GREATNESS

My wife and I just finished watching all seven, two-hour installments of Ken Burns’, documentary on Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. It left me feeling a bit melancholy, for watching any birth-to- death encapsulated in a few short hours will depress, but such Olympian greatness ending like ordinary mortals is an especially bitter pill to swallow. Ken Burns’ reputation for skillful use of black and white stills melded with music, sound effect and professional actors reciting the written word of the protagonists is mesmerizing and “The Roosevelts, An Intimate History” did not disappoint.

We get to see these exceptional people at their pinnacles of power and their tragic private lows. As the series title suggests, we experience an intimacy with them and their complex lives due in large part to letters and documents that reveal just how brilliant and driven they were. Back then the use of everyday language was precise and poetic as we discovered in Ken Burns’ first documentary on our Civil War. Burns’ selection of soldier clerks’ and farmers’ letters home revealed an ability to express thought and emotion in the written word that we seem to have lost in our textually abbreviated digital world, but I digress.

Watching this century of American history from Theodore’s birth in 1858 to Eleanor’s death in 1962, one can’t help but draw parallels between our present day political putrescence and the rampant corruption of government by business and special interest back in TR and FDR’s time. It would be impossible to recount this documentary in a short essay, but I will say the axiom of history repeating itself is graphically illustrated in “The Roosevelts, An Intimate History”. All three of the Roosevelts in question were champions of fair play and equality for the working man and woman. The two presidents, one a republican, the other a democrat, enacted sweeping reform of business monopolies, price-fixing and fair treatment for labor.

The political putrescence I referred to would be the not-so-subtle legalization of corruption in the form of secret unlimited money given to lawmakers by corporations, this sounding the death knell of our representative democracy. The Supreme Court is stacked with corporate representation, hence the “Citizens United” successfully litigated sick joke that money is speech and corporations are people. All this while directing attention to smoke and mirror issues such as brown children, Ebola and ISIS swarming over our southern borders. Then we have the quiet dismantling of the Glass-Steagall act, the law enacted by FDR to prevent another Great Depression. This common sense law separated risky casino investment operations from savings and loan institutions, and would have prevented the housing bubble crash the Bush administration handed to us as a parting gift. In the interest of disclosure, the dismantling of said law was first initiated by Ronald Reagan and completed by Bill Clinton. Who says politicians don’t cross the aisle?

The list of accomplishments enacted for the ordinary working American citizen by TR, FDR and Eleanor was impressive: national parks, women’s rights and the beginnings of African-American’s rights, limited hourly work week, minimum wage, workers’ compensation, the right to form labor unions, social security and unemployment compensation to name a few. Every single stride forward made by these remarkable people is under attack by well-funded, mean-spirited capitalist ideologues, today’s robber barons and captains of industry, if you will. The Roosevelts believed in the American social contract: that business and labor were both as important as the other, but business needed a little help in recognizing this fact. They believed that government and the constitution are flexible tools to better the lives of ALL citizens of the United States of America in that pursuit of happiness mentioned in our declaration of independence.

  In every move they made, their legacy was one of importance to them. Another way of putting it; they had a conscience. In all of the fourteen hours that I was glued to the television, one short verbal exchange between two people at FDR’s funeral procession in Washington DC still rings in my ears. As the body of FDR passed in front of him, a man knelt down on the side walk. The person standing next to him asked if he knew the president and the man replied, “No…, but he knew me.”

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Alex lives with his wife, Anna in Key West, Florida. He enjoys writing poetry and prose and making the complacent uncomfortable.

More From Other Sources:

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-roosevelts/

http://www.nps.gov/history/logcabin/html/tr3.html

http://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/key-events

http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/industrial-age-america-robber-barons-and-captains-industry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_of_Happiness