What We Most Need in Our Next President

What we most need in our next President:  Moral leadership which can unite our nation.  It has happened before. It can happen again.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s assumption of the Presidency in 1932 came amidst widespread unemployment and fear, affecting millions of people in this country.  It was also a time of great global upheaval flowing from the economic collapse around the world.  Many intellectuals of the period, witnessing the rise of communism and Nazism, thought democracy was done.  In 1931, Nicholas Murray Butler, long-time president of Columbia University and recipient of that year’s Nobel Peace Prize, told students that totalitarian regimes brought forth “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more courage than the system of elections.”

In 1932, fascism was socially acceptable and even a little trendy.  Mussolini was still hugely popular well beyond the Italian-American community, and some of the same anti-Semitism coming out of the Nazi party in Germany could be heard in the common rooms of great American universities.  The poet T.S. Eliot gave a lecture at the University of Virginia arguing that “reasons of race and religion combined to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.”  Crystal clear evidence how wise and famous men can get things so very wrong.  

Incoming President Roosevelt had a different view.  In an interview with The New York Times in November 1932, he said the Presidency is “preeminently a place of moral leadership.”  He reviewed the work of great earlier presidents and concluded that each of them were “leaders of thought in times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

We are at such a time again today.

As author Jonathan Alter wrote, “for all of his transformative influence, FDR was, at bottom, a vessel president—a carrier of all the qualities, admirable and less so, that presidents need to chart a course in choppy waters.  The vessel held not just personality traits, but the essential elements of the American character:  our faith in ourselves, our spirit of experimentation and our hope for the future.”  A list to which I would add the recognition of the need to tackle our challenges and opportunities, united, not divided—not pitted one against another, but together.

When these elements seemed nearly extinguished in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt restored them in a matter of months.  This was the work not of social forces, but of a man—a man committed to a moral purpose worthy of the beliefs and principles on which our Nation was founded. 

We need such a man—or a woman—today more than ever.