Joseph Sabino Mistick: FDR and faith in America

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was preparing for his inauguration in 1933, he faced calls for him to assume extraordinary powers. The nation was at its lowest point since the beginning of the Great Depression. In his 2006 book “The Defining Moment,” Jonathan Alter calls it our “gravest crisis since the Civil War.”

Many Americans had no idea if and when they would get their next meal. Farm auctions were chaos, derailed by crowds of desperate farmers. Washington, D.C., was besieged by World War I veterans seeking long-promised bonuses. Machine-gunners manned the rooftops of federal buildings. Statehouses and government offices were stormed by violent mobs. The threat of violence was everywhere.

As panic spread, banks were shutting down or being ordered to close by the governors of some states, wiping out savings. Trading was indefinitely suspended by the stock markets in New York and Chicago. The national unemployment rate was estimated at 25% for all workers, and industrial areas were hit much harder, as high as 90%.

According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum’s introduction to its collection of papers from that time, “FDR’s inauguration took place at the lowest point of the Great Depression. With unemployment soaring and banks collapsing, public fear was so great that many were ready to support sweeping emergency powers for the new president. Dictatorship was on the rise overseas.”

Public calls for FDR to become a dictator and ignore “Congress and even the Constitution” came from some prominent sources. A New York Herald-Tribune headline read, “For Dictatorship If Necessary.” Popular newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, “A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.”

Shortly after his inauguration, FDR gave a nationally broadcast radio speech to the annual American Legion convention. Seventy years later, when a rejected draft of the speech was found in a file, we learned that those calls for “dictatorship” had been taken seriously.

In that version of the speech, FDR would have created a private army — similar to the brownshirts and blackshirts of Hitler and Mussolini — by asserting his right as commander in chief to command the American Legion members “in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.”

Instead, in the version of the speech that FDR actually gave, he asked the American Legion members to simply support his programs. In our darkest times, when he might have gotten away with seizing dictatorial powers, FDR bet on America and Americans. He put his faith and trust in the Constitution and embraced the freedoms guaranteed by our founders.

Compare that to the cringeworthy claim made by Donald Trump’s lawyers last week in one of his many attempts to operate above the law. They told a three-judge appellate court panel that Trump should be immune from criminal prosecution for any crime he committed while president, even the hypothetical use of SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent.

It appears that Trump’s strongest supporters see nothing wrong with that. Or with his praise of the world’s worst demagogues, his use of Hitler quotes, his threats of retribution, his plan to cancel the Constitution and his promise that the country will be torn apart if he doesn’t get his way.

When it counted, FDR believed in the greatness of America and Americans. He rejected the fearmongers. He never bad-mouthed America. And we made it through the toughest of times.