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Just a few months ago I stopped off at FDR’s “Little White House,” the modest country cabin in Georgia where he took his vacations and where he died.  Its simplicity – it is one storey, and only a few rooms, perhaps fifteen hundred square feet – mocks our modern mores, and shows more starkly the incredible accomplishments of the man.

I find it hard to argue against the thesis that he was the greatest American president – he was president for twelve years, and during those years the country he governed went from weakness and imbecillity to the conqueror of Europe and the Pacific – a military feat he completed within four years.  Certainly no other president faced such monumental, world-wide tasks, and it is hard to imagine how they could have been more competently achieved.  With this achievement is his restoration of the middle class in America, which reached its apogee in the period after Roosevelt’s wars, and programs such as Social Security which solved one of the side-effects of modern medicine, namely old age.

Roosevelt was quoted in a recent Times piece about Barack Obama, and it is worth listening to his words and pondering them – how he realized that greed is a vice, that suffering is its wage, that money is not an adequate measure of worth or accomplishment, that government must be run for humanity, and economy is only a route to such an end.  The language is saturatedly Christian as well, and its inspiration probably Christian – though it also has its antecedents in the Greek demarchs and Roman tribunes like the Gracchi.  That he thus created a prosperity beyond the reach of the economists is part of the contradiction of all things, much as you cannot become happy unless you have a goal other than happiness.

“Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government – with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent to humanity.”

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.  They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob!  Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today: they are unanimous in their hate for me, and I welcome their hatred!”

The problems are much the same today, and the need for another FDR to dial the clock back on the work of destruction money will do to our civilization is much the same.