No fear

Lyndon Johnson said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that "He was the one person I ever knew, anywhere, who was never afraid."

Which, if you think about it, was a pretty remarkable thing, considering what America was facing back in 1932 when Roosevelt came into office. We had never had a Great Depression before. We had never faced anything like the Nazi and Japanese empires. Those were scary scary things. Americans had no past experience to look to - no indication that these things were going to turn out OK. It was a time to be afraid...which meant that people who were never afraid were desperately needed.

FDR wasn't a one-man superhero squad who whipped the Depression and smashed the fascist warlords. He was just the point man for of a whole lot of Americans who rose to the occasion and tackled problems like none we had ever tackled. And amazingly, we didn't just overcome those problems - we came out way ahead.

It's worth it to remember what that dark time was like. We had just gone through the Industrial Revolution, but there was no guarantee that it was a stable kind of economy. Republicans, the party of big business, had ruled the country almost uninterrupted for half a century, but their hands-off approach t the economy was looking like a disaster. Massive waves of Catholic immigration from South and East Europe had convinced many Protestant Americans that their country had been overrun by aliens. And the surging new fascist empires really looked like they had found a stronger model of government and economics.

Sounds familiar, right?

But we came through all that stuff. It looks so easy in retrospect, but it took most of a decade to get rid of the Depression, and 400,000 American lives to beat down the fascists. To those who lived through all that, it must have seemed like nothing short of a miracle - after the dust cleared, we had half the world's GDP and more than half of its military strength. And the fact that we came out of all that crap with a country that was much more ethnically integrated makes it all the more miraculous.

Today we're obviously facing a lot of the same things we were facing in 1932 - economic disaster, ethnic tensions, and ascendant dictatorships. But thanks to FDR and the others of his generation, we know we can overcome that stuff. And I believe that we will again.

Is Obama the next FDR? Is he the man who will get Americans to roll up our sleeves and dig ourselves out of the big hole? We don't know yet. But I'll say one thing - Obama seems like he's never afraid.