OP-ED: POTUS speech: It was once much better
June 27, 1936, Philadelphia: Rain threatened to disrupt President Franklin Roosevelt’s speech outdoors at Franklin Field. By the time evening fell, however, starlight glinted through patchy clouds.
On this fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention, some 100,000 party faithful were crowded into the famous college football stadium to witness Roosevelt’s acceptance of his party’s presidential nomination for a second four years in the White House.
Around 9:30 the presidential automobile slid up a ramp to an area curtained off behind the stage.
The president, his legs crippled by polio as an adult in 1920, was smiling as he was helped from the car. On his son Jimmy’s arm, Roosevelt was making his way to the platform when he spotted an old friend, the poet Edward Markham. Reaching out to shake Markham’s hand, FDR stumbled, his left knee brace having snapped open.
Bodyguard Gus Gennerich and Secret Service agent Mike Reilly kept the president from hitting the ground. “There I was hanging in the air,” Roosevelt recalled, “like a goose ready to be plucked but I kept on waving and smiling. I called to Jimmy out of the corner of my mouth to fix the pin.”
After some fumbling, Jimmy succeeded in snapping the brace back into place. The president, on his feet again, appeared calm and collected as he stood at the podium. Inside, he was rattled. The previous few minutes had been the most frightening of his life, he later confessed. It wasn’t until he reached the line in his address about “economic royalists” did he regain his composure. “Then I gave it to them.”
Starting in 1929, the American people had been suffering from the greatest economic calamity in history. Beginning in March 1933, Roosevelt’s New Deal had fought back against the Great Depression, but with only limited success. Unemployment remained high in 1936. Despite severe opposition from business leaders, FDR enjoyed enormous popularity. A deft political actor, he cast the denizens of Wall Street and corporate America as villains.
At the same time, the rise of Hitlerism in Europe forecast a darkened future for the continent. The security of the U.S. would likely be at risk as well. Roosevelt had a real challenge on his hands. A great many Americans wanted to remain as far from the tragic consequences of European affairs as possible.
Bathed in the glare of 100 spotlights set up around the stadium, the president proclaimed that in the years previous to the New Deal, “a small group had concentrated power into their own hands…. For too many of us, life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.”
“Liberty requires the opportunity to make a living,” the president continued, “a decent living according to the standards of the time, a living which gives men not only enough to live on, but something to live for.”
FDR acknowledged upheavals in the world order in the context of affairs at home.
“In other lands,” he said, “there are some people who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and [now] seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of freedom. They have yielded their democracy.
“I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destruction and economic demoralization. It is more than that. It is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and the rest of the world.”
FDR concluded with a bracing, prophetic assessment of the course ahead. “There is a mysterious cycle in human events,” he declared. “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
To loud, sustained cheers, the president assured his listeners in the stadium and on radio, “I am enlisted for the duration.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.