The miracle man: FDR & the saving of a nation.

All last month there were quiet, almost unnoticed, memorials marking the fiftieth-anniversary of the death of the twentieth-century's great president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There have been newspaper columns, stories on television news, and discussion shows, and a ceremony at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he died. In a time of lesser men, these have been salutary reminders that a true leader can evoke and must evoke what is best in a nation.

He was the president of my generation's youth. I proudly cast my first vote for him in his second election to the presidency. In the previous four years he had transformed the world in which I lived. He had restored an almost despairing nation to life and energy and strength.

Much has been written about the Great Depression but to those of us who lived during it nothing can convey the reality. I have never forgotten the visceral clutch of fear I felt when one day, coming home from school, my friends and I found ourselves on the edge of a crowd of muttering and weeping adults. The bank on our route home had closed suddenly. My godfather worked in that bank, my father had been a director, and all the money my grandfather had been able to leave my grandmother was deposited there. Half the people in our small town were affected by that closing, and closings like that were repeated thousands of times across the country.

Hard times were a given. The old people we knew scraped by on pittances. Farm relatives brought food to people living in town. Saddest to remember now are the fathers who woke every morning, donned their brushed and pressed old suits, put on their hats, and went uptown to offices and stores where there was scarcely any business. And every day we were reminded that the spreading poverty was nationwide. The boxcars on the trains running through town were crowded with men, some sitting in the doorways of the empty cars, others riding precariously on top. The railroad tramps of a previous time had been joined by men by the hundreds drifting from one part of the country to the other looking for work. The old gravel pit on the edge of our town was the site of what was then called "a jungle," a place where the drifting men gathered at night, warming what food they had in tin cans over open fires.

People tried to help. My father was mayor of our town then. Every night the chief of police (there were two policemen!) gathered some of the men and gave as many as he could beds in the town jail. In the morning he gave them dimes to get coffee. Some of the men went through town offering to work for food. On the way to school we would see one man or the other sitting at the table the sisters kept on the convent porch.

But the desperation was growing. Industrial production was down to 56 percent of the 1929 level. Thirteen million people were unemployed. Farmers were in terrible straits, faced either with losing their farms or the inability to sell their crops. All over America dreams were dead. And people looked for someone to blame. Divisions grew. Radio was new and a means of influencing the many. Demagogues crowded the airwaves. The Communist party was growing. There were riots here and there.

And then came that jaunty, miraculous man telling us that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. "This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper...," he told us in his inaugural address. And we began to believe.

In the much-talked-about 100 days he acted quickly to do what he promised and won the enactment of the most sweeping legislative program in U.S. history. He saved the banks and reformed them through the Glass-Steagall Act and bolstered them with the Federal Deposit Insurance Act. The Federal Emergency Relief Act granted funds to states for direct relief. The Civilian Conservation Corps was to enlist 500,000 young men in reforestation and flood control work. Mortgage relief was enacted and was to aid millions of persons. The Farm Credit Administration and the Farm Bankruptcy Act helped some farmers refinance mortgages and others who had lost farms to regain them. Homes were saved for threatened homeowners by the Home Owners Loan Corporation. These and many other aspects of the New Deal touched the lives of people directly. They felt the touch of Roosevelt's compassion--the real ability to understand their condition--and the compassion of those who worked with him.

The people did not forget. On that April night when his funeral train moved toward Washington, they paid tribute. Eleanor Roosevelt described it later:

I lay in my berth all night with the window shade up, looking out at the countryside he had loved and watching the faces of the people at stations, and even at the crossroads, who came to pay their last tribute all through the night.

The only recollection I clearly have is thinking about "The Lonesome Train," the musical poem about Lincoln's death. ("A lonesome train on a lonesome track/Seven coaches painted black/A slow train, a quiet train/Carrying Lincoln home again....") I had always liked it so well--and now this was so much like it."

And on the next night as the train carried his body home to Hyde Park from Washington, the same thing was true. Henry Wallace, one of the mourners, wrote, "Although there weren't many stars out and no visible moon, I could see the silent, bowed crowds that lined the sorrowful tracks to pay tribute to their fallen leader as he made his last trip home. The train just crept along. Everything seemed dirgelike. Even the wheels sounded like so many muffled drums."

Fifty years later we, too, remember. And hope for his like again.