Why the New Deal Matters (Page 4)

March 4 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of FDR's inauguration as President--and more than likely, you heard his famous line about "nothing to fear but fear itself" trotted out for beneficent, bipartisan approval. It deserves to be quoted--but take a moment and go online to read the whole speech (like the Gettysburg Address or JFK's inaugural, it is not long) and read down until you come to his description of how America will recover and grow once more. This is what he said about the reasons we'd been made afraid:

Our distress comes from no failure of substance.... 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 failures and abdicated.

Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit...they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored conditions. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.

The money changers have fled their high seats in the temple of our civilization. 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. 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.

In the roughly ninety seconds it took FDR to deliver those words on a bleak and unpromising day in Washington at the tail end of winter seventy-five years ago, he described a politics, an economics and a morality at once--and thereby told Americans how they could and should make change, that he would lead them in doing so and who would oppose them.

He didn't cut to the middle or appeal to an interest group; he didn't divide the country into friends and enemies (though he named those he intended to struggle against); and he held out the promise that all could work together, though he knew in truth they never would.

And then together, the Americans who knew his story--and knew it was their own--set about the work ahead of them.

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