Fred Gearing, US Army Air Corp, 1943
“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
When President Roosevelt spoke these words, Americans had every right to be afraid. In the depths of the Great Depression, one out of four Americans were out of work, the banking system, industry and commerce were broken, and dark storm clouds were forming over Europe and East Asia. Nonetheless, the President told the American people that they should not be afraid. Despite its struggles, America was, after all, a great country, endowed with bountiful resources and industrious people. He assured the people that we would prevail in meeting these challenges, and that good government of and for the people would be part of the solution. The Americans that embraced President Roosevelt’s leadership and calls to action in peace and war have come to be regarded by many as the “greatest generation.” This distinction does not diminish the contributions of other generations. Rather it bestows upon this group acknowledgment of a unique set of challenges, victories, and accomplishments: passage through the greatest economic crisis in the nation’s history; victory over, perhaps, the darkest forces to ever gather on the face of the planet; and the construction of the American middle class. Yet even this brave and audacious group was far from perfect. In at least one notable example, fear overrode judgment, and this resulted in the deprivation of liberty and due process to numerous American citizens and resident aliens of Japanese descent. This was a terrible wrong as our government has officially acknowledged, and it provides a powerful cautionary tale for our times. However imperfect, this was a generation of men and women who saved the world, and then built it for us anew, better and stronger. We should never miss a chance to thank them. There is no better way to honor them than to categorically reject fear and the intolerance it breeds in our own times.
The politics of fear and intolerance, however, is alive and well, at least at one extreme of our political discourse; often this fear is as unreasoning and unjustified as the kind Roosevelt cautioned us against. The message is that people should be afraid: of Mexicans taking their jobs, of Syrian refugees and Muslims in general, of a tyrannical federal government, etc. Of course, in one candidate, this messaging has lost all pretense of subtlety and become overtly intolerant and violent. He struts and postures as an authoritarian figure capable of “making America great again” through the force of his self-proclaimed winning personality and great intellect. The very premise of his campaign insults America, insofar as it denies that America is already manifestly great, and that it is America’s pluralism and tolerance, broadly writ, that accounts for its greatness. If this carnival huckster were to actually implement what he advocates, not only would America cease to be great, but it would cease to be America.
Observing this theatre of the grotesque makes one nostalgic for the leadership of the “greatest generation.” Who among us would not trade one hundred Mitch McConnell types for one Bob Dole? Politics isn’t “bean bag,” as they say, and politicians of that generation were plenty capable of bare knuckles partisanship. In the end, however, one had the sense that for most of the statesmen that came of age during WWII, the welfare of the nation was the paramount concern. They were people with the capacity to be reasonable, to disagree without being disagreeable, people who remind me in temperament and intellect of my late father.
Fred Gearing was also a member of the WWII generation. During the war, he was a staff sergeant in the US Army Air Corp. He was a gunner and flight engineer on the B-26 bomber aircraft. On August 21, 1943, his tenth combat mission out of Tunisia, North Africa, my father’s plane was shot down near the target of their bombing run, the marshalling yards of Villa Literno, Italy (NW of Naples). The crew members were able to bail out of the doomed aircraft and were subsequently captured by German forces. He spent the balance of the war as a prisoner of war in Stalag 17 in Krems, Austria. After the war, the GI Bill afforded him the opportunity to study at the University of Chicago. Ultimately, he earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, and embarked on a career as a university professor, mostly at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
We are losing this generation, and it often seems now that we become a bit more lost with each passing. My father died over five years ago now. During the last weeks of his life, while under Hospice care, my father reflected on the arch of his life, and, as was his professorial habit, he wrote some of his reflections down. He wrote that tolerance was his personal icon, the central theme of what had mattered most in his life.
He found this tolerance among the people that had mattered most to him: “The kind of person the men and women were with whom and alongside of whom I struggled, among them a few mentors and forbearers in whose manner I tried to struggle, and many other Americans out there who often struggled too… The struggles had been strangely civilized, (although we often did not recognize this at the time). The men and women who struggled had been the very heart of it: They were tolerant of ambiguity… We dealt, that is, with men and women who lived comfortably with things which were indeterminate, with events which were unstable, with records which were cryptic, with interpretations which were unclear, while pressing forward the while to reduce, not the tolerance, but some aspect of the ambiguity itself. My icon had been a gift.”
