FEAR ITSELF
by Forrest Church
November 16, 2003
A century ago, the Harvard philosopher George Santayana memorably said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." He was one hundred percent half-right. His words suggest that the past is a record of error, which it is our business to correct. That is true but not the whole truth. When we forget our history, especially its most inspirational chapters, we are also doomed to fail to live up to it.
It was a cold, late winter's Saturday, the sky a canopy of gray clouds, matching the spirit of the times. When 100,000 Americans gathered on March 4, 1933, to hear the new president–a crowd extending from the steps of Washington’s Capitol far into the distance around the reflecting pool and down the great mall–times were darker than they are today. Near the bottom of the deepest depression in its history, America had fallen precipitously from the high-stepping days of the Roaring Twenties. The boom had gone bust, one quarter of the population could find no work, soup lines wound around entire city blocks, and shantytowns turned parks into slums. Yesterday's rich young men, if not actually jumping from Wall Street office windows, were cast into bankruptcy. People turned against their neighbors, looking for scapegoats, driven to violence by desperation. The government appeared paralyzed, and indeed nothing Washington tried seemed to work. The whole fabric of society was unraveling before a helpless nation's very eyes.
Though he had shown little over an honorable yet unspectacular public career to indicate he had the stuff to reverse the nation's fortunes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put his finger on the problem. He didn't talk about how the government could work with business and labor to lift us out of the Depression, or propose any radical social or economic program; the New Deal would come later. What the new president did was to utter the hitherto unspoken word that lurked in everyone's heart–fear. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he said.
No other presidential address matches Roosevelt's First Inaugural in the directness and immediacy of its impact. At the end of the speech, witnesses say, the applause was thunderous, rolling like waves. The president clapped in rhythm with the crowd. To the millions more listening on radio, the effect was even greater, more intimately felt, almost personal, as if he were speaking to each American individually. Any speech can be heard. This one the audience actually lived. Our president's confidence became the nation's own.
In the morning papers, the press–hardened and skeptical then as today–reflected the relief and exultation of a weary people. Even pundits who faulted the text on political grounds applauded its tone. "No more vital utterance was ever made by a president of the United States," read an editorial in the Atlanta Constitution. "Confidence literally arose from its hiding place and is today a living reality," another journalist wrote.
I serve on the board of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to the Roosevelt legacy. Among my duties, I chair the committee that presents the Roosevelt Four Freedom Medals to men and women whose distinguished service carries forward the Roosevelt spirit. This weekend at Hyde Park, New York, in a memorable and inspiring ceremony, we presented Four Freedom medals to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Senators George Mitchell and Robert Byrd, Studs Terkel, Deloras Huerta (Head of the United Farm Workers Union) and Father Robert Drinan. I was especially pleased to have both my mother, Bethine, and my daughter, Nina, with me. Between us we soon will span a century of history ourselves, the torch of freedom passing from one generation to the next.
The Four Freedoms hearken back to FDR's second immortal speech, his Annual Address to Congress delivered on January 8, 1941, familiarly known as "The Four Freedoms Address." In it he proclaimed four basic freedoms–freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These freedoms demand our protection and extension "everywhere in the world," he said. Just months before the nation's entry into World War II, that President Roosevelt should include a new freedom–freedom from fear–among those essential to humanity is significant. With fear again the heart's unspoken watchword, he echoed his reminder that fear itself constitutes a fundamental danger to human existence. By adding this new freedom to others familiar in American history, he elevated freedom from fear to the founders' altar.
Whether with respect to us as a nation or as individuals, the promise of human freedom is denied to anyone living under the tyranny of fear. Individual freedom from fear and civic freedom overlap, something that Roosevelt’s own story demonstrates. His unassailable confidence heartened the nation, but he learned courage on his own, when in 1921 at the age of thirty-nine, he was struck by infantile paralysis (or perhaps, a recent study suggests, by Guilliame Barre syndrome). Paralyzed from the waist down, Roosevelt lay bedridden for half a year, his ambitions suspended in a newly uncertain future.
Shortly before she died, his mother, Sara, confessed that he had never spoken to her directly about his medical condition. When she first saw him in his crippled state, Sara made this report in a letter to her brother:
I got here yesterday at 1:30 and at once ... came up to a brave, smiling, and beautiful son, who said: "Well, I'm glad you are back, Mummy, and I got up this party for you!" He had shaved himself and seems very bright and keen. Below his waist he cannot move at all. His legs (that I have always been proud of) have to be moved often as they ache when long in one position. He and Eleanor decided at once to be cheerful and the atmosphere of the house is all happiness, so I have fallen in and follow their glorious example.
This is precisely what the American people were to do, both during the Great Depression and World War II: They fell in and followed FDR's glorious example. Though he could not walk a single step without aid, often relying on his sons to accompany him on painstaking journeys from dais to podium, it was impossible to think of this man as an invalid. He did disguise the fact, abetted by gracious opponents and a sympathetic press corps. Yet most Americans perceived their leader to be fitter than he appeared. Almost everybody believed he had fully recovered from his "bout" with polio.
One reason for this belief is that Roosevelt practiced what he preached, maintaining an almost magical serenity. In seminary, ministerial candidates are taught the importance of being a "non-anxious" presence for their congregations. Roosevelt was a non-anxious presence for the entire nation, beginning with his closest associates and extending over the radio in his fireside chats to all Americans in the intimacy of their living rooms.
