WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE DON'T KNOW
April 29, 2003 

by Joe Sobran

     At my age you're expected to complain about the 
younger generation, and at times I'm tempted to lament 
their ignorance of history. But the moment I do, I'm 
checked by a question: Whose fault is that? Who educated 
them? The answer, of course, is my generation. So I wind 
up pitying today's youth. 

     Every generation has a lot of catching up to do. The 
history their parents learned is obsolete, because 
history now includes their parents' experience on top of 
all that happened before. I remember the Eisenhower 
years, the rise of Fidel Castro, the Kennedy and King 
assassinations, the Vietnam war. Today's kids have to 
read about all that. It can never be as real to them as 
it is to me. 

     In the same way, I had to read up on things my 
parents remembered vividly: the Depression, Franklin D. 
Roosevelt, World War II. These were not things in the 
past; they were still present. Even in the prosperous 
Fifties and later, most adults feared a return of the 
Depression. The power of this memory shaped the politics 
of the 1950s to a degree you wouldn't suspect from 
reading about the events of the time. The Republicans 
bore the heavy burden of blame for the Depression; the 
Democrats were the party of "the little man." If you 
don't understand that, you can't understand the time as 
it felt to those who lived it. 

     The present is never just the present. It is the 
present plus all its memories. But its dominant memories 
are also distorted by selection. We tend to remember 
highlights, headlines, and slogans, but not the rich 
contexts of events. Many of the events we remember are 
isolated and given an exaggerated prominence. Baseball 
fans remember what Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams did in 
1941, but it's harder to remember which teams won the 
pennants and the World Series, things that seemed more 
important at the time. 

     Our historic memories are always abridgments of the 
past. Today Franklin Roosevelt is remembered for "leading 
us" through the Depression and World War II. The details 
are largely forgotten; the longest presidency in American 
history is reduced to a couple of slogans and a few 
newsreel images. (We've even forgotten that people used 
to go to the movies to see the news!) 

     In a sense, every generation is disinherited, cut 
off by time itself from the things it needs to know. What 
was undecided and complex then seems simple and 
inevitable now; what seemed radical then seems normal 
now. And most people hardly realized that vast changes 
were taking place. Is it any wonder that their 
grandchildren and great-grandchildren don't know? 

     Facing the Depression, Roosevelt took a series of 
steps that added up to a profound shift in the American 
system of government -- and the Depression only got 
worse. Promising to keep America out of World War II, he 
was secretly taking measures to get America into that 
war, long before Pearl Harbor. But he was a power 
politician and propagandist of great genius, and he got 
away with everything. His lasting legacy is the 
destruction of limited, constitutional government. 

     Only once did his designs become so naked and 
shocking that they were defeated. That was when he tried 
to "pack" the U.S. Supreme Court, making it subordinate 
to him and thus tearing down the checks and balances 
essential to constitutional government. Even his 
followers turned against him for once; yet he soon wound 
up getting his way with the Court when several justices 
retired, died, or changed their minds about 
constitutionality. 

     A few observers discerned what Roosevelt was up to 
and tried to warn the country. They were largely ignored; 
today their books are hard to find. (One of the shrewdest 
of them, Garet Garrett, spent his last years literally 
living in a cave.) But he is now generally considered a 
great president -- for doing exactly what his critics 
accused him of doing. And his perversions of presidential 
power are now used as precedents for others, with the 
approval of "conservatives." 

     If so few of his contemporaries, following events as 
they occurred from day to day, managed to penetrate 
Roosevelt's grand deceptions, how are today's young 
people supposed to understand? Not only have they been 
given the wrong answers; they don't realize there were 
ever questions. They were disinherited before they were 
born. 

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