To my father, it was tolerance itself, however imperfect and uneven its practice, that was the essential ingredient of American life. He wrote that, “all humans are built capable of such tolerance. Consider the imperfections of the human senses, of eyesight, of taste, of hearing, of touch. The tolerance can be resisted, as with some orthodox religious sects, as with some ideologies, as with cliques. But the tolerance can also be cultivated. I especially note my mentors who sought it out. I have implied above, and now claim: among nations Americans have cultivated it more. And, I do believe, this fact helps account for America’s prominence in main street economics and main street democracy, in the sciences and arts, and, yes, in war.”
And my father believed that it was tolerance that animated our founding documents. “I come, finally, to the foundation of the icon itself: No one can precisely identify the mix of luck and genius which brought them to it, but the founding fathers drew up a document called the US Constitution which has long stirred the pot of national governance and which has long kept it stirring.” Tolerance, broadly writ (ethnic, religious, intellectual, etc.), was his ideal, and the Constitution its institutional embodiment.
His final musings became dark, however, when he observed the nation’s politics prior to his death. For example, he was distressed by Senator Mitch McConnell doing what my Father described as, “stopping governance cold … and for the most naked and ugly of purposes. You heard it said, with no apparent embarrassment: Our first priority is to make this president a one term president. Recall the twenty or so ways the wordsmiths found to say that he’s not one of us.” And he added this footnote that makes me sad to this day when I read it: “my ponderings have given way to a start of panic. I am dying … and it may be that I am caused to die while I watch my America in great peril: my America where I’ve drawn almost every breath, where I’ve learned everything I may know, for which on one occasion (WWII) I did fight.”
Observing the spectacle of our national politics now, makes my father’s concerns seem both well-founded and prescient. In retrospect, Senator McConnell’s remarks early in the president’s first term should have been an ominous sign to us all; no pretence of decorum or comity, no mention of finding areas of common ground despite significant policy differences, no civility at all. And this from the Republican leader of the Senate, the institution that Social Studies teachers like myself have traditionally described according to the old adage, “ the saucer that cools the coffee;” the upper legislative chamber where the grown-ups find compromises and ways forward, separated from the rancor and hot-headedness of the people’s House. This remark was a signal, a “dog whistle” from a party elder, releasing the dogs of political war from all restraint. He was signaling that this president would not receive respect and the presumption of legitimacy that generally would be afforded any president, particularly one that had won by 9 million votes; compromise (of the sort that governance requires in our constitutional system), was out of the question. These early signals framed the ugly narrative that has since developed regarding the president.
Consider the mess that President Obama inherited: a deep and worsening recession with rising unemployment, two unfinished wars, a banking system and an auto industry on the verge of collapse. The banking system was rescued, the auto industry is thriving, unemployment is currently below levels commonly associated with healthy economies, the economy is growing, the wars have been ramped down and Bin Laden is dead. Despite it all, to listen to some of the GOP presidential candidates, the last 7 years have been a complete unmitigated disaster and the Affordable Care Act a signal of the certain coming of the apocalypse.
Now, with the once Grand Old Party in figurative flames, grappling with the completely horrifying possibility of Donald Trump being their standard bearer (should he overcome the weak, equivocating, and apparently too-little-too-late effort to stop him) the same party leader’s instinct seems to be to bring more gasoline to the book burning party. Senator McConnell now leads an effort to negate the president’s efforts to carry out the duty that the Constitution requires following the death of Justice Scalia. The president could not have been more responsible in fulfilling his duty: a thorough and exhaustive search, a complete vetting process, and the selection of a down-the-middle consensus candidate in Merrick Garland. Senator McConnell will not even meet with this universally respected and unquestionably qualified nominee, let alone call for hearings or a vote! Senator McConnell and the GOP Senate leadership seem incapable of resisting one last chance to deny President Obama legitimacy. They claim that it’s based on “principle,” “precedent,” and the need to have the voters decide (as if the American people hadn’t elected the president twice). In fact it is an unprecedented action on their part and a new low mark for the obstruction and purposeful dysfunction that have been the hallmarks of the GOP for the last 7 years and counting.
