Ultimately, we prevail
We waver, we wander but our nation remains strong
The stock market failed in 1929, and suddenly prosperity had slipped around the corner. Jobs disappeared, soup kitchens and bread lines grew. Fathers stood in long lines shuffling their feet, hoping for a chance to pick up some work and earn a few bucks. By 1931 it was clear that denying people help in tough times did not strengthen their character. By 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated, I was born, and the New Deal began.
Even I, this unaware kid, felt hope stirring. There were jobs. WPA
(Works Progress Administration), NRA (National Recovery Administration), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), TVA (Tennesee Valley Authority), and over it all the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act).
Where there had been paralyzation, there was action. Beneath the shock, the deprivation, the diminished pride, the evictions, the foreclosures, all brought on by a failing stock market, there was industry. There was now food on the table, shoes, clothes for school, a six pack of Labatt for the weekend.
The New Deal brought a nearly revolutionary proposition: Ordinary people caught in the maelstrom of market turmoil did not need to go hungry. This country had untold resources. Willing people, with some priming from the public pump, could be a resource for each other. People mattered; that was established.
But almost as sudden as the market crash, the world burst forth into war. Although there hadbeen outrage and unspeakable mayhem since Germany had invaded Poland in 1939, how serious would not be known until Hitler was defeated. And on our snug island we had watched. Until Pearl Harbor.
No longer neutral, faced with a serious threat of attack from both Atlantic and Pacific sides, we were mustered to serve. Some with more sacrifice than others. Young men were drafted. Fathers, brothers, husbands, green kids just out of high school. Lights blazed through the nights as war plants worked three shifts turning out P-38s, B-29s, howitzers, Sherman tanks, trucks, Jeeps. Old men went to work; so did women. Kids collected cans and newspapers. The nightly news became a ritual; Edward R. Murrow’s quavering static direct from London. Walking in the neighborhood, blue stars in windows deserved a pause and a nod of respect. Gold stars stopped you cold. You usually knew someone in that family.
If war has any redeeming virtues at all, surely one of them is community. We defeated Germany, Italy and Japan, together. And when the troops came home, at least those able to come home, there was a palpable sense of having done this together. And in that bubble, families grew, bought houses, constructed tight communities. For the fragility of life, the knowledge of how little stood between man and total destruction, was still very much an immediate lesson, learned on the battlefield.
But not all were so fortunate. The long-festering rot of unequal rights, unequal justice, discrimination by color and culture burst open for all to see. Black citizens were claiming their constitutional rights. But not without pain and indomitable courage. TV shots of kids fire-hosed, kids murdered at their Sunday school, their parents beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, savaged during the Freedom Rides, all this came home to every screen in every home in the country.
It was a long, long bloody struggle but there was light. And it took a rough-speaking, clear-minded legislator from a Jim Crow state to do it. Lyndon Johnson thrown into the turmoil by the assassination of John Kennedy shepherded the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Equal Opportunity in Employment Act past the solid Jim Crow states and into law.
Since then there have been more wars. Smaller ones, but no less deadly. There have been presidents of varying degrees of moral imagination and integrity,
And lately we’ve been licking our wounds after a totally unexpected assault on the U.S. Capitol by a ragtail outfit, armed with clubs and flagpoles, determined to overthrow a presidential election. But order is restored. And it is worth noting that not once did the forces of law, the police, the National Guard, the military consider defecting in favor of the mob’s leader, as often is the preliminary to a military coup.
The point is this: Although we may waver and too often wander from our best interests, as a nation we are strong. For a time darkness may rule. But inevitably, through the rubble, the doubt, and the calls for destruction, the light struggles upward. We do know charity from greed, compassion from revenge. And we know to do what is right, because it is right and ensures our ultimate preservation.
If war has any redeeming virtues at all, surely one of them is community. We defeated the Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan, together. And when the troops came home, at least those able to come home, there was this palpable sense of having done this together. And in that bubble, families grew, bought houses, constructed tight communities.