24 November 2004
Blanche Wiesen Cook
Trooping for Democracy
As an historian, I would like to [place] the fateful elections of the 21st century into historical perspective. Progressive liberals are mostly amazed that the word Liberal, which we once perceived at the "vital center," somehow too limited, has become the new word for un-American. After all, liberalism was the alternative to communism, socialism, fascism, and for most of the 20th century the very definition of Americanism. In 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted an entirely divided country, divided sectionally and politically, much as it is today, and declared: "We will have a liberal democracy, or we will return to the Dark Ages."
The issues then involved race and class and justice. A New Deal for all Americans, including public education, public health, publicly supported programs in the arts and sciences, environmental protection, the creation of new opportunities and job security for all. That, of course, involved taxation. New Dealers were influenced by their 19th century mentor, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes – who said: "I do not mind paying taxes. With my taxes, I buy civilization!" By 1913 progressives, democrats and republicans alike, agreed: a graduated income tax would democratize, liberalize, and improve America. A social contract in an age of war seemed important: an enlightened citizenry, decent housing, an end to industrial slavery and the greedy antics of the "malefactors" of corrupted wealth. If we pause to consider what the putschites seek, we see their goal is to return to the l9th century, before Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, and Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for expanded opportunities for poor people, playgrounds, public parks, the sanctity of national forests. Bottom line: this is a war against the entire public sector. This war is camouflaged by lies and sweet rhetoric: leave no child behind, means defund public schools; and fill our jails to overflowing with adolescent youngsters. We have created the testing-punishment society. For children, it is among the meanest and cruelest in the world. It is important to note that during the Cold War, the US was in competition. We needed to prove that we excelled in "guns and butter" issues. Hence, our public schools, music and arts programs flourished. There were Pell grants for poor people to attend college and university; and for prison education. Now there is bipartisan silence about poor people. Let's be clear: Right-wing DLC Democrats share responsibility for this degrading situation. With public programs for the poor ended, the suffering among us have only churches for sanctuary. Now, we are told federal funds may flow again --- but only for "faith-based" initiatives.
Liberals to Arms! We need to regroup, reconsider, reorganize. For thirty years I have been privileged to study America's great liberals, Dwight David Eisenhower, and Eleanor Roosevelt particularly . They have much to tell us about where we might go from here, and how once again to get there. There was once a bi-partisan liberal tradition. Compared to the putschites, even Ayn Rand libertarians appear progressive. Remember, they called for "free minds and free markets." Mind control, the domination of church over state, homelessness, torture, preemptive war, the end of due process and all international law – from the Geneva Accords to the UN treaties – are un-American grotesqueries. They demand an endless rebellion of mind and heart and spirit. We must meet and confer; fight every day boldly and with passion to restore the spirit and essence of our nation.
To see how far along this dastardly path we have crawled, it is important to remember that Dwight David Eisenhower called himself "a militant liberal." On l6 November l953, he wrote to John Foster Dulles that his Administration was "committed to ... policies that will bring the greatest good to the greatest number. This means that there must be lifted from the minds of men the fears of disaster, poverty, and old age." He campaigned for national health care and appointed former Women's Army Corps commander, Oveta Culp Hobby to head his new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Together with Eleanor Roosevelt and her friend Esther Lape they fought for the kind of single-payer health plan to cover all Americans the US has been unable to achieve. Eisenhower was contemptuous of the powerful lobby that deboned his program, leaving the US with the Health Reinsurance Act of l957, and pursued more liberal policies: He increased the minimum wage, extended the excess-profits tax, expanded the public-housing program (there was no homelessness under IKE), and warned the nation of the dangers of the military- industrial- complex, which he originally called the congressional-industrial-military complex.
Eisenhower wrote his brother Edgar on 2 May l956: "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again.... There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H.L. Hunt... a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." Today, there is bipartisan silence about homelessness, and candidates ignore the suffering poor. Republicans talk about our "ownership society." People like it when they "own" their own cars, and houses, and insurance policies. That there are seven to l0 million homeless Americans, some of whom who go to work and to school from their cars and their vans, apparently does not diminish our "ownership" society – and nobody insists on a revitalized federal housing program, brutally defunded by Ronald Reagan. Since then not one federal dollar has gone into new housing starts. [To understand the red and blue shifts on our political map, one must turn to l968 when LBJ expanded the Roosevelt-Eisenhower Wagner Housing Act, and promised to end segregation in housing. After that, Dixiecrats became Republicans.]
