Loving and hating presidents, then and now

On an April afternoon in 1945, Johnny Miller and I were shooting baskets in his backyard when his mother came to the kitchen door and told us, “President Roosevelt is dead.”

Johnny jumped and cheered as if he’d scored the winning basket at the buzzer. Even though the president wasn’t popular in our suburban New Jersey neighborhood, my friend’s reaction kind of shocked me. Mine was way different: “He won’t get to win the war.” 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only president I had known in all of my 12 years. He was in the third month of his first term when I was born and the third month of his fourth term when he died. The war he had led us through since I was 8 was the defining event of my young life and now, as it was being won, he had died.

After Roosevelt’s death, my grandfather told me he was “the most loved and most hated president since Lincoln” and now, we seem to have the most loved and hated president since Roosevelt, with a difference.   Lincoln and Roosevelt tried to unite the nation; Trump has been devoted to dividing us.  

In his inaugural, Roosevelt urged a nation with a quarter of its workers unemployed not to be afraid, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear, itself.” In his inaugural, Trump exploited our fears, real and imagined, portraying a nation beset by gangs, illegal immigrants and violence and pledging that from now on, it would be “America first.”

Roosevelt was derided as a traitor to his class for his radical New Deal programs aimed at putting people back to work and providing them a measure of security as they got older. As he succeeded, the hatred grew and in a memorable 1936 campaign speech, he described his haters as “the old enemies of peace; business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism and war profiteering.

“They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

That speech would help propel Roosevelt to a second term with a mandate to continue the New Deal programs that would eventually save capitalism. Ironically, capitalism would be saved for not only the unemployed, forgotten Americans but for Roosevelt’s old enemies, the practitioners of class antagonism, the speculators, the reckless bankers and war profiteers. His haters were strong and influential but they couldn’t defeat him.

Roosevelt and Trump have just one thing in common, a mastery of the media, especially the newer media of their time. For Trump, it’s television and social media; for Roosevelt, it was the radio. But they employed far different styles to achieve far different goals.

Roosevelt used the radio to calm an audience demoralized by the Depression, to reduce their fears and to explain, in a personal way, how he proposed to make things better.  His most memorable radio talks were known as Fireside Chats for their very intimacy.  Unlike the constantly tweeting Trump, Roosevelt used the radio sparingly. “The one thing I dread,” he said, “is that my talks should be so frequent as to lose their effectiveness.”  

Trump has never shown an inclination to be the president of all the people, to reach beyond his most ardent supporters. Most of his television speeches, even these long months after his election, have been in the form of base-pleasing campaign rallies. He doesn’t seem to worry, as Roosevelt did, that his rants “should be so frequent as to lose their effectiveness.” He should worry; every act gets stale.

Serving as an invaluable adjunct to Trump’s rants is his very own cable news network, Fox. No president has ever had that luxury and he has used it well.

If you spend some time in a given day watching Fox and its anti-Trump competitors, MSNBC and CNN, you may end up wondering whatever happened to conventional news coverage. Sometimes, they entertain us by feeding off each other’s excesses as Fox and MSNBC did when Fox commentator Joseph diGenova casually observed, “We are in a civil war” because “civil discourse in this country is over.” The next day, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, an anti-Trump Republican, agreed but blamed it all on Trump, saying he “greenlit a war in this country around race, the most dangerous thing he’s done.”

If, as they say, we are moving away from civil discourse toward civil conflict, a lot of blame can be laid at the door of these ratings-driven entertainment networks disguised as news organizations. Trump is doing his best to divide us but he’s getting a lot of help.

We’ve been heading in that direction for a long time. The noted historian Richard Hofstadter has written that “the growth of the mass media of communications and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment. Mass communications have aroused the mass man.”  Mr. Hofstadter died 49 years ago.  

Simsbury resident Dick Ahles is a retired journalist. Email him at rahles1@outlook.com.