He was born in a Commonwealth nation, and got rich in the newspaper business, including ownership of tabloids in England. Because of laws with which he did not agree, he is no longer a citizen of his native land. Deeply conservative, he used his platform as a publisher not just to report news, but to push a partisan agenda.
You probably think I am speaking of Rupert Murdoch. If so, you are wrong. I am speaking of the Right Honorable Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour, though the honorable part is somewhat suspect after his years in a US penitentiary.
Whether or not you agree with his politics and his business ethics (or alleged lack thereof), few will argue with the fact that the man is brilliant. Among his side projects while running a media empire have been a number of books, including massive and respected biographies of both Richard Nixon and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This last may seem surprising, and not just because it is odd for a Canadian with British citizenship to be that engaged in the American presidency. Why would a conservative write a biography of the president that gave us the New Deal and laid the foundation for the safety net that today protects the poor and the elderly? Black is, somewhat begrudgingly, an FDR fanboy. He notes the man’s birth into a wealthy family, and his wholly unremarkable career prior to assuming the presidency.
Though Roosevelt had been a competent and proactive governor in New York, nothing about his life prior to his first inauguration indicated the president he would become. He wasn’t exceptional at anything. The office, the crisis he inherited, and the crises that were developing in Europe and in Asia, crises that would explode into war, brought out his best self, so much so that he would become the first president reelected three times, and the only one, given ratification of the twenty-second amendment in 1951. For no sooner was the war over than American voters turned on those who had steered the nation through that time of trial.
The economy had been in decline, at least as measured by gross domestic product, for two months before the stock market crashed in October 1929. There were many causes: too much consumer debt, high risk transactions by banks, investor speculation and panic, and the lack of new industries to drive growth. Banks failed, and working class men suddenly found themselves unemployed and with no prospects. People actually began emigrating from the United States, folks like Malachy and Angela McCourt, who took their children, including future novelist Frank, back to Ireland. By the time FDR took office, the Great Depression was in its third year.
Archie and Edith Bunker may have sung that we could use “a man like Hebert Hoover again†in the theme song of the 1970’s sitcom “All In the Family,†but the public sure didn’t feel that way in 1932. A humanitarian, a Quaker, and a progressive Republican, Hoover was blamed for inaction, for a failure of nerve. In fact, inaction might have been preferred to one of the things he actually did. He had campaigned on promises of agricultural tariffs, but his allies in Congress passed what came to be known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, more widespread tariffs that even Hoover called “vicious, extortionate, and obnoxious.†He signed the bill into law anyway, over the objections of 1,028 economists. The consensus today if that the tariffs exacerbated the depression, and helped insure its spread to other nations. Circling the wagons and turning inward is rarely the best answer.
By the time Hoover was willing to take necessary action on the economy, it was too late. Every day he failed to act, the nation weakened. Like a disease, there was a window of opportunity when treatment would be the most effective and the least painful, but Hoover let that window pass him by. Trying to make too many people happy, he made everyone unhappy.
Roosevelt won in a landslide. Maine was one of the few states to go for Hoover.
It was during his first inaugural address, six years before war would break out in Europe and eight before American would become involved, that FDR uttered his famous line about fear. “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,†he told the crowd gathered on the Capital steps. This echoed the sentiments of the English philosopher Francis Bacon, who in 1623 had written that “Nothing is terrible except fear itself,†of Michel de Montaigne half a century before Bacon, even of Seneca the Younger, who lived during the same period as Jesus. It was not an original idea.
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.â€
Let me remind you of the context. The Nazis had won the greatest share of the votes for the Reichstag in 1932, the same year Americans had gone to the polls, but no one found their anti-communism or anti-semitism alarming. Indeed, many American politicians of the age were openly anti-semitic. War was years away. Roosevelt was not speaking about fear of an invasion, of German operatives landing here in Maine and on Long Island in New York, as they would during the war. Roosevelt was speaking to the fear of scarcity. He was speaking about hunger, a lack of employment, a lack of healthcare.
There were real hardships during the Depression, real hunger, and the Dust Bowl was still a couple of years away. But nothing productive was going to happen as long as fear outweighed hope, as long as inaction was greater than vision.
