Chapter One

1. FOR AMERICA'S SAKE

A New Story for America
December 12, 2006


My father dropped out of the fourth grade and never returned to school because his family needed him to pick cotton to help make ends meet. The Great Depression knocked him down and almost out. When I was born he was making $2 a day working on the highway to Oklahoma City. He never took home more than $100 a week in his working life, and he made that only when he joined the union in the last job he held. He voted for Franklin Roosevelt in four straight elections and would have gone on voting for him until kingdom come if he'd had the chance. I once asked him why, and he said, "Because he was my friend." My father of course never met FDR; no politician ever paid him much note. Many years later when I wound up working in the White House my parents came for a visit and my father asked to see the Roosevelt Room. I don't quite know how to explain it, except that my father knew who was on his side. When FDR died my father wept; he had lost his friend. This man with a fourth-grade education understood what the patrician in the White House meant when he talked about "economic royalism" and how private power no less than public power can bring America to ruin in the absence of democratic controls. When the president said "the malefactors of great wealth" had concentrated into their own hands "an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor, and other people's lives," my father said amen; he believed the president knew what life was like for people like him. When the president said life was no longer free, liberty no long