It seems that too often the cause of the civil war is obscured with statements about states rights and preserving the Union. Lincoln himself may be partly to blame, because at the beginning of the war he did not believe that the North would fight to end slavery. The Secessionists of South Carolina, in their Articles of Secession, did not, however, view the cause of secession as anything but the cause to preserve slavery.

Contrary to how TVD characterizes Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan, I would say it raises frontally the issue of the dangerous and growing wealth inequality in the United States by proposing to slash spending radically on programs that mostly benefit lower- and middle-income people while sharply reducing taxes for wealthier people and corporations. Almost all the savings on program cuts would go to pay for the tax cuts, and the deficits wouldn't start going down (theoretically) for 30 years, contrary to what TVD says. Tax cuts for the well off versus adequate health care, education, environmental protection, and other services for most Americans who are not well off -- that's the real debate the nation needs to have.

I, too, thought FDR was the rock holding America together through my childhood up to and nearly through WWII. But in subsequent years, I came more and more to honor Eleanor not just for her stands as FDR's wife, but for her later leadership at the United Nations. I understand she drafted a major part of the historic UN Declaration of Human Rights signed in San Francisco with her as the chief American spokesperson for it. I also came to notice that the term "Human Rights" eventually became commonplace throughout the world after that document was signed. Nearly all nations had to claim it as a standard for their policies whether they actually followed the UN document standards or not (most of us do not or cannot -- they are utopian for actual practices but remain a global inspiration). Thanks, Ted, for helping to keep FDR's vision (and thus Eleanor's) alive today. Where is someone like him -- and her -- when we need them??!!

Thank you Ted, for this great article.

Yesterday I watched an amazing film clip of a speech FDR gave in 1944 in the the midst of WWII in which he said,

“Nowadays, certain economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. A second Bill of Rights under, which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for for all, regardless of station, or race, or creed. Among these are the right to a useful and remunerative job... The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation. The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return that will give him and his family a decent living. The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom… from unfair competition and domination by monopolicies at home or abroad. The right of every family to a decent home. The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. The right to adequate protection from the fears of old age, sickness, accidents and unemployment. The right to a good education. All of these rights spell security, and after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights and new goals of human happiness and well being. For unless there is security here at home, there cannot be lasting peace at in the world.“

The clip is toward the end of a Bill Moyers' Journal segment featuring the economist James K. Galbraith, author of "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too." This books was published in 2008 just weeks before the collapse of Lehman Bros. triggered the Great Recession. It eloquently describes how the Bush administration’s "predator state" scammed the public sector and undermined public institutions for private profit. Now, Tea Party activists and mainstream Republicans alike venemously condemn Roosevelt's New Deal values, branding them as "socialist."

Our hapless president is so intimidated by the right and infatuated with corporate culture that he doesn't seem to notice that words are a poor substitute for deeds when it comes to achieving a just and prosperous society. Nonetheless, Obama too is frequently branded as a "socialist" and a "foreigner." In many ways, our nation has fallen into a political abyss that would devour a actual leader like FDR.

Were you there to witness both events?

Thanks for your early comments. Hearstscribe asks if I witnessed the events discussed. In fact, I did. I also witnessed the shelling of Baltimore Harbor when Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star Spangled Banner"
and expect to be around for the next millenium as well.

One word on leadership: I mentioned that the Ryan Plan was a point of departure for the kind of serious debate we need not only about deficit reduction but about national priorities and the appropriate roles of federal, state, and local governments and the private sector. (I disagree with much of the plan's specifics but that is beside the point). I earlier had deplored President Obama's prompt discarding of his own deficit-reduction commission's recommendations. Since this piece was written, the White Houe has announced that an Obama Plan, responding to the Ryan Plan, will be presented in a day or two. This is a highly encouraging development. I hope it will hasten the serious and substantive national debate we require on these issues---and, coincidentally, will signal the President's intention to aggressively present his own positive policy alternatives from this point forward.

