Losing Sight of FDR
Well, that couldn’t happen quickly enough for the neocons, but the fact is, as a society we’ve for the most part lost sight of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt was trying to do . . . and did.
Roosevelt presided over a country flat on its back. It wasn’t a matter of two-job families struggling to buy their first home, it was no-job extended families losing everything they ever owned. My old daddy talked about he and mom walking around downtown Evanston, wanting to stop for a cup of coffee and not having a nickel between them. Daddy was a landscape contractor and when small jobs came his way, he and his laborers searched their pockets for change to buy gas for the truck. Daddy was lucky he still had a truck. Whole segments of society had nothing left and, increasingly, that included hope.
Social Security was enacted in 1935 in the heart of the depression, meant to be a life-line to those who approached old age with their finances wiped out. It was a transference---no doubt about it--…