[Dialogue] Bill Moyers: My Father and FDR

Mon Nov 26 15:05:25 EST 2007

AlterNet

Bill Moyers: My Father and FDR

By Bill Moyers, TheNation.com
Posted on November 22, 2007, Printed on November 26, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/68638/

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."

Now, my father never met FDR. No politician ever paid him much note, but he
was sure he had a friend in the White House during the worst years of his
life. When by pure chance I wound up working there many years later, and my
parents came for a visit, my father wanted to see the Roosevelt Room. I
don't know quite how to explain it, except that my father knew who was on
his side and who wasn't, and for twelve years he had no doubt where FDR
stood. The first time I remember him with tears in his eyes was when
Roosevelt died. He had lost his friend.

We can't revive the man and certainly we wouldn't want to revisit the times,
but we can rekindle the spirit. There are 37 million people in this country
who are poor; there are 57 million who are near poor, making $20,000 to
$40,000 a year -- one divorce, one pink slip, one illness away from a free
fall. That's almost one-third of America still living on the edge. They need
a friend in the White House. My father, with his fourth-grade education and
two fingers with the missing tips from the mix-up at the cotton gin, got it
when Roosevelt spoke. "I can't talk like him," he said, "but I sure do think
like him." My father might not have had the words for it, but he said amen
when FDR talked about economic royalism. Sitting in front of our console
radio, he got it when Roosevelt said that private power no less than public
power can bring America to ruin in the absence of democratic controls. 

Don't think for a moment he didn't get it when Roosevelt said that a
government by money was as much to be feared as a government by mob, or when
he said that the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the
face of economic inequality. My father got it when he heard his friend in
the White House talk about how "a small group had concentrated into their
own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other
people's money, other people's labor -- other people's lives." My father
knew FDR was talking for him when he said life was no longer free, liberty
no longer real, men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness --
against economic tyranny such as this. And my father listened raptly when
his friend the President said, "The American citizen" -- my father knew the
President was speaking of him -- "could appeal only to the organized power
of government."

So thank you for reminding us that liberalism is less about ideology and
doctrine than about friendship and faith -- the bond between a patrician in
the White House and a working man on the Texas-Oklahoma border and their
mutual belief in America as a shared project. Thank you for this reminder of
how we might yet turn the listing ship of state. My father thanks you, too. 

Bill Moyers is a journalist and president of the Schumann Center for Media
and Democracy. 

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