Tag Archives: Franklin Roosevelt

The Power of Hope

The Power of Hope – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again.

During my senior year at Rockhurst, now a decade ago, the BBC released the first of two seasons of a new series of Shakespearean adaptations called The Hollow Crown. These films were realist adaptations of the Henriad plays Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V. This first season seized my attention and enthusiasm with a tremendous rush of emotion and energy. I wrote my undergraduate capstone in History on Richard II partially because of how these films brought these medieval kings to life for me. Shakespeare’s plays have tremendous power because they speak to common human emotions and experiences, it’s why they’ve been adapted by Akira Kurosawa from their original settings to feudal Japan, and why contemporary adaptations of these plays can work even if they can also leave something to be desired. 

Yet the greatest power that Shakespeare’s plays have is in their quotability. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers to use the English language to tell his stories, and to breathe life into his characters and settings that the most fantastical magic of The Tempest can seem just as believable as Richard II’s grief at losing his crown. For me, one of the most readily quotable lines in Richard II comes not from the deposed king but from his uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who in a speech which Jeremy Irons described as one coming from a medieval Brexiteer, offered the truism “small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.” (2.1). I think of this often in many different situations. Our politics of these last 8 years have been somewhere in the middle, an 8 year on-going rain that may seem tempestuous throughout but that has merely brought together several of these sudden storms in quick succession.

For most of my life I’ve heard the argument that ordinary people like us cannot do much to change our politics, and that we are better off leaving politics to the politicians who are going to do whatever they want anyway. I’ve grown up surrounded by this apathy, yet my parents instilled in me from my earliest memories a duty to vote, to speak up, and to play my part as a citizen. I’ve been frustrated in the last year in particular hearing so many people express a distaste in our electoral system because the two candidates running for President this year were men who seemed so out of touch and disconnected from the rest of us that we felt little need to participate. For myself, by the time the Missouri Primary came around for my party, our candidate had already secured enough delegates to claim victory in the primaries, and so this was one rare election when I didn’t vote.

All of that changed on Sunday at 12:46 Central Time when our sitting President, my party’s candidate, Mr. Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection to the Presidency this November. I was out at lunch with my parents when I got the news, and my first reaction was akin to many: fear at what would come next. I was on the fence whether President Biden should drop out of the race, unsure of what the result might be; and today writing this 48 hours later I’m still afraid of what could happen.

Yet my fears have been assuaged somewhat at the sight of how much the tone of this election has changed in my party. Where so many were going to vote for the President in order to keep his opponent out of power, in the last 48 hours our new candidate, Vice President Harris, has received more than 28,000 offers from ordinary people to volunteer for the Harris campaign. In the last 48 hours the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party have raised about $250 million in donations and pledges; of those donations more than 888,000 were from ordinary people wanting to pitch in. The tone has changed, where before last month’s debate we hoped that President Biden could lead the campaign to eke out enough moderate and undecided voters to support the Democratic side and defeat his opponent, now we have a campaign that is built less on fear of the opposition and more on the hope of what our new candidate has promised to do and could do if elected President.

Hope is far stronger than fear because it offers us a chance to aspire to something greater than ourselves. The most successful President of the twentieth-century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ran on a platform of hope and reform that would pull the country out of the Great Depression, and in his later campaigns defend liberal democracy from the growing tides of authoritarianism around the globe. All Democratic Presidents since Roosevelt have been judged on what FDR accomplished, and few have risen close to his level. The two that initially come to mind are Lyndon Banes Johnson, who served as President from President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 until January 1969, and our now outgoing President Biden. In spite of a staunch and illiberal opposition built around the premise that any and all legislation proposed by the Democrats must be blocked at all costs, even at the expense of the country, the Biden-Harris Administration has passed several landmark pieces of legislation which have been notable in the good they’ve done while being overshadowed by claims to the opposite from the clamoring gallery in the opposition.

