THOSE NASTY ANGELS

By Edwin Cooney

In his Monday, March 4th, 1861 Inaugural, in an attempt to urge national unity over rebellion, Abraham Lincoln referred  to our highest tendencies as a people as "the better angels of our nature." Not to be outdone by "the Great Emancipator,” Richard Nixon used the same phrase to make the same observation during his Monday, January 20th, 1969 Inauguration!

As I look over the divisions and resentments occurring in 2023's version of national politics, two things are obvious. First, these new House priorities don't address the real issues people really and truly are worried about. These issues include climate change, the financing of badly needed infrastructure, and the worries that traditional majority groups have about becoming minorities in an increasingly Black, Hispanic, and other ethnic and gender-oriented constituency. Second, most of the priority issues being enunciated by the House's new majority are designed to get back at former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her "left wing" minions. As negative and destructive as this may be, it's very traditional. Here are some examples:

1) In July of 1921, the new GOP Senate majority, resentful of much of the Wilson Administration's domestic and foreign policies, opened an investigation of the Wilson Navy Department and, specifically, of the activities of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Young Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had been the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate in 1920. His prominence and his charming personality were potential future political threats to the Republicans’ political future. The question was whether or how much the Navy Department had been involved in the efforts of the Newport, Rhode Island Naval Base's efforts to clean up a homosexual scandal. FDR sought to minimize his participation in the matter which he barely managed to do. Ted Morgan in his 1981 biography of FDR shows that Roosevelt was much more vulnerable to the charge than he had insisted. The hearings put a lot of stress on young Franklin and that heavy stress, Morgan insists, given FDR's health history, may well have contributed to his August 10th, 1921 polio attack. (Note: the naval base scandal was never a political issue against FDR, as controversial as it was, once he was elected President!)

2) During the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of Congress's agenda was designed to clean up the accomplishments of the 

Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The Taft-Hartley bill, offered in 1947 by Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft and New Jersey Congressman Frederick A. Hartley, countered the Wagner Act of 1938 guaranteeing the legitimacy of labor unions and their right to strike. Other anti-Roosevelt and Truman congressional actions included the work of the unAmerican Activities Committee and its subcommittee that Congressman Richard Nixon used to investigate former State Department employee Alger Hiss who went to jail for denying his membership in the Communist Party in 1938. The Eisenhower Administration was nearly denied the right to negotiate treaties by the proposed Bricker Amendment which sought to alter the president's ability and flexibility during international treaty negotiations.  

 

3) Congressional investigative and other activities have plagued the post-presidential reputations of every president since the 1950s. These investigations, although they occasionally may disclose vital errors, are the type of advice to which those nastier angels of our nature are so susceptible. The most common of this type of advice is the suggestion that when something negative or bad happens, don't get mad, get even! 

The audacity of the American people to elect a Black President in 2008 and again in 2012 just had to be countered by his opponents as the election of a foreigner or of a radical Muslim!

The worst aspect of "get even" politics is the way it obscures the real national agenda.

Next week, I'll define (as objectively as I can) our real national agenda.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY