[Note to DKos readers: in the interest of drumming up inspired new diarists, I invited my dad to contribute a piece. This is actually his second. He wrote a damn good Obama diary in 2012. I’m hoping he’ll write a third one in 2020 when Sanders runs for re-election.]
2016! I can’t believe I’ve lived to see it. To tell the truth, sometimes I feel like I’ve lived too long. But I also feel hopeful. This is finally an election when we have a chance as a people to get back to common sense politics.
I am an old man. I’m 88, in fact. As I sat with my son on Monday night and listened to the returns from Iowa, I was reminded of things that happened long ago. I remember that November night in 1936 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected for a second time.
Although at age eight, I wasn’t able to understand the full significance of what was happening, my parents did, and their unbounded happiness was obvious even to me. I knew my father was out of a job and my mother supported us with a $15 a week sales clerk income. I learned that my father could now expect to find employment, hopefully as a part-time county employee. He had worked hard for a county supervisor candidate who, we hoped, would provide such a job if elected (that’s the way it worked back then). To make it brief, he was indeed elected and my father went to work in the county maintenance shop as a blacksmith’s helper.
This may have happened whether or not Roosevelt was elected, but, strangely, my parents seemed more excited about Roosevelt’s triumph than they were about their own good fortune. Because most of our neighbors (like us) didn’t own a radio—being too poor to afford one—we all gathered at the nearby grocery store, where the radio was turned up loud so everyone could hear.
To really understand the joy we felt that night, you’d have to know our sorrows. Although my family lived rent-free in a tiny house (my father maintained several houses that were, like ours, owned by a lumber company), others were not so fortunate.
Some of our neighbors were middle-class people who had become impoverished. Others, like us, had come from the South, where poverty had existed long before the crash of 1929. Our own house consisted of two shotgun cabins hooked together in an L shape. Next to us on the east side were four other cabins, one so close to us that we couldn’t get fire insurance. They were occupied by desperately poor people. For a time, in fact, a single cabin housed three families. On the west side of us lived an old cowboy who had lost his land and was supporting his younger wife and his daughter on his meager savings. When he died that year, his wife and daughter were evicted. Both of them, I was later told, were forced into prostitution to pay for food and shelter. Of course they weren’t the only women who were desperate. There were single mothers who supported their families by taking in washing and ironing. The only equipment they had were wash tubs and flat irons that they heated over coals. The smoke from their “washing” fires competed with the smoke of wood burning stoves that people used to heat their houses. Looking back on it, I realize they were heroes.
Then there was the Chinese grocery store, which was further down the street to the west, past lots that stood vacant after houses had burned down (only the foundations were left). That little market was the neighborhood social club. The kind and generous people who ran the store gave us credit when we were broke and ice cream when we paid our overdue bills. In my mind, they were the neighborhood’s aristocracy, though, sadly, they experienced plenty of prejudice, especially after the communist revolution in China in later years.
That night in 1936, we gathered at the grocery to listen to the returns. After we heard the reports coming in of Roosevelt winning some of the bigger states back east, we knew he was going to prevail. To say we were happy would be an understatement. I saw people hugging and congratulating each other and even the children I played with seemed to understand that something wonderful had happened. It was a night of promise, even though there would be more years of depression ahead. Now there was hope. The “New Deal,” which had already improved things somewhat, was going to continue.
In later years, those same shirtless children I’d seen parade by our house, carrying their naked loaves of bread and cans of commodity food from the relief center became middle-class Americans, thanks to the New Deal, the GI Bill, and the economic turnaround that came during the war. They prospered with the nation, all thanks to Roosevelt and the Democrats. In the boom that came in the 1950s, the nation’s tax rate was almost the highest in our history (at least for the rich) and the distance between poor and rich was at its lowest. The wealthiest Americans were paying 90% income tax rates (though they were effectively paying only 50%), yet the economy was flourishing, in no small part thanks to continued government spending on things like the interstate highway system.
We had it good for a few decades, when Democrats reigned. But over the next few decades, much of the good trickled away under Republican administrations (that’s the real “trickle down”!). By most measures, today’s Americans are far better off than we were during the Depression. But in another way, we have it worse. Even in the darkest days of the Depression, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. People were making progress. They knew they were going to come out okay. In those days, the system was not rigged against us. Today, it is.
If we go on with current policies (of both Republicans and centrist Democrats), there is no way that the American middle class will ever be what it was in the 1950s. The poor will continue to struggle with stagnant wages. Even if they manage to get a college degree, they come out tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Many have put off buying a house and starting a family. Many have just gone home to live with their parents. Even those who wind up with a good job have to pay higher and higher medical premiums and deductibles. Meanwhile the tax code lets the rich stash their money in Cayman Island tax shelters instead of investing in America. The one percent get over ninety percent of new wealth. Oxfam has predicted that, if current trends toward inequality persist, the richest 1% will own more than the other 99% of people in the world.
As I said, I am 88. I have had a good life. I have lived from paycheck to paycheck at times, but I own a house and a car, not to mention a radio (which I listen to religiously!). But younger Americans may not be so fortunate.