Most of the Biden-Harris Administration’s major legislation occurred when the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress through the end of 2022. These included in 2021: 

  • The American Rescue Plan Act, which injected $1.9 trillion into the economy to help ordinary people during the hard times of the recent pandemic.
  • The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is funding infrastructure improvements and new projects across the country. 

In 2022, Biden signed: 

  • The Inflation Reduction Act, which included elements of his failed Build Back Better Act offering significant investment in climate and energy production and a three-year extension to the Affordable Care Act.
  • The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which is the first major federal gun control law passed in the last three decades.
  • The CHIPS and Science Act which bolstered American semiconductor manufacturing.
  • The Honoring our PACT Act, which expanded health care for US veterans.
  • The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act which adds procedures to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to avoid a repeat of the stalling measures to keep President Biden’s election from being certified during the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
  • The Respect for Marriage Act which codified same-sex and interracial marriage.

And finally, in 2023, Biden signed:

  • The Fiscal Responsibility Act which restrained federal spending during fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and suspended the debt ceiling until the beginning of 2025.
  • In September 2023, he established the American Climate Corps, in a Rooseveltian manner to help facilitate the national response to the climate crisis.

What is striking about Biden’s presidency is both how much he accomplished in four years, and how little most people seem to know about it. He could not fully live up to FDR’s legacy because he lacked the majorities in Congress throughout his term that would have allowed him to continue to pass legislation. In the last month, it’s become clear that what new policies his Administration announces will be intended less as viable things to be accomplished in what remains of his term, but rather as signs of hope of what his party would do if they retain the Presidency and win back a majority in the House of Representatives.

That hope now has a face and a name in the Democratic presumptive nominee for President, Kamala Harris. The Democrats would do well to recognize that the power of hope for the things she and her Administration and the congressional party can accomplish together are far more powerful than all the fears we have of what would happen should the opposition regain the Presidency and retain its majority in the House. Hope is stronger than fear because it builds on the idea that there’s something better to be had than what we now have. I believe that hope is what will unite us together in the Democratic big tent this year to win this election. The circumstances aren’t great, President Biden’s withdrawal was far later in the race than I would have liked, and in the coming weeks I want to write here about the flaws in our electoral systems that his withdrawal lays bare.

This week though, let me leave you with what I believe to be true: the Harris campaign is in a strong place with its grassroots enthusiasm, fundraising, and organizing, and has the legislative accomplishments of the Biden-Harris Administration as a strong foundation for a successful, if unexpected, campaign. It’s up to all of us to hope that she can provide better promises than her opponents, and to act on that hope and vote in November.

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Freedom from Fear

Credit: Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Freedom from Fear – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In this episode I talk about how FDR’s Four Freedoms from his 1941 State of the Union is pertinent to today.

When I worked as a Teaching Assistant for the US History II class (1877-present) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, the week that we’d discuss the Great Depression and the New Deal, I would always highlight President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and spend a good deal of time discussing them, what they meant to Americans in the 1940s, and what they mean to us today. Chief among these for me has always been the most abstract yet primeval of these Four Freedoms: Freedom from Fear.

At the time he announced the Four Freedoms in his 1941 State of the Union Address, 81 years ago this week, FDR saw Freedom from Fear as “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor –– anywhere in the world.” 

This spoke as profoundly to a world plunged into the worst war yet known in human history as it does to us today in a world where the instability of war has of late shown its face both in the form of terrorism and paramilitary attacks as well as in more conventional fighting around the globe. Yet now as I write this, headlines in the major papers and other prominent news outlets continue to warn of aggression from the likes of China or Russia against Taiwan and Ukraine, both conflicts that surely, we in the United States would be likely to involve ourselves in.

Yet beyond the terrible yet over-glorified world of weapons and war, I often think of this fourth freedom in other social contexts all the same. It saddens me, yet still doesn’t surprise me to know that now, nearly as distant from FDR’s presidency as Lincoln’s was from the Continental Congress, we still are a country that lives in fear of enemies both foreign and, yes, domestic as well. This cycle of fear has led to so many of our fellow citizens buying guns for self-defense, often in response to the frequent mass shootings and other homicides that are a wrathful shadow over our lives. 

