Future uncertain: so what else is new?
Here is a political story that’s aged maybe too well, given the shaky condition of our institutions and of our democracy. It takes place in January 1934, as the Great Depression rages on.
At least one person – the principal character in this short narrative – correctly sensed that the country was in the midst of great change. But just how he found difficult to say. The tumult of the times, as it always does, obscured the future.
And so:
On a frigid winter afternoon, Buell Snyder, congressman from Perryopolis, and Speaker of the House Henry T. Rainey boarded a small aircraft in Washington for a flight to Western Pennsylvania and an appearance in Uniontown.
The two men were on a political mission – to help Snyder fend off several Democrats who were eyeing his seat in the House. Replying to a request from Snyder that he come to Uniontown to speak to a banquet ostensibly marking President Franklin Roosevelt’s 53rd birthday, Rainey said, “I would very much like to help you. In looking over your record, I find it 100% for the administration.”
Snyder wired a local newspaper, “The only thing that will prevent us from being there is a storm of such proportions that our airplane cannot fly over the mountains.”
The Pennsylvania Airline flight the two men took encountered no undue turbulence, and landed safely.
Relaxing later in his room at the White Swan Hotel, Speaker Rainey told reporters that he was no stranger to Uniontown. Several times a year he made his way from his district in Illinois to Washington on the National Road, always staying at the Summit Hotel before crossing the Maryland mountains on his way to the capital.
“My district is not in the coal fields (of Illinois) but is very close,” Rainey said, by way of explaining his many questions to reporters about the unsettled labor situation and dire economic conditions in Western Pennsylvania.
Five-hundred guests were on hand for the banquet in the hotel ballroom.
A political veteran (he was first elected to Congress in 1903) who favored black suits, crushed fedoras, and cigars, the Speaker laid it on thick for the crowd. He called Fayette County the “Switzerland of America,” for no apparent reason other than it hosted at one time or another two such antagonist political personalities as Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, “who represented in Congress the district I now represent.”
“When God made the world,” Rainey said, “He took a handful of his best mud, mixed it with coal, and threw it down and said this is Fayette County.”
The House chieftain assured banquet-goers that President Roosevelt was working hard on their behalf. Having known FDR when he was assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I, then “a rich, affable, genial” young man, Rainey marveled at the changes in the president in the years since – years marked by the onset of polio and the struggle to regain the use of his withered legs and to lead a more or less normal life. “… The time of his affliction began an astounding God-given leadership,” Rainey said.
(So much for the notion that Americans of the period were largely unaware of FDR’s condition. They may not have been aware of the extent of Roosevelt’s disability, but they certainly knew he suffered from an “affliction.” Otherwise, they were just not paying attention.)
The Speaker defended the administration’s spending on jobs for the unemployed during a time of record-high unemployment. “We are worrying what would happen if we didn’t spend. If it brings back business in this country and it restores happiness … then it will be cheap at any price.”
Rainey likened the first several months of the New Deal to a doctor attempting to revive a critically ill patient. “We got the nation under the oxygen tent. We are pouring the oxygen in, and we are finding out there is going to be a recovery.”
For all his years in public life, he professed real puzzlement over the course of politics. The two great parties were being transformed. “There is no Republican Party as we used to think of it,” Rainey said. “With the specter of despair, they have gotten out of the cathedral. The Democratic Party is long gone.”
“As we go along,” Rainey said, “new issues will develop and new party lines will form. We don’t know what they will be. But I do know the old ones will be gone forever.
“The old clouds are breaking. Together we are following the new star in the direction we do not know where, but I do know we are going away from where we were.”
It would take another half -ozen years for the darkened skies of the Great Depression to clear. Then another cloud burst: World War II.
Now, like then, we don’t know where this bumpy ride we are on is taking us. How it will end is unknowable. Now, like then, leadership is crucial. Now, like then, trust in the essentials of democracy will be tested.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book, “JFK Rising,” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.