Oct 29, 2017 By Richard Robbins 4 min read

These days we hear a lot about the difficulties our leaders have when it comes to connecting with ordinary Americans. The telephone call placed by President Trump to the widow of one of the four soldiers slain recently in Niger was meant to be consoling. It was anything but.

The president, according to the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson, stumbled while trying to recall his name. Their conversation angered her. It made her cry.

Critics contend the president lacks empathy — the ability to feel what other people are feeling, especially during times of stress.

The inability to “walk in someone else’s shoes” is certainly a handicap if you’re the nation’s comforter-in-chief. Americans expect their leaders to feel their pain.

This expectation largely goes back to the advent of the modern presidency during the White House stewardship of Franklin Roosevelt. During the height of the Great Depression, Americans felt they had a friend in the White House.

Make that two friends. Americans felt a certain kinship with Eleanor Roosevelt, too.

Here’s a never-before-told story highlighting that kinship. It’s a model of empathy extended to a distressed American. Most telling, it was done privately, out of the glare of publicity.

Early in the presidential election year of 1932, a young married man by the name of William Harris of Vandergrift, Westmoreland County, wrote Mrs. Roosevelt, then the first lady of New York state, about the terrible time he was having.

His life had gone haywire. Out of work, he blamed himself. The real problem was the Depression, the economic juggernaut that stunted the lives of millions of Americans in the 1930s.

A doctor had told Harris to try to settle himself. “But how can I not worry when I’m not allowed to work and our house is about to be sold?”

He needed a break, he said. Some advice would do him just fine. He wanted to know about borrowing money. What did it take?

Harris, who hailed from Rhinebeck, N.Y., not far from the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park, had in mind going into business for himself. He sensed an opening in the tool sharpening trade. “Every (sharpened) saw pays fifty cents. I could make out … There is no other machine around.”

“I am not trying to make this a sob story … I just don’t want to be a burden … I’m only … 23 years old … Won’t you please give me some advice?”

Eleanor Roosevelt did the best she could, with protocol and all. She turned to the first lady of Pennsylvania, Cornelia Pinchot, the wife of Gov. Gifford Pinchot. “I wonder if you could help out?” Mrs. Roosevelt asked her Harrisburg counterpart.

A Mrs. Lober of the Pennsylvania “Rehabilitation Bureau” was put on the case. Mrs. Lober was instructed to write a report on what transpired with Harris “so that it can be given to Mrs. Roosevelt.”

The documentation runs out at this point, though the Pinchots again collaborated with the Roosevelts in late summer 1932 on another job search.

This time the principals were involved — Gov. Pinchot and the soon-to-be president-elect.

A young man, 22-year-old Morris Louick of Ebdy Street in Pittsburgh, wrote FDR that he had “tried every ordinary means” of finding a job. Now he was turning to an “uncommon way” — to the man who was the odds-on favorite to become the next president.

“However conscious I am of the fact that you are very busy right now, I still feel that I owe it to myself to ask a favor of you.” Scour your friends on my behalf, he pleaded. Please find me a job, Mr. Roosevelt.

“Dear Gifford,” FDR addressed his fellow governor, “… you might find some way to help him.”

Pinchot replied that he had “directed” his highway secretary to “give this matter his personal attention.”

It is instructive that in 1933 the White House was deluged with letters and telegrams from average Joes and Janes. Never before had so many Americans been inspired to write the country’s leader.

Neither one of the Roosevelts was a demigod. But they seemed to care about people — individual people. They related. If they could do it in their crisis-filled time, why can’t it happen in ours?

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.