The Tragedy of Liberal Power

Sydney (15 August)

On 14 February 1945, Corporal Ira Hayes pushed toward Iwo Jima Hill, Allied bombers flattened Dresden, and – aboard the U.S.S Quincy – slaves wandered close to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his daughter, Anna Boettiger.

The President’s ship was anchored in the Suez Canal, en route to Washington D.C. from the Yalta Conference, and he prepared to quietly meet Ibn Saud, King of the newly-unified Saudi Arabia, for the first time.

King Saud had left Jeddah days earlier on an American naval vessel, alongside a group of princes, diplomats, attendants, and ‘nine miscellaneous slaves,’ according to a manifest stored at East Carolina University’s Joyner Library. And President Roosevelt, onboard the U.S.S Quincy, did not appear to have a problem with that.

Roosevelt and Saud bonded over injuries and their love of farming, disagreed over Zionism, and promised to remain friends, Col. William Eddy – the meeting organiser – described in his 1954 book, FDR Meets Ibn Saud.

“[The President was] a charming host, witty conversationalist, with the spark and light in his eyes and that gracious smile [that won people over,]” Eddy said. “With Ibn Saud, [Roosevelt] was his very best,” Eddy added.

The President, less than two months away from death, seemed to regard Saud’s slaves as a kind of exotic curiosity. “[The] whole party was a scream,” he later wrote about the King’s partly enslaved entourage, in a letter to his cousin, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Roosevelt was neither incapable of confrontation nor blind to labour exploitation. Over the 1930s, he backed Labor Secretary Frances Perkins’ ground-breaking labour organising and safety reforms, and excoriated American business leaders.

“[Organised corporate interests] are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match,” he said at a 1936 rally.

But Roosevelt’s liberalism, even in its purest, rarely-achieved form, ended at the borders of the United States. And in doing so, it empowered reactionaries and blunted parts of his domestic agenda by letting the radical right avoid having to oppose universal respect for human dignity.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s – having accepted that respecting human dignity is conditional, on a ship with Ibn Saud and at home – Roosevelt failed at the macabre exercise of defining those worthy of protection.

He began his Presidency on the back foot, trying, and often failing, to explain why specific groups deserved to be treated with basic respect. He was able to mount effective majoritarian defences of the American working class, but failed to advance similar protections for Black Americans and Americans of Mexican and Japanese ancestry.

In 1934, while working to pass the Social Security Act, Roosevelt met with NAACP leader Walter White at the White House to discuss an early anti-lynching bill. White pushed the President on the issue, and Roosevelt appeared flustered. But the discussion did not yield much.

Roosevelt was not fond of lynchings, having described them as vile murders and rejections of the commandment that ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ in a 1933 talk to the Federal Council of Churches in America. “We do not excuse those in high places or in low who condone lynch law,” he told the group.

But he could not bring himself to end the practice. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, [opponents] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass [to] keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk,” he reportedly told White, according to former F.D.R Library Director Paul Sparrow.

To Roosevelt, lynchings were moral affronts that he was powerless to do anything about. He may have been right, but that was partly his own fault. The moment the President – like other liberals – accepted that human dignity was not universal, political fights became fights about whose humanity mattered.

They became fights that ethnonationalists, authoritarians, and religious extremists – those that Reinhold Niebuhr (secularly) described as the ‘children of darkness,’ the moral cynics among us – are entirely capable of winning.

Once liberals accept that human dignity is conditional, the ‘children of darkness’ need simply to prey on the anxieties, economic hardships, and, indeed, prejudices of decent voters to wind back progress. That is substantially easier than pushing back against most people’s innate, moral intuition that dignity is universal.

President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, understood this better than he did. While he prepared to break bread with King Saud and his slaves, the First Lady was in Washington D.C, thinking about Abraham Lincoln.

“Today, when we face problems which would come close to his heart, I think the knowledge of his firm belief in the dignity of the human being is something from which many of us draw strength and inspiration,” she wrote in a 13 February column, celebrating Lincoln’s birthday.

During the President’s meeting, she went further. “[Global peace] cannot be [achieved], however, unless the people of the nations involved see to it that at home they build the kind of atmosphere in which economic and political freedom is possible,” she wrote on 14 February.

And Eleanor Roosevelt’s support for universal dignity went beyond vague columns. In 1934, she arranged Walter White’s meeting with the President, and likely helped him prepare for it, having been a long-time member of the NAACP.

Roosevelt, in the final decades of her life, also routinely condemned Saudi Arabian slavery – which formally ended on 6 November 1962, one day before her death – as backward and publicly chided King Saud over it.

“To many of us, the King does not seem to have exercised his powers to raise the standard of living of his people, to get rid, at this late date, of all slavery in his kingdom,” she wrote in February 1957.

But despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s best efforts, both in the United Nations and in meetings with her husband’s successors, liberal statesmen continue to follow in President Roosevelt’s footsteps, rather than her own.

Liberal statesmen solemnly trigger oil shocks in solidarity with the victims of Bucha and Lviv, but their willingness to act does not seem to extend quite as far as Al Fashir, Tigray, or Khan Younis. They preach the beauty of pluralism in the morning, and then proceed to fete religious autocrats and hold umbrellas over genocidal presidents at noon.

There is a temptation on the part of governing liberals to compartmentalise responses to foreign atrocities, and wipe them away as wholly unrelated to domestic cohesion. But this ignores both the fact that voters live in global information environments and maintain the capacity to infer principles from actions.

When politicians alternatively defend and disregard foreign atrocities, which are often visible to their voters, they do the work of would-be authoritarians at home. They tell their electorates that human dignity is not universal, that it can be subordinated to economic and political interests.

They can try to explain why human dignity should be extended to everyone at home, but will face the same challenges that Roosevelt did. Reactionary politicians can appeal to the worst instincts of decent voters once liberal politicians give up on universalism.

When liberals resurrect President Roosevelt’s worst instincts – which he displayed on a ship in early 1945 – they should not expect to avert his historic failures.

By Avinash Govind