The cripple who put his nation back on its feet

Our President, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, has just come home from a getting-to-know-you trip to Brunei and Singapore. I won’t compare her to the Emperor Nero who "fiddled" (played the lyre) while Rome burned. But what she’s come home to, if not exactly a raging fire, is a nation smothered in the thick and choking smoke of self-flagellation and despair.

Can we ever rise from the black mist of corruption that seems to envelope every stratum of our government and society, the ignorance, the poverty, and the climate of hatred and mutual recrimination? Can we, to borrow from Lord Byron’s musings on a fallen Greece at Salamis, ". . . snatch from the ashes of our sires, the embers of their former fires"? Are we a generation condemned by already chronic graft and criminality – and, much worse, mounting cynicism – to disappointment?

In her recent odyssey, GMA has met a sultan and a strongman. The sultan got his power by birthright (and the fact that the British "deposed" his father), while the other "invented" a country where none existed before, and dragged his new nation, kicking and screaming at times to fame and prosperity.

That was an interesting photograph on the front page of yesterday’s newspaper, showing GMA receiving the usual lecture, smilingly, from Singapore’s "Senior Leader" Lee Kwan Yew (the uncrowned king, or Yang di-Pertuan Agong, as the next-door Malays call their paramount Ruler). Former Prime Minister Lee, whose son Brigadier General Lee Hsien Loong is called B.G. Lee (meaning "Baby God", since he will be, Inshallah, the next Prime Minister of Singapore when Go Chok Tong "retires"), has indeed much to recount. He kicked this journalist out of Singapore in 1960 for exhibiting "lack of respect", but what the heck, he’s a great man whom I, it can be admitted now, respect and admire. I didn’t say "democrat", but a terrific leader nonetheless.

Did our President pick up a few pointers from the sometimes irascible Mr. Lee? I trust she has read his 730-page book (a sequel to his The Singapore Story) entitled From Third World to First (Singapore’s saga from 1965 to 2000), in which Lee recounts how uncertain and bewildered he was when on August 9, 1965 the Federation of Malaysia literally booted Singapore out. Recalled L.K.Y.: "I never expected that in 1965, at 42, I would be in charge of an independent Singapore, responsible for the lives of its two million people." By comparison, at that time, this was equal only to the population of the city of Manila.

Said Lee: "There are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engines, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies . . ."

We can forgive ex-Prime Minister Lee and his sometimes feisty Singaporeans a strut and a swagger over the impressive achievements racked up since that uncertain day when, Kwan Yew observed ruefully, "I did not sleep well." In his memoirs, he marked that date in August 1965 the day "I had started out with great trepidation on a journey along an unmarked road to an unknown destination."

What can I say? Do the times make a man, or does a man make the times? It was the magic of Lee’s leadership, and the flail of his tongue, backed up, of course, by the lash of the "Internal Security Act" (ISA), inherited from the colonial British, that converted out of almost barren rock, and a few struggling trees, a backwater of empire into a verdant, bustling, booming, streamlined Singapore – a nation per capita the wealthiest in Southeast Asia.

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Can this same thing be accomplished in a democratic state, plagued by battalion of lawyers, human rights advocates, and a combative, querulous, nitpicking, fault-finding free press?

My late grandfather, Don Agripino Villaflor (who never financially recovered from it) was the first to tell me of the stock market crash that had wiped out his own savings in Manila. He spoke of an America far different from the powerful United States of today, even in mini-recession controlling 20 percent of the world’s trade.

Indeed, the USA in the early 1930s was, if you think about it, even worse off than we are today. For 40 million Americans, starvation and poverty became a way of life – and despair. Families walked hundreds of miles, hopelessly looking for work. Soup kitchens kept some going, others wandered, aimless and hungry, begging for work. Nature was equally unkind. Floods ravaged some parts of the country. Other states were afflicted with years of drought, which brought about crop failure after another, and turned once-fertile plains into a "dust bowl" where farmland deteriorated into thousands of square miles of parched desert. Unemployment soared to 15 million, or a quarter of the entire labor force.

In a candid volume, Hard Times: The 30s, the editors of TIME-Life, reported: "The stark statistics gave no real picture of the situation – of the pitiful men who sold apples on city street corners; of the long lines of haggard men and women who waited for dry bread or thin soup, meager sustenance dispensed by private and municipal charities; of the bloated bellies of starving children; of the distraught farmers blocking roads to dump milk cans in a desperate effort to force up the price of milk . . . Everywhere there was hunger."

Said an observer in Chicago: "We saw a crowd of some 50 men fighting over a barrel of garbage which had been set outside the back door of a restaurant." He was shocked "at American citizens fighting for scraps of food like animals!"

