Recently I started watching the Ken Burns series on The Roosevelts. It more or less covers the century from when Teddy Roosevelt was born in 1858 until when Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962 at the age of 78. Teddy only lived 60 years, dying in 1919 and Franklin (FDR) died in 1945 at age 63. Ken Burns is my age and is perhaps the best chronicler of American history (at least in film) of my generation with such notable works as The Brooklyn Bridge (1981), The Statue of Liberty (1985), The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The National Parks (2009), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019). He is a regular nominee and winner of documentary Academy Awards and Emmy Awards and is generally renowned in the field. I recently told someone who was despondent over the loss by the Democrats in the recent presidential election that they should watch the Ken Burns series on The Roosevelts because it does a marvelous job of adding historical perspective to our thinking about how to cope with the current events that are so perplexing us. I am only half way through the Roosevelt series (though I do think I watched it in full in 2014 and was even invited by a Roosevelt family member – granddaughter to FDR – to attend the Ken Burns premiere of their family epic) and I am already quite taken with the perspective it adds about how to view the pendulum swings of the political juggernaut of the United States of America.
I was given an award six or seven years ago by the people at Federal Hall in lower Manhattan. Federal Hall is the old hall at the northeast corner of Broad & Wall Streets and is thus at the physical vortex of American business and finance. On the northwest corner sits 16 Wall Street, which was the historic headquarters of Bankers Trust Company (with its emblematic and globally recognizable pyramid on the roof). Needless to say, I have strong ties to 16 Wall Street, where I had to serve a week of “Vault Duty” in its multi-floor, Sub-basement A securities vault during my first year as a young bank officer. On the southeast corner is the famous home of J.P. Morgan at 23 Wall Street with its huge banking floor and massive crystal chandelier. The distressed real estate company I ran in 2008-2010 owned 23 Wall Street, so I became very familiar with that unique and vexing little piece of iconic real estate. And, of course, on the southwest corner sits the historic New York Stock Exchange building, which I can say has been at the center of all that I did for 45 years on Wall Street in one way or another.
Federal Hall is a Greek Revival–style building, completed in 1842 that began life as the New York Custom House. It is owned and operated by the National Park Service as a national monument and is technically called Federal Hall National Memorial. It sits on the site of the original City Hall of NYC. It has a storied history that made it a centerpiece before, during and after the Revolutionary War. It is where the first Congress of the United States met and it is where George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the newly formed nation in 1789. That is why his statue in bronze stands at the top of the front steps facing down Broad Street. The current building served as Custom House and then a Treasury repository for one tenth of the U.S.’s gold and silver reserves at the turn of the Twentieth Century. It also housed the Assay Office and even for a time, Prohibition agents were housed there. For the last 25 years Federal Hall has been a ceremonial event space that the National Park Service uses for everything from the McCain/Obama town hall gathering to various gala award ceremonies. It was at one such gala that I and several other people actively working to restore the New York Harbor waterfront (those were my NY Wheel days) received a Teddy Roosevelt award from the National Park Service. The award itself is a one foot high bust of Teddy Roosevelt, presumably in honor of his foundational role in designating the first five national parks and signing into law the Antiquities Act of 1906.
I have always liked that award since I thought so well of Teddy Roosevelt and his role in American history. Well, the Ken Burns documentary lays out heretofore unknown facts (at least to me) about Roosevelt’s good and bad acts for the nation. To say that it is a more balanced story than I realized is an understatement. The same can be said of FDR and his follow-on role as the only four-term president of the country. In fact, I’m guessing that when I finish watching the series, while I may respect some of the actions of Teddy and FDR, it may well be Eleanor Roosevelt who I will most admire for her dedication to equal justice and the wellbeing of the American people.
The reason that is so important to understand in these trying times is that it reminds us that there have been many many times in American history when the forces of evil or at least less than good forces have prevailed and forced politicians who may have otherwise been well-intentioned to pursue policies that with hindsight were bad and destructive or unkind policies that perhaps cut into the average American’s prosperity and sometimes even his or her wellbeing. The thing to remember is that the country moves in cycles as we see in all history and that public sentiment tends to swing back and forth between nature and grace to varying degrees. It takes the perspective of time and experience to sometimes see just how good or bad those efforts and policies truly are. I wrote this week on the occasion of Jimmy Carter’s death that he may well prove to nostalgically be one of the best presidents we ever had just as Teddy Roosevelt, with his face forever carved into the South Dakota hillside of Mount Rushmore, may be proving over time to have been less selfless and less a positive force than we thought.
While I will admit that conclusions should not be reached prematurely and that the passage of time will out in these matters, for my money right now, I believe the world will see that Joe Biden was a great president and that Donald Trump was and will be a disastrous president. I insist on saying that I want Trump’s presidency to do good things for the long run benefit of our country and people, but it’s just that I don’t think that’s what will happen. I do agree its important to hold judgement since there is little I think I/we can do to alter the current course until the interim elections in 2026 and then the presidential election in 2028, and my general belief is that we must all always hope for the best and not be part of the problem rather than the solution. What I really come away feeling is that none of us will truly understand who is right and wrong until we have the benefit of the long view…I just wish that didn’t take so long to unfold and that so many people can be hurt by bad decisions in the meantime.