We've Met

                                                

   Something was decidedly missing Sunday night a week ago.  After seven consecutive nights, Ken Burns'  "Meet the Roosevelts" had run its course.  I wish it had gone on.
   Typically Burnsian, much of the video accompanying the 19th and early 20th Century portions of "Meet the Roosevelts" came from family albums. They fascinated in the same way that childhood and youthful photographs of famous people always do, and Ken Burns has made a career of satisfying this fascination.
   Moving picture technology was aborning when Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency.  Even so, today's digital re-mastering has done wonders with old film. Motion is now displayed in close to real time, and the herky-jerky distraction of the original filmstock is truly a thing of the past.  The fact that it contains no sound is a lament, not a complaint, because, obviously, talkies were still  more than a couple of decades in the future.  But, oh, how great it would be to hear TR stem-winding, to listen in on his conversations while walking to work in the White House, and when rough-housing with the kids.  Deelightful!  Bully!
    TR's fifth cousin, Franklin D., benefitted enormously from advances in communications technology, to the good fortune of the American people, as well as himself.
    Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover preceded FDR's utilization of radio, but he made the medium his own. He had the uncanny faculty of reaching his audience in a manner to which all public speakers, students of speech, all fledgling radio announcers, all Toastmasters, and all Dale Carnegie trainees aspire. He imparted the impression that he was addressing his entire audience personally, that he was talking to each listener individually.
    It may be that the instruction taught to speakers-to-be to "envision that you are speaking to one person," grew out of hearing  FDR's marvelous speaking talent. Marvelous and singular.  No speaker has ever approached him.
    Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast eyewitness news from London on the CBS radio network during the Blitz, preserved some of the best of FDR on two LP's entitled "I Can Hear It Now."
    If memory serves, they were published in the late '40's, and I first heard excerpts in 1950, during some sort of observance of events of the first half of the 20th Century.  Then as now, I considered them priceless.
    Eleanor Roosevelt lived long enough to have added television to her communications facilities. She wrote, "My Day," a syndicated newspaper column six days a week between 1935-1962. She hosted network radio shows from 1942-1952, and she had a show on Public TV from 1959-1962. She was an author, lecturer, party leader, social activist, first chairperson of the United Nations Human Rights Commission. 
      She was indefatigable in her advocacy of women's rights globally, and, here at home, her pioneering groundwork could achieve a new milestone as soon as 2016, if the Democrats would have the good sense to nominate the brilliant and splendidly intuitive Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
       Oldsters among us had already met the Roosevelts. We should rejoice at the reintroduction to Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and to Eleanor Roosevelt, their service to the United States, to the American people and the people of the world.
      They were patricians and they were populists. For the Roosevelts, that was no contradiction.  The late Senator Paul Wellstone had to have channeled them when he said, "We all do better, when we all do better."