20; Burns,
Lion,
pp. 134-38; Farley, pp. 112-54.

[“
California came here
”]: quoted in Burns,
Lion,
p. 137.

12
[“
Good old McAdoo
”]:
ibid.

[“
The same cops
”]: Dos Passos, “Out of the Red with Roosevelt,”
New Republic,
vol. 71, no. 919 (July 13, 1932), pp. 230-32, quoted at p. 232.

[
1932 campaign
]: Freidel,
Triumph,
chs. 22-24; Davis,
New York Years,
ch. 11; Burns,
Lion,
pp. 140-45; Farley, pp. 155-91; Roy V. Peel and Thomas C. Donnelly,
The 1932 Campaign: An Analysis
(Farrar & Rinehart, 1935); Herbert Hoover,
Memoirs: The Great Depression, 1929-1941
(Macmillan, 1952), chs. 19-31; Rexford C. Tugwell,
The Brains Trust
(Viking, 1968); Tugwell,
The Democratic Roosevelt
(Doubleday, 1957), ch. 12; Tugwell,
In Search of Roosevelt
(Harvard University Press, 1972), ch. 6; Schlesinger,
Crisis,
ch. 33.

[
Press on FDR
]: see
Literary Digest,
vol. 114, no. 2 (July 9, 1932), pp. 2-3; Oswald Garrison Villard, “An Open Letter to Governor Roosevelt,”
Nation,
vol. 134, no. 3488 (May 11, 1932), pp. 532-33.

[New Republic
on FDR
]: “Is Roosevelt a Hero?,”
New Republic,
vol. 66, no. 852 (April 1, 1931), pp. 165-66, quoted at p. 166.

[Post
on FDR
]: Freidel,
Triumph,
p. 328.

[
Mencken on FDR
]: “Where are we at?,” Baltimore
Evening Sun,
July 5, 1932, reprinted in Mencken,
A Carnival of Buncombe,
Malcolm Moos, ed. (Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 256-60, esp. p. 259.

[
Lippmann on FDR
]: “Governor Roosevelt’s Candidacy,” New York
Herald Tribune,
January 8, 1932, reprinted in Lippmann,
Interpretations, 1931-1932,
Allan Nevins, ed. (Macmillan, 1932), pp. 259-63, quoted at p. 261.

[Outlook
on FDR]: Outlook,
vol. 160, no. 7 (April 1932), p. 208.

12
[“
Can
’
t you see
”]: letter to Robert Woolley, February 25, 1932, quoted in Freidel,
Triumph,
p. 253n.