There is an airport that serves our national capitol which is named after Ronald Reagan and when he died, and almost daily since then, we are forced to listen to discussions about his greatness.

The other day a man named Charles Morgan, Jr. passed away and next to nothing was said about him, aside from this comment on DK.

It is quite likely that if there had no been a Chuck Morgan, though, we would not be on the eve of the most eagerly awaited presidential inauguration since 1933. And the most urgent task awaiting our new president is to blot out the damage done to our country by the man who blamed government as the problem, and the acolytes, including so many who report the news and inhabit the capitol, who have followed President Reagan and his destructive mantra almost over a cliff.


It is likely that you never heard of Chuck Morgan, but that is because the law and the courts have also been victim to the assault on government led by the Reagan forces. But while the campaign that made the Reagan presidency happen began in Philadelphia, Mississippi to identify with those who consider the federal government to be a intruder, Chuck Morgan, as much as any other person, used the federal government and its courts, in the best traditions of this country to secure the blessings of liberty for all of its people.

It was Chuck Morgan, then a young lawyer just beginning his practice in Birmingham, Alabama, where his family had moved when he was much younger still, who responded to the church bombing which killed four young black girls there in 1963 (classmates, she tells us, of Secretary of State Rice) by telling a group of young businessmen that

Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb"

That ended Chuck Morgan's life in Birmingham, but it did not end what he did for his country and the south in general. Thanks to a sympathetic federal judge (and the serendipity that Judge Frank M. Johnson happened to be around at the same time and place is one of those things that could make a person believe in a divine spirit), Chuck used the courts and a federal government that slowly realized its own responsibility to change our country and make the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts a reality.

Without his work, and that of so many other courageous men and women, our country would be quite a different place and not one about to inaugurate the man who is now our President-elect. And when Chuck Morgan began a brief tenure at a law school, he taught his impressionable students, who had just watched the law finally catch up with a president of the United States who sought to pervert our system of government and imbue the chief executive with the powers of a monarch, about the obligations of a lawyer to use the courts to even the playing field and prevent the powerful and the corrupt from imposing their will on the rest of us.

When President Reagan took office a few years later he said something quite different and it was his view, that government was essentially an impediment to progress, that has dominated political thought since then.



Chuck Morgan would have told us what he meant by that: to the extent that government evens the playing field to protect us against the tyranny of the big and powerful it should get out of the way.

That is not what this country has been all about, a republic formed with a healthy respect for the rights of a minority against the excesses of the majority, but by the early part of the twentieth century the concept that government should just get out of the way had taken sufficient root that when huge parts of Mississippi and Louisiana were almost drowned by a flood (sound familiar?) the New York Times had to warn us that

The idea that the [federal] Government's aid to the afflicted will be adeuate to relieve their suffering and to tide them over until the crops are planted and produce marketed, should not be permitted to prevail

since it was the responsibility of the private sector to bring back the business activity which had been lost and not the government's. (New York Times, May 18, 1912 at page 12).

All that changed when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in on March 4, 1933 and said:

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife. 1

With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

Did the New Deal solve all of our problems? Of course not. As President Roosevelt himself reported four years later:

In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens--a substantial part of its whole population--who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.

I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago.

I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.

I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope--because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

The New Deal did not solve our problems, but it changed the way we look at them and their resolution. The President disabused the country of the notion that government could play no role in the well being of its citizens. Quite to the contrary, he pointed to

the clear hope that government within communities, government within the separate States, and government of the United States can do the things the times require, without yielding its democracy. ...

Nearly all of us recognize that as intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them also must increase--power to stop evil; power to do good. The essential democracy of our Nation and the safety of our people depend not upon the absence of power, but upon lodging it with those whom the people can change or continue at stated intervals through an honest and free system of elections. The Constitution of 1787 did not make our democracy impotent.

...we have made the exercise of all power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public's government. The legend that they were invincible--above and beyond the processes of a democracy--has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten.

The Congress which took office in 1933 was far more in the control of the President's party than is the one which our new president will have to convince in seeking to make the same argument against the same destructive backdrop. That does not mean, though, that compromise is the order of the day or that the imperatives of the moment should be subordinated to the same people whose insistence that government get out of the way has put us in as perilous a crisis as we have seen in my lifetime.

It is not the time for the well meaning Republicanism of the last two "Democratic" presidents, or for the loud noises followed by routine capitulation which the Senate Majority Leader favors, nor is the incoming administration's hope for consensus and 80 vote approval by the Senate of their proposed solutions as important as the need to restore government to its role to protect its citizens from the ravages of a greedy unfettered marketplace.

Franklin Roosevelt explained it this way:

For ... years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

...

We ... struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me and I welcome their hatred.

President Roosevelt could say that as he sought re-election in 1936, because he knew his opponents could not win against a popular president. Today the haters are hiding; many pretending that they are on the same side as the rest of the country. The applaud our new president because they want to fool us as to where they really stand.

Do not be fooled. There is a huge task before us and prevarication and delay will certainly mean failure. Chuck Morgan did not let threats of violence deter him from his sacred task. We can ask for no less from our members of Congress and the new administration.