Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.
More than 90 years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a warning that appears prescient in light of today’s woes. Consider these 53 words from FDR’s inaugural address on March 4, 1933:
(T)he only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
Roosevelt’s reference to “dark hours of our national life” calls to mind other rhetoric and survival in dark hours. The reference hints at the lack of frankness and needed vigor in our nation today. And the reference does far more than merely hint about the fear than Trump strikes in the hearts of so many — from the struggling non-profit organizations trying to aid the vulnerable and needy to the well-off members of Congress, apparently confident in their unending terms in office.
Here’s Thomas Paine in his winter of 1776 Crises Papers—one of our first “dark hours” during the American Revolution.
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
DON’T LET DEMOCRACY PERISH
Four score and seven years later, on November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln wondered in his Gettysburg Address whether “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…can long endure.”
He asked Americans to “highly resolve…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The dark hours addressed by Paine, Lincoln, and Roosevelt were in times of war or the Great Depression. In times of domestic division and hate, courageous leadership by elected officials and support and understanding from the public also are vital so democracy can endure. And the barriers of divisiveness and fear are stressful. So it was when McCarthyism was rampant in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Even then, however, we’ve had leaders whose courage may be more appreciated today than it was 75 years ago.
Consider Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine. In response to the character assassination and vengeance of her day—fomented by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin—she delivered what was called her Declaration of Conscience statement on June 1, 1950.
She denounced “the reckless abandon in which unproved charges have been hurled from this side of the aisle.” And while faithful to Republican Party history and hopeful for success at the polls, she declared, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.”
SADDLING UP FOR 2026
Those are the horsemen that Trump and many Iowa MAGA-driven Republicans have saddled up to ride to the 2026 elections.
We see such reckless abandon today in those who have characterized lies as “alternative facts.” And we have more than “four” horsemen of incompetence in Trump’s cabinet threatening the nation’s health, public education, and all those who cherish longstanding principles of being “created equal.”
The Trump-dominated Senate, including Iowa’s Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, voted to confirm all of these cabinet members. Grassley, Ernst, and Iowa’s U.S. House delegation are in step with Trump’s declaration that, as president, he has “the right to do anything I want to do.”
And we face more than three more years of Trump doing anything he wants to do unless curtailed in the national elections of 2026 and exiled in 2028.
To put that time frame in context: for Thomas Paine, the “times that try men’s souls” of 1776 were to continue until the peace treaty of 1783. The Civil War continued for sixteen months after Lincoln’s Gettysburg address until General Robert E. Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. Even then, Lincoln was assassinated less than a week later; to this day, systemic racism and a Civil War mentality thrive in some quarters.
National unity in war against the Axis powers in World War II helped end the Depression. And McCarthy’s censure by the Senate on December 2, 1954 dealt a blow to McCarthyism. That was more than four years after Senator Smith’s speech and six months after an Iowan and Grinnell College graduate, Joseph Welch, said to McCarthy at a hearing, “Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?” Uncharacteristically, the audience applauded.
FEW, IF ANY, RESPECT THE OFFICE LESS THAN TRUMP
The closing line from Senator Smith’s declaration 75 years ago is an appropriate guide for the coming years and elections: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
That is worth keeping in mind, lest Trump continue his recklessness and our re-named War Department becomes a vehicle for more Trump vengeance against those loyal enough to our Constitution to criticize him.
And let us have none of this “You must respect the President.”
President Harry Truman made it clear time and again: while we must respect the Office of the President, we must hold accountable the person who occupies that office. Many, perhaps most, Trump critics are driven by their respect for the office and the damage Trump and his supporters are doing to the office and to our national standing throughout the world.
You know, “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”
Top images: Official campaign color portrait of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1943, available via Wikimedia Commons. Photo of Senator Margaret Chase Smith is courtesy of the Margaret Chase Smith Library.
