Late Labor Day Thoughts

This is a week late, but it’s about history and it’s important so I hope you’ll let that pass.

I took the family south on Labor Day. We went to Pine Mountain, Georgia.

Pine Mountain features a state park that runs several miles behind Franklin D. Roosevelt’s old place in Warm Springs. A few years ago, I would have expected a lot of abuse for FDR’s memory there, including a statue of him, in plexiglas, at the main park building. Instead, I found that statue nearly covered in dollar bills, little sacrifices made to help keep it operating.

We also stopped for a hike at Dowdell’s Knob. This was a favorite FDR picnic spot in the 1920s and 1930s. I took a picture of the view.

The plaque notes that while staying at Warm Springs Roosevelt would launch expeditions to this spot, with food cooked right there and served on linen tablecloths with real silverware. There’s a lovely view from the grill (that’s what you’re looking at), although the grill itself has been cemented-in. But you can imagine the line of black cars coming up the drive, Roosevelt and other polio victims seated in the sunshine, the staff serving, the people laughing and glasses of whiskey clinking as the Sun disappeared into the trees behind.

We also dropped by Warm Springs itself. It was turned into a museum after FDR’s death, under a very bipartisan board of directors. One director’s son was later Mayor of Atlanta in the 1960s, another ran for Governor as a Republican.

The museum and attached gift shop keep alive the 1930s and 1940s, filled with books and knickknacks evoking the Depression and World War II.

But here is what most struck me.

It was this.

This is now the iconic image of our 32nd President. It’s an image he fought hard to keep from us all of his life. It’s an image that is precious to us now.

Roosevelt was able to regain his political footing after his polio only because he played A Splendid Deception on the American people. He claimed he was "cured" and seemed to have proved it. It seemed that he stood to nominate Al Smith in 1928, after having done it on crutches 4 years before (to negative reviews). And for 12 years after that he continued to fool people, appearing to walk as well as stand.

Americans of that time needed to believe the illusion. By believing the illusion, they could believe in the man. FDR "walked" by pressing a cane into the ground with one hand and pressing a companion (often his son James) on the arm to make him a "virtual cane" on the other, all the while nodding, smiling and talking, as though enjoying himself. By locking his legs straight with metal braces, Roosevelt "appeared" to walk, to stand, to be vigorous.

To make even this deception work, of course, Roosevelt had to exercise like stink. That’s what he learned to do at Warm Springs, to ignore the pain and the disability, to strengthen what he had and to keep what he had fit.

Pearl Harbor killed him. After the attack Roosevelt vowed to give up exercise "for the duration," which meant until the war was over. He began dieing almost immediately. A polio must exercise, every day. Fail to do that and what’s left begins to shut down.

Roosevelt thought it a symbolic sacrifice in a real war. Every American sacrificed likewise. Everyone lost relatives, in Europe, or the Pacific.

Which brings us back to 2006, and our mountain biking President, and our never-ending tax cuts, and our calls to buy SUVs for the so-called Global War on Terror.

This is a phony war, a proxy war. This whole war is a distraction, and not a splendid one.

You’ll know when we get into a real war. You’ll know when we’re all called to sacrifice, to give up our trappings of wealth, to rearrange all our lives’ priorities, from the elderly to the smallest child, for the duration. When you’re called to sacrifice as Roosevelt did, you’ll know.

This will soon happen. But you won’t be fighting Al Qaeda. The war won’t be in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The war will be right here, fought against our own profligacy, against the ticking time bomb of irreversible climate change. It will be a war fought to save the lives of your grandchildren, born and unborn. Failure to achieve absolute victory will make us the last generation.

Are you ready for the challenge?