His detractors (and there were many) found him insufferably arrogant. Cocksure, impudent and presumptuous are among the gentler adjectives employed by his enemies in colorful defamation of Roosevelt's character. People who loved him saw instead a dashing bon vivant with a will of iron. The words that jump to my mind when I think of Franklin Roosevelt–jauntiness, spirit, faith, self-assurance, effervescence, courage, confidence, mettle, and aplomb–can all be listed among fear's antonyms. The one word you never hear associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by friend or foe alike, is fear.
Yet think of all he was up against. The times in which he lived and led were, on balance, more trying than our own. He could not dress himself without assistance and was never without pain. He devoted the better part of a decade (throughout his early forties) to a single-minded effort to walk again and failed almost completely. But he was never defeated. How much finer this is than to be defeated without failing, which happens whenever we refuse to try.
It is not the least bit surprising that of Roosevelt’s many fine speeches, the two that history prizes most highly address the subject of fear, for he considered fear itself to be the greatest enemy of a free people. Psychologically, he knew, fear is more paralyzing than polio, more depressing than the greatest depression, and as crippling as war.
Roosevelt’s witness has direct bearing today as we write the latest chapter in our nation’s history. A new challenge, international terrorism, inspires fear and threatens freedom. Ever since 9/11, we have all been struggling to find our sea legs to steady ourselves most effectively to meet this new challenge. My concern is that our national policy and the rhetoric supporting it is being driven by fear as much as it is designed to liberate us from it. The Patriot’s Act, for instance, contains several necessary changes in federal law to help our law enforcement agencies to protect us against terrorist activity, but, by painting with far too broad a brush, it also would effect a fundamental change in our long-standing commitment to individual liberty. Fear can blind us, leading to actions taken ostensibly to preserve the nation that in fact undermine the very liberties we seek to protect.
In ethics, the golden mean for correct behavior falls equidistant between extremes, the right amount of any given quality perceived as ethically superior to too little or too much. Generosity, for instance, is the golden mean between miserliness and profligacy. Aristotle introduced the golden mean to Western philosophy twenty-five hundred years ago. Weighing fear according to this ideal, the preferred alternative to panic is not fearlessness but prudence (the half-way point between the two). The word prudence today suggests fear, but originally it signified "right thinking." Far from being a drab virtue, prudence invites us to be bold, not timid, as long as we aren’t foolish.
The fear expert Gavin de Becker defines the word safe as meaning "free of acceptable risk." Complete security is not a golden mean, but one extreme on a continuum that extends all the way to untrammeled and unregulated freedom of movement and action. In this sense, security and liberty are opposites. Objects that are secured lock into place; they cannot move. Before resetting our national alarms, we must therefore decide just how safe we wish to be, never forgetting that security itself is a form of bondage.
Think about it this way. To obsess over threats to safety while ignoring threats to liberty demonstrates as little enlightened self-interest as does a person who thinks nothing about borrowing logs from the walls of his home to replenish his supply of firewood. As the house grows draftier, in order to keep the fire burning brightly enough to make up for the lost heat, he must take more and more wood from the walls. Tending his hearth, he destroys his home.
Since we can purchase no security whose warranty will not one day expire, wisdom counsels lavishing at least a little security in exchange for liberty. Once we as a nation have done all the obvious and sensible things to protect ourselves against another terrorist attack, each additional fraction of protection exacts a proportional sacrifice of freedom. And not only freedom. When our alarms warn us only against threats that imperil our safety, they fail to alert us to dangers that may jeopardize our humanity.
Franklin Roosevelt’s words echo on to remind us that we protect freedom more effectively by mastering our fears than we do by fanning them. He united our people to meet two enormous challenges: the great Depression and the Nazi threat. Throughout, even when calling for sacrifice, he inspired confidence. And he never played the fear card.
The struggle against terrorism, too, will demand patience, sacrifice, and collective national resolve for years to come. We are committed now to do everything possible, with international support and guidance, to secure a lasting peace in Iraq. For this, and for every aspect of peace making in a more randomly dangerous world, neither fear mongering nor appeasement will answer history’s call. We must neither sacrifice our nation’s cardinal principles in order to protect them, nor abdicate the responsibility of leading the world in the struggle against international terror. To be a leader, however, you must have followers, a principle that holds for nation states as well as individuals. For both, new leadership is called for–neither that displayed by the present administration nor that yet clearly evident from those who are offering themselves to lead the next. We must pray for a new generation of leaders who will inspire both faith in our highest principles and also united sacrifice in protecting and extending them.
Finally, even as we fight this frustrating war against international terror, we must simultaneously work to create a world more conducive to lasting peace, recognizing our own complicity and acting with the responsibility that rests on our broad shoulders as the world’s only super power. Listen again to Roosevelt’s words, spoken in 1941 as he was preparing our nation for war and sacrifice.
Freedom from fear . . . translated into world terms, means a worldwide 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 is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Underscoring the power of fighting fearmongers without resorting to fearmongering, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche issued this warning, with which I close. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." In reminding his fellow Americans that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, President Roosevelt sought to make us less vulnerable to our enemies, not more like them.