FDR and Fort Sumter

Today is April 12, my birthday, and also the anniversary of the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 and the anniversary of Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in 1861, considered the opening fire of the Civil War.

I was not around for the Civil War, but I was nine when FDR died, and I know just where I got the news. That evening we were in my dad’s 1932 Chevy with wartime stickers on the windshield and boots in the tires, headed out for an ice cream cone. We passed the Milwaukee railroad roundhouse on our way, I saw the flag at half-staff, and my parents, having heard the news earlier in the day, explained the event that they, as a railroad labor union family, regarded as a tragedy.

“Playing war” with my friends and listening to my uncles’ accounts of their overseas ordeals was about the extent of my participation in the great conflict, though I did win the status of Tin Can Commando, wearing an oilcloth armband while I roamed the neighborhoods, collecting flattened tin cans. I thought the New Deal saved the country from the Depression and that now I was helping FDR save us from the fascist hordes.

This week I hear of the flap caused by the governor of Virginia declaring a celebration of Confederate History Month that suggested remembrance of the sacrifices of officers, soldiers, and citizens while ignoring slavery, and I reflect on the changes in civil rights laws and attitudes since FDR’s day. To a person born in the 30s, these changes seem manifest in a thousand ways, all “on the right side of history,”  amounting to a fuller participation in American society on the part of African-Americans and people of color, altogether a good thing.

Is that governor’s declaration a pitiful attempt to rewrite history to make the white people around him feel better? Is it a calculated attempt to please “the base” in time for the next election? If so, it is dramatic evidence of what prisoners of denial his supporters are, and how far we have to go toward the more perfect union.

Is the nasty denial and denigration of Obama’s achievement, of his hopes for America, his own New Deal, tied to these times? Of course it is. The denial of slavery and its power to warp white arrogance and inspire its combativeness, and the resurgent economic  fears of FDR’s time have combined to stir the pot again.

It would be many years after that ninth birthday before any of this seemed important, or even registered on the personal radar. I had the good luck to be raised among work-ethic Iowans, and thought all Americans more or less of good will, the nation governable, the future aglow. I would submit that now, none of us are quite sure.

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