Eleanor Roosevelt's work for affordable housing was central to her democratic vision. She always said governments exist for only one purpose: to make life better for all people. But, she continued, you can never depend on politicians to do anything about that. You have to go door to door, block by block, village by village to get your wants and your needs met. During the l920s ER and her friends went "trooping for democracy" to ask potential voters what they wanted, what they needed. She never told people what to think, or how to vote. She asked questions, and worked to build movements – movements for women, peace, community. This year thousands of volunteers followed her advice, including most of us and our friends. My partner Clare Coss and I went to St. Louis with ACT, MOVEON, and Planned Parenthood. We can attest: trooping for democracy is VERY hard work. It is also extremely informative.
In our nation of neighbors, we are a very divided country: not red state vs blue state, but block by block, door to door. This election was about race and class, myths and lies, confusions and conflicts, needs and wants. There are people out of work and suffering in America. And there is a war against the poor. The cultural emphasis and vicious slanders against Godless, leftist, queer and elitist secularists (which sounded so familiar to those of us who remember Joe McCarthy's "phony egg-sucking liberal queer and commie" rhetoric) was camouflage. Our mandatory sentencing rules and perverse criminal justice penalties promotes a new era of slavery in every state of our embattled union. There is little work in the Mississippi Delta or throughout the rust belt; but there is work in Parchman Prison and every state and federal lock-up.
And then there is this war. Eisenhower said in l956: We cannot save Budapest by bombing it. Today we bomb and bomb -- to bring democracy to an old and proud historical realm. In this place called Iraq – the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Eurphrates Rivers, we have failed to read between the pipelines. For those of us who were taught that "History Begins in Sumer," and Ur is that first site of beginning, the birthplace of Abraham, just east of which is Eden – Basra, Nasariya, the Marshlands, it is strange indeed to contemplate this war for democracy; or the US once a nation defined by the Enlightenment marching backwards into the 4000 year old war of the book.
After a lifetime of activism, going door to door throughout America and around the world, ER addressed the future. In the last chapter of her last book, TOMORROW IS NOW, published posthumously in l963, ER's final message called for ardent courage and refortified liberalism:
"Long ago, there was a noble word, LIBERAL, which derived from the word FREE. [libre] Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. Indeed, there was a time – a short but dismaying time– when many Americans began to distrust the word which derived from FREE.
"One thing we must all do. We must cherish and honor the word FREE or it will cease to apply to us.... "
To restore that word, some specific questions must be immediately addressed: Who votes, and who counts. Who controls the voting procedures. How do we prepare an educated creative concerned citizenry. There has been a long war against learning in this country. Who will stand up and demand the return to an excellent public education system that honors and nurtures our best gifts. Every other industrialized nation insures health care for its people. Today, US health costs are the highest on the planet. We have health and healing for profit only. Moreover, over 45% of the electorate did not vote. We still have a smaller voter turn-out than any other democracy. Why not fine folks who refuse to vote; or reward folks who do vote.
As we confront our future, it is clear that the Cold War ended without a strategy for peace or global betterment. Initially, George Herbert Walker Bush decided that at cold war's end the US might stand finally for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With no fanfare, almost in a whisper, his administration persuaded the Senate in l992 to ratify the civil and political covenant of the Declaration of Human Rights which Eleanor Roosevelt did so much to achieve. But it is the United Nations and the promise of a New Deal for the world that have most specifically faced the wrecker in recent administrations. Ronald Reagan stopped paying UN dues, and the US declared virtual war on the international body created after World War II with such high hopes for a future of peace and dignity for all people. In l945, after 50 million dead, the world agreed that a permanent body to debate and consider was better than a planet embroiled in continual warfare. In 2001 George War Bush transformed 911 from a crime against humanity to a war against humanity within 24 hours. Already trillions of dollars in debt, his team promises to continue this war beyond the lifetime of everybody living, whatever that means. Engulfed by horror, terror and war, the future hangs on an alternative thread of recognition: People have to have more to live for than to die for. There will be no peace until we reassert the value of life beyond the womb: health, education, opportunity, justice and dignity for all. People of values understand that war is legalized murder. Massacres do not promote democracy, or international security. The challenge before us is the greatest challenge in US history. We must fight for liberal democracy – the rule of law, international law, and the promise of human rights.
Blanche Wiesen Cook is Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is author of Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One: 1884-1933, Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution and The Declassified Eisenhower, and is a former vice-president for research at the American Historical Association.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.