Herbert Hoover, whose curse as the 31st President of the USA (1929-1933) was to preside over those years of Depression and disaster, will forever be tarred as the most unpopular President. Towards the end of his unfortunate term, even the steel industry – then the backbone of the American economy – was operating at only 13 percent of capacity. Bank failures and the collapse of small businesses into bankruptcy, as well as cruel foreclosures of mortgages on homes or family farms, were a weekly affair.

Do we have many squatter colonies in our country today? In America, in derision of Hoover, scores of thousands of such squatter villages sprang up and were named Hoovervilles. There, the homeless set up sheds made up of scrap metal, packing boxes and cardboard as flimsy shelters for the night. In the daytime, these "armies" of the dispossessed were out, foraging for food.

Inevitably, poor Hoover lost his bid for reelection. What’s more important is the man he lost to: a whirlwind of a personality named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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FDR (from whom Fidel V. Ramos, almost certainly, derived his FVR) was the longest serving Chief Executive of the United States, leading America out of peacetime depression, then to victory in the world’s greatest war. He was elected to an unprecedented four terms, serving 12 years in the White House – until he died, suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage in Warm Springs, Georgia. As the funeral train bore his casket back for official burial in Washington, DC, millions of weeping Americans, state after state, lined the tracks to bid farewell to their beloved leader.

Roosevelt was so vibrant and magnetic a man, with a wide smile and a jaunty wave that projected self-confidence and cheer, that few noticed he was a cripple – Americans had elected a man in a wheelchair their leader to cope with the most critical period in their lives!

Roosevelt had led a spoiled life as a boy, dominated and cosseted at the same time by a strong-willed, very wealthy mother, Sara Delano. He was scoffed at by his classmates in Groton, blackballed from membership in the most exclusive club in Harvard. He seemed a built-in failure. But he was handsome, determined that people "like him", and ambitious. He married a cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, a niece of then US President Theodore Roosevelt of "Rough Rider" fame, the man who had coined the slogan, "Speak softly but carry a big stick."

FDR, as New York governor, then Asst. Secretary of the Navy in World War I, finally went on to run as the Democratic Party’s candidate for Vice President. FDR had barnstormed half of the US, energetically, in a handshaking hand-waving marathon, but he lost. Despite this setback, however, he seemed on track to eventually reach the White House.

Then everything seemed lost. On August 14, 1921, unexpectedly, he was felled by polio. Roosevelt lost the use of both legs – and was to remain thus paralyzed for the rest of his life. Alas, everybody he knew mourned FDR’s political career was over! FDR knew dark despair. His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, believed he should quit and live out his days in bed. But this is when Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, for the first time, took charge of things and defied her mother-in-law. With the help of FDR’s trusted political confidant, Louis Howe, "a small and smelly man" Elanor had exclaimed when first she met him, the future First Lady urged FDR to return to the fight. Never underestimate the power of a woman!

Yet, how could a cripple win? Biographer Susan Ware relates the story: "FDR realized that people who felt sorry for him because of his immobility wouldn’t take him seriously. So with great effort, Roosevelt taught himself to walk with braces – or, rather, to create the illusion of walking by grasping tightly the person next to him and swiveling his lower body forward in a simulation of movement. So great was the effort involved that FDR always sweated while ‘walking’ in public, no matter the weather."

What’s more, "in an act of media self-restraint that seems remarkable today," Ware continues, "members of the press never mentioned or photographed him being carried upstairs, being lifted in and out of automobiles, or using a wheelchair to get around. As a result, most Americans didn’t realize the president was paralyzed.

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Added the TIME-Life writers: "When Roosevelt became the 32nd president . . . the country was scared. That morning, March 4, 1933, every bank in the country had to close its doors . . . On the high inaugural platform, in front of the Capitol, the 51-year president-elect repeated the oath of office in a clear deliberate voice and said, ‘This Nation asks for action, and action now’."

That’s when he delivered his immortal line about his firm belief "that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Roosevelt vowed a "New Deal" for Americans, and asserted that "our greatest primary task is to put people to work." He concluded his stirring address, most people forget, in these words: "In this dedication of a nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come."

Stuart Chase, a leading exponent of semantics, said, so truly: "With words we govern men." FDR had the words. He had the will. He sent the hopes of a dispirited nation soaring. He put Americans back to work.

He used to say that what the nation needed was "moral leadership." Need we say more?

The famous columnist and pundit, Walter Lippman, had written before FDR won that Roosevelt was "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications, would very much like to be president."

Yet, how can you keep a man down, who rises painfully from his wheelchair and, with his golden tongue and a solid, even mildly Socialistic program of government, seduces his people back to their feet?

"You must have faith," FDR declared in one of his famous radio Fireside Chats, broadcast nationwide, "you must not be stampeded by rumors."

Amen.