Every worker's paycheck suffers from the evil cookie monster of 76 years of expanded F.I.C.A. payroll taxes. Foggy Bottom harbors many hidden socialists, communists, and spies still fighting for the evil empire and still rooting for the wrong side of the 'cold war'. And, the many years of unnecessary Depression due to federal government expansion make it three tragic legacies for the 12 year + overrated president of New Deal infamy. April 12 can not come and go fast enough! As for the other 3 events, take another pass.

Suggest folks also read columnist Leonard Pitts' perspective:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/09/2159376/the-civil-war-a-conspiracy-of.html

I deeply appreciate Mr. Van Dyk's commemoration of 12 April 1945, the date President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at the health spa in Warm Springs, Georgia.

FDR was by far our nation's greatest president, and his demise – announced to my mother and me by the motorman of a Roanoke, Virginia streetcar – is my second politically significant memory; I had turned five years old just a few days before.

(Autobiographical aside: my first and earliest politically significant memory is from 1942: my father, mother and I viewing the Normandie as she lay crippled at the French Line pier in Midtown Manhattan; she had limped back into port after being wounded by a Nazi torpedo just off Long Island.)

Returning to the topic of Mr. Van Dyk's essay, its subsequent assertions unfortunately threaten to reduce it to an unintentional satire on itself.

First there is Mr. Van Dyk's linkage of FDR's untimely death with the secessionist South's 12 April 1861 attack on Fort Sumter. The synchronicity of dates was one of the pieces of so-called evidence in the absurdly conspiranoid claim President Roosevelt was poisoned by agents of a capitalist/die-hard-Confederate cabal.

The choice of 12 April for FDR's alleged assassination was said to be a coded message: the South – or rather the slave-keeping über-capitalist mentality of the South – was rising again, this time hand-in-glove with the Yankee industrialists.

Next, though Mr. Van Dyk downplays the breathtaking humanitarian achievements of the New Deal – policies that bravely confronted the malevolence of U.S. capitalism (whether North or South) and everywhere sought to blunt its savagery – he correctly notes the lingering influence these ameliorative efforts had on “Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Democratic congressional leaders (who) were inspired by FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, known in particular for her concern for women, minorities, and children.”

But then Mr. Van Dyk shows his true colors. He characterizes the subsequent, racism-and-misogyny-driven Hard Right electoral triumph that has killed both the American Experiment in constitutional democracy and the American Dream – the ignorance-fueled victory that has murdered Dream and Experiment beyond any possibility of resurrection – as nothing more than “revisiting the ways and means of our governance.”

And in complete indifference to the conquest's growing death toll – the nearly 50,000 persons slain each year by denial of health care, the millions more seniors, disabled and chronically unemployed people slated for extermination by the maliciously genocidal destruction of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – Mr. Van Dyk claims “we are...doing it peaceably and proceeding from bases of law and custom – no shots being fired, as at Fort Sumter, or threats of totalitarian takeover...”

As to the “totalitarian takeover,” Mr. Van Dyk need but look around: the capitalist aristocracy – less than one percent of the nation's population – now owns or controls more than half the nation's wealth.

The former “land of opportunity” is thus now notorious for its ever-more-glaring socioeconomic dichotomy. And after two years of Barack Obama's betrayer-presidency, it is clear there are no longer any meaningful differences between Republicans and Democrats – that the United States has become a one-party nation in which there will never again be any real effort to ease the suffering inflicted by capitalist predation.

In other words, the “totalitarian takeover” has already happened.

As to “law and custom,” has Mr. Van Dyk forgotten the Nazis were produced by capitalism's manipulation of German “law and custom” – that the Teabaggers are spawned by capitalism's nearly identical manipulation of U.S. “law and custom”?

Is Mr. Van Dyk somehow unaware Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's unapologetic war against the poor and the unemployed is – in its own cleverly euphemistic way – hardly less genocidal than Hitler's Final Solution?

Shame on Mr. Van Dyk. Surely he knows there is nothing “peaceable” about death from homelessness, starvation and untreated illness – which, of course (precisely because such fatalities are murder without “shots being fired”) – is the very sort of extermination program the capitalists love best.

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CORRECTION: a tired-eyed, arthritic-fingered typing error added an extra zero to the number of persons killed annually by lack of health care in the United States, a mistake in the above comment I just now discovered and have corrected accordingly. My blunder, my apology.