As long as people sat around wringing their hands, nothing was going to happen. Roosevelt went on, speaking of “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.†He called for leadership with “frankness and vigor.â€
Roosevelt could well have used the words of the prophet Elijah to the widow. “Do not be afraid. Go and do…†If the widow and her son had behaved like most human social systems, Elijah might have starved.
Roosevelt’s speech, Elijah and the widow, this is all a question of faith, of bold risk-taking. Do you believe in the “might be†of God’s call to Elijah, to the widow in a household that was experiencing scarcity? Do you believe in the “might be†of Roosevelt’s call to his fellow Americans? Do you believe, as Elijah did, that God is good, that creation is good. Do you believe, as Roosevelt did, in the creativity, spirit, and essential goodness of the American people?
Even Roosevelt would give in to fear at times. During the war, he would issue Executive Order 9066, authorizing internment without trial of Americans of German, Italian, and Japanese heritage, though the order was used almost exclusively against the Japanese who, after all, looked different.
Hoover was a good man. He was surrounded by good people. This wasn’t the den of thieves that had surrounded Warren Harding. But Hoover was not the right person for that moment. What was needed was a person with audacious faith. The nation got it in a middling politician from New York.
What was needed in ancient Israel, as Elijah ran from the mercurial Ahab and his wife, Queen Jezebel, was faith in a God that “gives food to the hungry,†that “upholds the orphan and the widow.†Elijah needed to believe, because there was real danger.
Fear is driven by the most primitive part of our brain, the reptilian brain. Not that I want to bad mouth reptiles, also part of this amazing creation, though you can keep the snakes, thank you very much. It is just that we are called to do more and be more. God’s abundance is all around us. We have these giant and complex brains that are wired for the more-ness of creation, for God and art and love, as I mentioned last week. We have these amazing brains that are wired in ways that allow us to adapt. Creativity and problem solving are the reason we are what we are. Imagine what humans would be without plows and wells! And we have thumbs, which are pretty darned incredible. We can plan and adjust and we can act, and indeed we must act. For the human animal, stillness is death. Stand still and you starve. Stand still and you freeze.
Yet every single move we make is risk too. Every. Single. Move. You get up and you take risks. You love and you take risks. You leave your home and you take risks. Life is risky. If you focus on that, you succumb to inaction and fear, you don’t feed Elijah, you agree to tariffs. If you do not trust in the essential goodness of God and the abundance and miracle of life, you have lost your faith. You cannot be a glass-half-empty-and-the-rest-is-going-to-evaporate sort of person and claim Christ, for Christ is God’s promise to us made flesh. Christ is a pointer to the power of love, a love that can transcend the death of neurochemical being.
This may sound odd, especially here in the Calvinist trajectory of our Protestant Christian faith, where so much emphasis is placed on our total depravity. We are the same people that believed Satan was consorting with the sinful in Salem. This may sound strange here in a progressive theological trajectory that has rejected creeds, literal statements of belief. But you have to believe something. If not, why are you here?
The choice is not whether or not you believe something. You believe thousands of things, some conscious, some not so much. The question is what you believe. The question is whether you take charge of your belief, or passively allow the culture and commerce to tell you what to believe, to tell you that you will never have enough to be satisfied, that the world is scarcity and competition.
For a truly Christian life, you must take charge and take action, believing that there is enough, enough love from God, enough grace, enough goodness and creativity in humans, you must believe and you must act on that belief.
For a truly Christian life, you must make room for troublesome prophets and middling politicians, for God’s abundance shows up in zeal, sometimes obnoxious zeal, in creativity, in hope, for the Spirit blows where the Spirit blows, and we are called to go there together, to places we never dreamed we might go.
Despair is the opposite of belief. It is saying that God is not enough. It has no place in Christian community. Sorry Archie, we don’t inaction, and we certainly don’t need a man like Herbert Hoover again. The answer to contraction is action. The answer to scarcity is innovation. The answer to all that is wrong in the is is to live in the might be. We have a name for that. It is called the kingdom. It is a place of divine abundance, and it is right here, right now, and always has been.
Choose to believe. Amen.