This cycle of fear has kept us indebted to our for-profit health insurance industry, without which we couldn’t afford to pay the medical bills that result from the healthcare that keeps us alive. I thank God that my employer has good quality health insurance, because honestly if I were given the choice of surviving or going into severe debt to pay for an emergency surgery or other procedure, I’d have to really think about that before making a decision. What value is there in life if you can’t really live because all your earnings are going to pay off not only your debt but also the interest on that debt?

Fear can drive us to achieve better things, to overcome our fears, yet it can also inspire us to do terrible things. Fear of the other, fear of difference, is the root cause of so many problems that beset our country and humanity at large. I study this in the context of how the idea of the savage was understood in Renaissance natural history in my professional capacity as a PhD candidate in history.

One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: Voyager provides a clue as to how we could truly achieve the dream of this fourth freedom. In the second season episode “The Thaw” Captain Janeway and the crew of Voyager take on an AI that was created by the imaginations of a group of interstellar settlers who put themselves into cryogenic stasis for decades. That AI ended up manifesting itself as Fear itself and proceeded to terrorize the settlers and eventually the Starfleet officers from Voyager who enter the stasis chambers to try and deactivate it from the inside. At the end of the day, Captain Janeway herself confronts Fear and proceeds to give the best argument for power that I’ve ever heard; power only lasts if its authority is unchallenged. Fear only lasts if we are afraid. At the end of the day, the answer it seems is coming to terms with our own agency, our own ability to make decisions for ourselves.

We as the United States have become paralyzed by fear; there are reforms and changes we really should make but the people who could make them more often say it’s too dangerous to disrupt the status quo, to shake the foundations if only slightly. To quote another President, this time Mr. Lincoln from his 1862 “Annual Message to Congress”, “As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” Times have changed, and with them the ways we deal with our government and its relationship with the people must change as well. We need universal healthcare; we need electoral reform that will fully protect the right to vote enshrined in the Voting Rights Act. We need to make the changes necessary in our educational system, policing, and in nearly every other facet of our society to tackle bigotry in every venomous form it takes. We need to rethink our immigration laws, unscramble them, welcome in people who want to become our fellow citizens, our friends, our neighbors, who want to contribute to our society by their presence within our borders.

Eventually, I dearly hope, we’ll finally achieve FDR’s fourth freedom. I look forward to a day when I, and everyone around me has nothing to fear. I’m a teacher, admittedly in higher ed rather than in K-12, but a teacher nonetheless, and here in the United States being a teacher means knowing that there’s always a chance someone is going to decide they need to attack the students, faculty, and staff at your school or university. In my classroom, while my first priority is to teach, in that situation my first priority is to ensure my students’ safety. I long for the day when I won’t have to worry about someone attacking my classroom, and frankly I know there’s a decent chance even if I don’t experience a school shooting firsthand that I’m likely to experience a lockdown because of one, and not just the frequent drills we did for school shooters when I was in high school.

We fear each other because we don’t trust each other, and a country comprised of citizens who are too afraid to trust one another is a country in peril. Everything that I said today could well be interpreted as a partisan statement. Think about that: fear itself has been weaponized for partisan purposes to such an extent that the few solutions to that fear are themselves inherently partisan, fundamentally political. What have we done to ourselves to get to this point?

To turn again to President Roosevelt, freedom from fear “is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” Make this my hope, my prayer even, that if my generation and the generations to follow are remembered for anything it’s at long last overcoming those innate human fears that have driven us since the first Cain of our legendary past cast their stones against their fellow humans.

In the podcast version of this post, the recording of FDR’s 1941 State of the Union Address, his “Four Freedoms Speech” comes from the Archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York which is operated by the National Archives and Records Administration. I’d also like to thank my friend the immensely talented voice actor Michael Ashcraft for his giving life to President Lincoln’s words in this episode.