Do Senator McConnell and other party leaders not understand that such delegitimizing actions and words have created the environment that makes Trump’s ascendancy possible? When the elders of the party, those who are supposed to provide adult supervision, signal that civility and respect are no longer required, what exactly is going to happen? What obscene affronts to civil discourse become inevitable? As Jefferson wrote, “let Facts be submitted to a candid world.” The list would include, but not be limited to the following: unchecked birtherism; a House member shouting “you lie” at the POTUS during the State of the Union Address; Obama as secret Muslim conspiracy theories; obstructionism that has laid waste to the possibilities for governance in ways that would make the Vandals proud; abdication of all the responsibilities of a “loyal opposition;” “death panels” and numerous other absurdist policy fictions; the filibuster as standard operating procedure in the Senate…
Of course, like virtually everything else, the resulting division and polarization is deemed to be President Obama’s fault. It reminds one in a sickening way of the bully who smacks a kid in the back of the head on the school bus and then says “hey, stop hitting yourself.” It shouldn’t surprise anyone now that the GOP front-runner has taken up the bully role, as this attitude has been so thoroughly cultivated through code and obstruction. Trumpism is a monster of the GOP leadership’s creation, and like Mary Shelley’s monster, it can no longer be controlled. The monster is composed of a violent body, a hateful heart, and a defective brain. Party establishment types now wring their hands with worry that he’ll destroy the Republican brand; he’s gone too far, saying and doing things that were only supposed to be hinted at and expressed in code!
We do not need to worry about President Obama. He has proven to be more than a match for the bully. He has acquitted himself with dignity, presidential bearing, courage, poise, and judgment. History will smile on his presidency. What we need to be concerned about is the republic itself.
So what is to be done? Americans of good conscience - Republicans, Democrats, and independents - must recognize Trumpism for what it is, and know that what it represents is antithetical to what is essentially American. This is a nation based on the fearlessness and hopes of our predecessors; that pluralism and tolerance will always triumph over fear and intolerance. We all must stand together, despite our differences, against what we can certainly agree is a grotesque affront to civil society. The greatest responsibility, however, regarding the present imperative of safeguarding the republic from this menace, lies with our Republican friends; this has happened, after all, within their party and on their watch.
To our Republican Friends,
The time for equivocation has passed. Please denounce and disown Trump and everything he stands for. Do not say, as some have, that “Trump is unacceptable, but I’ll support the Republican nominee no matter what.” You can’t have it both ways. Say clearly and unambiguously that “I will not support him under any circumstances.” None of us, no matter how partisan, should take any pleasure in watching the agony going on within the Republican Party, and I for one do not. A healthy democracy needs at least two parties capable of governing and/or serving as the loyal opposition, and the GOP in its current fractured state of crisis, does not appear capable of either. It appears increasingly likely that if Trump is the nominee, or Ted Cruz for that matter (not much better regarding fear and intolerance), that the party is headed for electoral defeat. So what is there to lose; the election may already be lost. The question is what kind of party will the GOP be afterwards? There are worse things than losing an election. Losing your soul or the soul of your party, for example, would be far worse for you and the country. Please learn from the last 7 years, that flirting with certain political and social forces is a dangerous game. Become, once again, a principled party of limited government and constitutionalism, a party that reveres the Constitution enough to not seek to delegitimize a president who was elected twice by the very processes it prescribes. Do this for us, for all of us, and our forbearers. Don’t allow a cheap imitation of an authoritarian figure ascend to become the face of your party. My father and his generation sacrificed too much defeating the likes of him. This is one of those moments when it must be country over party. Do not let this pass. I know my dad and so many of his generation would thank you.