As my son and I listened Monday night to the returns from the Iowa caucus, I had some of that same feeling I felt in 1936, when Roosevelt was re-elected. Though I know Hillary Clinton is a good Democrat who wants good things for our nation, it is Bernie Sanders who inspires me. He is not the charismatic candidate that Franklin Roosevelt was. He is also much older, and far from wealthy. Nor is he an aristocrat. Yet he brings with him the same kind of feeling that, at last, here is a man who really cares about the people.
LET’S NOT CALL IT “SOCIALISM”
Roosevelt, of course, never called his policies “socialistic,” but he and Sanders share a common vision. Sanders wants to pursue the goals that Roosevelt put forward in his so-called Second Bill of Rights: the right to a living wage; the right to education; and the right to health care. Roosevelt incorporated some of those principles into the New Deal, but he left most of the work for later generations to accomplish. But somehow we’ve fallen down. Bernie Sanders is calling on us to get up again and pursue Roosevelt’s vision.
Unfortunately, his campaign is not without a flaw. And judging from my own experiences over a very long life, it’s a big one. The trouble is, he calls his ideas “socialism.” I admire him for sticking to his guns rather than denying his politics, but I am old enough to know why the word scares people. During the Cold War, the word “socialist” as it was applied to the Soviet Union and other communist countries became a loaded term signifying evil. It was pounced upon by conservative Republicans to vilify liberals who were simply trying for a better world.
In the 1950s, I remember my uncle coming to visit in our new middle-class house that my father built with his own hands (I did some of the work, too. You can still see the pale mortar between the bricks where I added too much lime. Dad said I was so slow that he could do it without my help. He was right.). My uncle sat in our best chair in the living room and talked about his anger toward communists. He was my mother’s successful brother, who had risen from office boy to become president of New York Life. When my father made a disparaging statement about Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade of lies, exaggeration, and bluster, my uncle said—very self-importantly—“somebody has to crusade against communism.” Or at least words to that affect. He went on to tell us how Arthur Miller’s play, “Death of a Salesman,” had been written just to undermine and destroy our system of distribution. Here was a wealthy, educated man who bought into silly, overwrought anger (which he later had the grace to apologize for).
I well remember, too, the Republican political slogan of the 1952 election, when Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson. “Twenty Years of Treason!” (Democrats having been in power since 1932). Democrats, you see, were said to be socialist traitors. The biggest victim of the Cold War, at least at home, was free speech. To say you supported anything socialist was like saying you supported the Soviet Union.
CALL IT “COMMON SENSE AMERICA”
The Cold War stigma on the word “socialism” has not washed away. Perhaps it will, in time, but people of my generation still shudder when they hear the word. With all due respect to Senator Sanders, it is time for him to give a new name to his movement. Roosevelt brought us hope and joy with his New Deal. Sanders can bring us the same with what I would call “Common Sense America.” The phrase “Common Sense,” of course, calls to mind the great American pamphleteer and revolutionary, Thomas Paine. But more than that, it can define a proud movement of progressives who will take up the FDR legacy and bring us into a new century filled with hope.
The only way this will work is for Sanders to again and again show Americans the proper way to use tax money, as opposed to what the Republicans want to do with it.
As always, they want to keep lowering taxes, going so far as to do away with the estate tax altogether on behalf of the .2% of American families now affected, thus taking between $250 billion and $1 trillion more from government revenue (over ten years). They want to forever lower taxes so that billionaires can put more money in overseas tax shelters and other havens that in no way help the country.
We want to use that same money to invest in America, the way Roosevelt and even Eisenhower did. We can pay for single payer health care. Here’s one case where I agree with the old slogan: what’s good for General Motors is good for America. Back in 2005, the GM CEO said “Like it or not, if we pay $1,500 per car for health care and our cheap global competitors pay $200, that’s a disadvantage. And we don’t have that situation because we’re stupid - it’s been the U.S. government policy for us to pay that bill and we’ve been doing it.” We not only CAN pay for single payer, but we must, both for the health and dignity of our people and for the profits of our businesses.
We can also save Social Security, moreover, without even breaking a sweat by simply raising the income cap for Social Security taxation. While we’re at it, we can make college education free. Yes, we’ll have to raise taxes on the wealthy to do those things, but, as Sanders said, not to anything like the 90% top rate during Eisenhower’s administration. If a high effective tax rate on a tiny sliver of top earners didn’t hurt the economy then, it won’t now, either.
We need to tell the country that the Republicans are deeply unpatriotic and profoundly uncaring. We need “Common Sense America” billboards and television and internet ads all over the country making these comparisons between what we want and what Republicans want. We need COMMON SENSE instead of corporate socialism.
At my age, I’m not worried about my income or my benefits being reduced, but I am worried about my children and grandchildren living in a world that is less humane, less tolerant, and less concerned about the needs of others than mine was. In Bernie Sanders, I see hope just like the hope we saw in 1936. It’s up to us to make his vision a reality.
Now I just have one more thing to say. I want to thank my old friend Ernie (like me, he’s 88) who provided me with the research materials for this piece. We both want Senator Sanders to understand that when his work is done here in ten or fifteen years, we’ll be waiting for him on the other side. Maybe he can help there, too.