The Next Frd? Roosevelt Understood The Need To Harness America’s Brainpower To Solve The Economic Problems Of The Depression. Gingrich Should Understand The Same Thing May Be Needed To Solve Today’s Delimmas

As an unabashed liberal - and a black one to boot - I was astonished last Wednesday to find myself concluding that Speaker Newt Gingrich’s maiden oratory was moving me more than any political statement I’d heard since LBJ introduced the Voting Rights Act almost 30 years ago. While there was much in Gingrich’s statement that requires respectful thought and discussion, I will confine myself here to those eloquent passages dealing with the need to attend to black children in poverty and in peril.

Gingrich recalled his breakfast at which two black House members talked about their feelings of helplessness on seeing doomed schoolchildren, and then he said: “for some reason, … that got through. I mean, that personalized it. That made it real, not just statistics, but real people.”

He hooked me there. I’ve found, over the years, that many white people have a hard time learning from black people. For a political leader in the full flush of victory to tell of such a learning experience while laying out his political intentions is virtually unknown in America.

Nevertheless, my caution signals blink furiously, because this is still Newt Gingrich. Despite reaching out to Democrats and to minorities on Wednesday, he is still the man who casually suggested that the Great Society was the product of the counterculture. And he is the man who has said time after time that “American Civilization,” as he likes to call it, worked just fine from the mid 18th century to the 1950s. Pardon me, but I don’t think my slave ancestors would agree, nor, having been born in segregation in the ‘30s, would I.

Moreover, Wednesday’s Newt Gingrich told Democrats that we could learn from - among others - Govs. John Engler of Michigan and George Allen of Virginia. David Broder has just assessed some of the programs of these governors in this newspaper and has concluded that Allen’s tax cuts “will largely be paid by the poor.” Turning to Engler, Broder cited a University of Michigan study of the 80,000 general welfare cases that the governor dropped; it concluded that the people affected “were less likely to have up-to-date skills, less likely to be hired in entry positions and more likely to have acquired physical and mental health problems.” The Michigan researchers concluded that these people needed what they had always needed: jobs and better training.

So, what is one to guess about the speaker’s meaning when he says he wants to “truly replace the current welfare state with an opportunity society.” As a person who grew up in the civil rights movement, I have always yearned for America to be a true opportunity society for everybody. And, as a former welfare worker in Cleveland, I can surely attest to the limitations of our welfare system.

But if all Gingrich means is that we should balance the budget by hacking away at government and giving the poor the “opportunity” to fend for themselves in what is for many of them a racist and job-parched environment, as Allen and Engler seem intent on doing, then this splendid speech will have turned out to be the cruelest and most brutal hoax imaginable.

Poor children need families, and in a culture where almost half the marriages end in divorce, the very least the most vulnerable citizens need for a chance to form and keep families is a real shot at earned income. But America is going through a profound economic upheaval that is pinching middle-class people, doing severe damage to unskilled whites and devastating unskilled blacks. Thus, while Gingrich rivets minds with lines about babies in dumpsters and 12- to 17-year-olds drowning in social pathology, nobody remembers to mention that blacks have suffered double digit unemployment for the past two decades or that (according to the Urban Institute) in 1993, 53 percent of black men 25 to 34 (the prime family forming and keeping ages) were either unemployed or earning too little to lift a family of four out of poverty.

So, in the spirit of the new speaker, I would suggest a book for him. It is Chicago Professor William Julius Wilson’s “The Declining Significance of Race,” the biggest lesson of which is definitely not its title. Wilson teaches powerfully that poor blacks have advanced in this country at times such as the world wars and the mid 20th century boom when their labor was desperately needed. When the need collapses, they suffer acutely.

The fact is, as Edward Luttwak has pointed out, America’s grip on what he calls “turbo charged capitalism” is piling up enormous social costs every day. The bottom 60 percent of the wage scale is feeling it, and the only answers the political system seems to be yielding up are tax cuts and less government.

The speaker professes great admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt. My own sense is that Roosevelt would have faced our current economic problems candidly as he did those of 1933. He acknowledged to the nation that our troubles were enormous and that he didn’t have all the answers. Then he enlisted the best minds in the nation to try this and try that and try the other thing until some things began to work.

I remember back then my first personal encounter with a white person in Kansas City, my segregated hometown. It was 1937, and I was about 5, and the man was working on a sewer a few doors from my house. I watched him work. In that cultural context, I must have looked like a futureless little pickaninny to him, but he asked me my name, and I told him and asked him his. I will never forget his answer: “Little boy,” he said in the weariest voice I’ve ever heard, “I’m too poor to have a name… just Mr. Roosevelt’s little job here.”

In 1944, Roosevelt told us America needed an economic Bill of Rights, saying: “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

Proceeding from these thoughts, which are close to some expressed by the speaker on Wednesday, Roosevelt went on to outline his program. According to his biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin, the economic Bill of Rights “must include: the right to a useful and remunerative job; the earnings sufficient for adequate food and clothing and recreation; to decent housing; to adequate medical care; to protection from the economic fears of old age and unemployment; to a good education.”

Government worked for that white man in Kansas City, and self-help, jobs and government worked to lift a few million blacks to the middle class in the wake of the civil rights movement. FDR sketched a powerful vision of a true opportunity society. I hope that when the speaker talks so powerfully about his vision and about House members swapping district visits to deepen their understanding and their collegiality, he comprehends the need to confront the current economic security crisis head-on. Verbal dexterity and ideology won’t work. Neither will punishing the poor.

FDR backed up his eloquence with brilliant use of the nation’s brainpower and its government to achieve his immortality. All of that could be within this speaker’s grasp.

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