Presidential punching.

Naturally there was much written yesterday about the rowdy debate between Trump and Biden on Tuesday night. I didn't see it, but I gather it was not a pleasant event. Normally three men with a combined age of more than 220 years fighting like that would mean a bad day at the home. But these are the times in which we live.

In my faraway youth, I recall elderly relatives who bemoaned the ugliness in politics, often harking back to the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The celebrated FDR pulled us all together in the Depression and then especially the war, uniting Americans with his beloved fireside chats. They knew that he and we were all pulling at the oars together to move the great ship of state in the same direction. Not like now, when [insert recent president] was always sniping at someone. 

The Beloved FDR

But here's the thing. I have been called on to work as an editor on many historical books, about Lincoln and Eisenhower and the presidency in general, and one germane to today's topic -- a compendium of Roosevelt's speeches. And let me tell you, from what I read, Franklin Roosevelt, with the exception of the famous Pearl Harbor speech, never missed a chance to sling vile accusations against his opponents. 

As here, from FDR's first inaugural, after winning in a landslide. Having vanquished his opponents, he takes the high road by dumping a load of crap on them: 

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

And his message to Congress, 1936:

We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. The very nature of the problem that we faced made it necessary to drive some people from power and strictly to regulate others. I made that plain when I took the oath of office in March 1933. I spoke of the practices of the unscrupulous money-changers who stood indicted in the court of public opinion. I spoke of the rulers of the exchanges of mankind’s goods, who failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence. I said that they had admitted their failure and had abdicated.

     Abdicated? Yes, in 1933, but now with the passing of danger they forget their damaging admissions and withdraw their abdication.

And again at his second inaugural, where Republicans lost support in Congress and Alf Landon was sent packing: 

When four years ago we met to inaugurate a president, the Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves to the fulfillment of a vision—to speed the time when there would be for all the people that security and peace essential to the pursuit of happiness. We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those first things first.

Remember, everyone is a beloved citizen in this country, except those unnamed ones who have no faith in our new direction, and they must be cast into the outer darkness. 

Here's Mr. Unity's "Arsenal of Democracy" fireside chat on December 29, 1940, a time when many well-meaning Americans wanted to get involved in overseas butchery as much as other Americans wanted to be in Vietnam in 1968:

Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out.... There are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents. I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States.

See, he's not charging these Americans with actually colluding with the Axis powers, he's just noting that the ones who don't want to do what he wants to do are unwitting suckers of the Nazis. 

And here's one of my favorites, from Mr. Unity's Economic Declaration of Rights, an attack on capitalists and promotion of government control of industry that could warm the blackened heart of any red-diaper baby:

A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help. The day of the great promoter or the financial titan, to whom we granted anything if only he would build, or develop, is over. Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to reestablish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of underconsumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. The day of enlightened administration has come.

Move over, Rover, let Franky take over! 

In the 1943 State of the Union, when we are already mired in two wars:

Every normal American prays that neither he nor his sons nor his grandsons will be compelled to go through this horror again.

     Undoubtedly a few Americans, even now, think that this nation can end this war comfortably and then climb back into an American hole and pull the hole in after them.

Read any of his speeches and wait for the moment he slips the cosh on some pack of Americans. He's always got to prove that he's the man by whacking someone else, even when it's unnecessary. He may have put on a genial front, but there was little real grace in the man.

You are certainly entitled to think that FDR was right about everything he said, right about every target he aimed. I am glad he fought the Axis powers and encouraged desegregation. But don't tell me he united the country. Whatever unification he achieved was by stomping on the faces of some Americans for the applause of others.

Most of all, no one ought to believe that presidents lashing out is something new. FDR was as good at it as anyone, and better than most.

And P.S.: As I have noted before, St. Eleanor of 74th Street was no prize either. She was more than willing to steamroll other people in pursuit of her aims, even her own family.