Foundation and Union

I have been trying to figure out why our country is so riven.   It is not as though we have not been riven before, as in the 1930s when racism and anti-Semitism bloomed like an Onion at the Outback Steakhouse.   Middle American nativism, reflected in the ravings of Father Coughlin, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Bund and even Charles Lindbergh, aviation hero.  

 

Philip Roth writes convincingly of this in his novel of alternative history. “The Plot Against America,” where a sycophantic Rabbi becomes the dupe of Charles A. Lindbergh, who wins election to the Presidency against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the election of 1940.

 

In that novel, which is, in fact, based upon the true historical zeitgeist of America in 1940, Lindbergh and his anti-Semitic Secretary of the Interior, Henry Ford, send Jewish boys to families in the south and Midwest to be “Americanized.”  The novel became a television mini-series, with the conservative Rabbi, Lionel Bengelsdorf, convincingly being played by John Turturro, and shown to be a foolish dupe of Lindbergh. Rabbi Bengelsdorf is promised a position of authority and power in the Lindbergh administration to convince Jews to vote for him.

 

Anyway, it all turns out pretty sour for Bengelsdorf when he learns that Lindbergh, after the election, no longer regards him of any use. While Lindbergh does not fit the role of confidence man, he did deceive Bengelsdorf to act in his behalf by betraying his own people.  Lindbergh was, after all, a Nazi sympathizer, with no particular affection for Jews, whom he wrongfully thought had too much “influence” over President Roosevelt.

 

Roosevelt, meanwhile, had all he could do to keep political peace at home and to thoughtfully bend the United States into a fight for democracy and to save England from defeat in 1940 by the Nazi tyranny.  It was not easy, as James MacGregor Burns writes in his brilliant biopic “Roosevelt the Soldier of Freedom.”  America in 1940 was a hotbed of anti-Semitism as well as deep racial injustice and isolationism. People fleeing war ravaged Europe could not get visas to enter the United States.   African Americans were being lynched every day and the “America First” movement was coordinating rallies in Madison Square Garden with the Nazi-American Bund to keep America from fighting a war for “the Jews.”

 

Fast forward 80 years. Immigration policy remains a fiery cauldron of discrimination, xenophobia, racism, and fear.  Fear of those different.  Fear of those who do not look like us.  The nameless fear of fear itself, as invoked in FDR’s first inaugural address (1933).

 

the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance

 

This speech, given at the depth of the Great Depression, where soup kitchens lined Pennsylvania Avenue, the dust bowl caused famine in the Midwest, where unemployment was 25%, where an army of veterans descended on Washington to protest and were dispersed by the Army, shows how leaders that care about their flock act.  

 

They calm fears, they create unity, they lead the blind to quench their thirst. They do not steal classified documents, they do not enrich themselves at the public expense, they do not lie about election results, stoking fear and discord.  They do not slither like snakes, away from public accountability and double down on their wickedness.  They do not consolidate power based upon prejudice and fear. And they do not corrupt and pass fleas upon all those that lie down with them.

 

This nation was built on many different foundations.  A living Constitution, but one that must move with the times, the labor of slaves and immigrants, the dispossession of native Americans, of land stolen from Mexicans, of imperial hubris, of racial injustice, but also of decency, and the respect of our norms and institutions.  The rule of law.

 

Occasionally we take a detour, we forget our past and partially re-live it.  But in the end, we must believe that it will all turn out right.  It took revolution, civil war, civil rights movements, protests, civil disobedience; but we must finally recognize what unites us as a people.  The sticky glue that holds us together. This struggle has existed since the foundation of the union, and it will continue to exist as we labor toward a more perfect union. Not disunion.  But union.