On the evening of Oct. 14, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of his famous Fireside Chats to a national radio audience. What used to be called Community Chest drives—local campaigns to raise money for social-welfare charities—were about to be launched, and FDR wished to pay tribute to “the past and present generosity of the American people.” Such private agencies, he explained, were essential to “social welfare and social justice” and not “contradictory … to government effort.” The good works of what we now call “private” charity were essential to community needs, especially in times of emergency; the point, in FDR’s message, was for private and public agencies to combine forces and work in harmony.
What intrigues me about Roosevelt’s speech is that, so far as I am aware, it is the first time that FDR, as the nation’s president, made any sort of public comment about the historic New England Hurricane of 1938 which, more than three weeks earlier, had devastated huge portions of the northeast coast of the United States, killing nearly 700 people. Roosevelt used the “New England tragedy” as a hopeful example of the kind of private-public relief efforts that will “lift up … our Nation to a standard of living that will conform with decency and comfort and self-respect.” Nowhere, however, does he suggest that such relief is a primary responsibility of the federal government—or that he, as president, is obliged to inspect the devastated regions, much less comfort its thousands of victims.
I thought of this the other morning as I watched Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) being interrogated about Hurricane Harvey by a team of CBS News personalities. Was President Trump doing enough to relieve flood-ravaged Houston? Had his arrival in Texas been premature, thereby complicating rescue efforts? Was his choice of words to suffering citizens comforting—or subtly insulting? Were his wife’s high-heeled pumps appropriate footwear in devastated precincts?
To his credit, Sanders seemed disinclined to score political points at a moment when people were drowning and thousands driven from their homes. But the line of questioning—indeed, most press coverage related to Trump—served to underscore the degree to which presidential power and responsibility, since Franklin Roosevelt’s day, has evolved (to paraphrase Trump’s predecessor) to stem the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. A president is not just the impresario of any executive response to natural disasters—which must be flawless and instantaneous—but national healer as well, journeying personally to grounds zero and offering consolation to individual victims and larger communities.
As if to emphasize the point, the Internet has lately been full of photographs of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama offering solace to distressed citizens, their sad expressions fixed in rigid empathy. I don’t know what the ultimate verdict may be about Trump’s performance—those Obama hug shots seem intended to compare and rebuke—but he has certainly learned a lesson from the example of Hurricane Katrina and George W. Bush, some dozen years ago. Bush made the mistake of initially deferring to the judgment of local New Orleans officials—almost all of whom were revealed to be dangerously incompetent—and praising the initial efforts of federal relief workers. Bush had also erred in winning a second term some months earlier, leaving the media in a truculent mood, ready to pounce.
Of course, it should also be emphasized that, not so long ago, the royal touch was not considered a primary duty of presidents, and that very nearly within living memory, acts of God didn’t fall within the purview of federal power. In 1906, when San Francisco was leveled by earthquake, and nearly 3,000 citizens were killed, the task of rescue and recovery was left, almost exclusively, to state and local government. It is true that the commanding officer of the nearby Presidio, General Frederick Funston, took it upon himself to declare martial law (unofficially) and organize relief. But no one seemed especially bothered by Funston’s coup, and across the continent in Washington, neither Congress nor President Theodore Roosevelt found it necessary to intervene.
Similarly, two decades later (1927), when the floodwaters of the Mississippi River ravaged some 21,000 square miles of the Delta region and neighboring Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas—flooding towns and cities and displacing untold thousands of impoverished residents—President Calvin Coolidge was prompted, but hardly required, to dispatch his jack-of-all-trades commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, to direct relief efforts. Hoover had made his public reputation feeding starving multitudes in war-ravaged Europe; now his engineering genius salvaged order from chaos, and helped elect him to the White House the following year.
In that sense, Donald Trump has been the beneficiary of changed expectations about federal power. The president who was elected to restore the nation’s industrial might and republican confidence is now expected to deliver, and drain the swamps of Texas as well as Washington. And since the presidency is about perception as much as performance—well, who knows? With the right combination of words, gestures, proclamations, and infusions of cash, he might even succeed.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
