Books on FDR-Dutchess County 2008

Books on FDR: Fear and Learning in Those Pages
The story of how FDR wrote " the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Opinion by G.E. "Skip" Lawrence, of The Phoenix

Last week, I joined O's Book Club. No, not hers. His.

We know, because his press office wanted us to know, that two books have been on President-elect Barack Obama's nightstand of late. The first is Jean Edward Smith's FDR; the second, Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.

Mr. Obama's press office wanted us to know, because they wanted us to know that the approaches to the current national financial crisis of the incoming Administration will be greatly informed by the experience of Roosevelt's.

I joined up. Got the books.

Truth be told, I got an extra boot into the Club by a conversation over lunch on Bridge Street with a friend. We got to talking about the local effects of the national economy, and he said that he'd already seen some immediate and significant non-economic ones. People he thought he knew well, he said, acting now out of financial fears, were behaving in ways he never would have predicted.

That led to a long consideration of fear, and of Roosevelt's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He admitted that "when I first learned that line, I didn't think much of it. Now it blows me away."

So, truth really be told, I came to the current offerings in O's Book Club with a question about that line's real source. Was it of Roosevelt's own invention?

Older biographies would have had us believe so. In 1956, James MacGregor Burns gave us a picture suitable for framing: Franklin Delano Roosevelt alone of an evening in February, 1933, in his Hyde Park library, fire crackling and pen scribbling on yellow legal pad. By 1:30 a.m., in Burns's account, the iconic President had produced the iconic Inaugural.

It turns out that about the only things accurate in that portrait were the fire, the legal pad and the hour. And that line about "fear itself?" Not there.

Nor was Roosevelt alone in the library. What was happening that evening was not drafting but re-drafting: a typescript first draft was being translated into Presidential longhand, and the President, at his desk, was editing as he went along — with advisor Raymond Moley, ensconced on the couch, editing with him.

The 1:30 a.m. two-heads redraft was intended for final review the next day by Roosevelt senior advisor Louis McHenry Howe. After scanning it, Howe dictated major revisions, and dictated into that final version the line about fearing fear itself.

Howe said later that he'd seen the phrase in a department store ad a month or so before in The New York Times. An unlikely story, an unlikely source. But Moley said he'd seen it, too. No such ad has ever been discovered.

But a version of the line had appeared as a quote in a Times news story. Its source, however, was one neither Howe nor Moley would have easily acknowledged at the time: National Chamber of Commerce President Julian Barnes, a very vocal and active Republican thorn to Roosevelt's 1932 Democratic campaign. Barnes had said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear." (Just doesn't have the same ring, does it?)

To be sure, the notion was not new, hardly above a commonplace, whoever was saying it in 1933. Whatever its source, it's the line's provenance that warms my heart. That Louis Howe dictated it in makes me believe in it all the more.

The crumpled, rumpled, chain-smoking, ash-dripping Howe, a gnome of a man who once described himself as "one of the four ugliest men in New York [State]," was a journalist by birth and by trade. His family's reasonable comfort was lost, and never regained, when his father's Indianapolis newspaper went belly-up in 1873. Ink in the blood being what it is, however, a younger Howe made ends never quite meet as a stringer for a clutch of New York papers, then as a reporter for the Saratoga Sun, covering Albany politics.

He was unpredictable, irascible, irreverent, cynical, with little respect for the expectations of polite society. But neither did the knock-down gutter politics of the day. It was a perfect fit.

Roosevelt, when he first came to Albany as a State Senator, recognized talent over temperament and hired Howe as an advisor. Howe so advised until his death in 1936. Nobody managed legislative politics or campaigns in Albany or Washington better than Howe, in service to his boss.

And no one had a better ear for what worked in a speech. For the First Inaugural, he named it, nailed it: "…fear itself: nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." And he even got that word "paralyzes" to be spoken aloud about the nation's condition by a President standing at a podium only by the grace of two leg braces and two strong arms.

It was a statement about policy: the new Administration would act where the old one feared to. But what gave the sentence special power then, and does still, is that it is also a reflection of personal experience in crisis.

"There is no other [passion] whatever," wrote Montaigne, "which carries our judgment away sooner" than fear. Nothing else "so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear," said Burke.

The Bush administrations used that commonplace to its advantage, assuming that that those made to fear external enemies would be looking to their own security, grateful for what the administration's right hand was doing to provide it. And not watching what the administration's left hand was up to.

The new administration must guard against a new and urgent public fear of failure, this one more clearly of our own creation, and gnawing at us closer to home. Perhaps, however, now that Roosevelt's line in his First Inaugural has been again well-vetted, it won't have to be repeated on January 20.

G.E. "Skip" Lawrence can be contacted at glawrence@PhoenixvilleNews.com .

Dutchess County Happenings