Bill Moyers: My Father and FDR
By Bill Moyers, TheNation.com. Posted November 22, 2007.
Note: Bill Moyers gave the following remarks at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute's twentieth-anniversary Four Freedoms ceremony, where he received the Freedom of Speech award.
Thank you for this recognition and the spirit of the evening. Thanks especially for giving me the chance to sit here awhile thinking about my father. Henry Moyers was an ordinary man who dropped out of the fourth grade because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet.
The Depression knocked him off the farm and flat on his back. When I was born he was making two dollars a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never made over $100 a week in the whole of his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union on the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections, and he would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if both had lived that long. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because the President's my friend."
Join me below the fold (H/T to Jackson8 for the Moyers Speech)
I was raised by my grandparents as much as by my parents, we were an extended family who all lived within a few houses of each other while I was growing up. I was the first born in this place, this promised land of California and the rest, Parents, Grandparents, Aunt, Uncle and Cousins had all come from that same part of Oklahoma as Moyers did. Each and every one was an FDR Democrat. The man was revered like no other and we lived in a time and place that were the direct result of the success of the Liberal Democracy FDR had built. Was it perfect? Hell no. Was it light degrees better than the world my Grandparents had known when they were young? You bet.
You could be damn sure that FDR was their friend too.
I received all the political education I would ever need from my Grandmother when I was very young. She told me, in that same Oklahoma/Texas accent you hear in Moyers' voice and with the appropriate sneer of contempt when the she said the word "Republican", "The Republicans are for the rich and the Democrats are for every one else."
That is the damn truth. But the rich these days, my Grandparents would not know what to make of it because as much as they knew the rich to be their economic enemies I don't think they ever thought of them as the Straussian, Fascist Monsters we know so many to be. But then, they weren't political junkies, they were simple people in that way but they certainly knew the facts of the matter when it came down to the two parties. It would break their hearts to see how the "rich" have co-opted the party of FDR in so many ways but my Grandmother would certainly understand that the "rich" were people who were never happy with far more than enough, only everything would satisfy them and that, not for long.
I am happy they did not live to see this, this mess of a fix we're in.
These candidate arguments we've been engaging in here remind me of a story my Granddad told me in the late 60's, only in the way it sheds light on my lack of enthusiasm for any candidate and for the corrupt process they are all a part of. When my Grandparents retired around 1965, they began driving all over the US in a camper- and later a nice trailer. They'd be gone for weeks at a time chasing the goal to visit every state in the lower 48. Their ability to do this was a testament to the changes FDR had brought about. My Granddad had always been self-employed, the bulk of his adult life as a General Contractor but he had always maintained his membership in the Carpenter's Union and had retired on his pension from that Union, a Union that didn't even exist when he was born in a sod house on the plains of Oklahoma. That's right, my Grandfather was born in a house made of mud to farmers who scratched a meager living from the soil and a short 60 years later, was in a position to tour the country in his retirement. When he was a boy, people didn't retire, they worked until they died or were disabled and here he was, able to drive all over this country, meeting people from all walks of life and seeing the sights the nation has to offer. And all of this was possible because FDR was my Grandparents' friend.
But back to the story, now.
On one of these trips, my grandparents were on some out of the way road in Louisiana and stopping for gas they met an "old colored man" who truth be told, was probably no older than my grandparents and to them, "colored" would always be the polite term they adhered to, the alternatives at the time of their youth were not pretty words. This was during the election of 1968 so as they chatted with this fellow, the subject of politics naturally came up. They asked him who he was for and he replied, "Oh my man's not running". Curiosity aroused, they asked who that man was.
"The Kingfisher, Huey Long."
Now, unlike so many other "Okies" fleeing the hard times of depression era Oklahoma, my grandparents headed to New Orleans. It was something of a joke in my family that while everyone else headed to California, it would take another 20 years for my family to do so, because they went East instead. They lived in Louisiana during Long's time (Louisiana offered more opportunity at the time than California precisely because Long was in charge there) but he was a little radical for their tastes and they were staunch FDR people.
"They killed him you know."
Yes, my grandparents knew.
"And I haven't had any use for any of them since then."
My grandparents understood that too. They had been there at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles that nominated JFK in 1960. They killed him too, you know. Until her dying day, my Grandmother could not hear the name without choking up. But they remained stanch Democrats and always supported the party's nominee. The "Colored Man" would have none of that though, "they" had killed his man, there would be no other like him and with that, he had accepted his lot in life knowing that the bright future Long had promised for all would never be.
And that's kind of where I am. When "they" killed Bobby in 1968, I felt a light inside me go out. I knew how the man in Louisiana felt. I still feel that way. Everything since has been window dressing, out right treachery and betrayal it seems from the party that FDR built and whose promise was being extinguished by its foes every moment of my adult life until we have arrived here at this sad point in time only to witness the victory of great wealth over all that is right and decent.
So I'm sorry I don't feel much for the Democratic candidates, I wish I did. I suspect FDR wouldn't be friends with a number of them and I'm sure Bobby Kennedy wouldn't have either. And I keep thinking back to the story of the old black man in Louisiana. I know all to well now how he felt.
FDR was our friend, but Bobby Kennedy was going to take what FDR had started and finish it, once and for all. So they killed him. They killed my man too. And it has been all downhill since then with the end goal in sight- a nation controlled by a small Oligarchy sporting a veneer of democracy and featuring politicians that wouldn't be in the positions they are if they weren't corrupt because in this country, now, if you're not corrupt, you're not allowed to play.
And that's because they killed my man. And they killed Huey Long and Jack Kennedy and Martin and the names go on and on.
They always kill "our man" and I just don't feel like taking any of these substitutes when the courage these men exemplified is so needed now yet is in such short supply from the leading candidates. I will not settle for less. I just won't. I can't.
Because I will always remember that FDR was our friend, and so were the others. America could sure use such friends now.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.