July 14, 1988

This poem comes from July 14, 1988. Pop was offered a deal to buy our house at Sky Harbor. He and mother were pretty gung-ho about it. I did not here why they did not follow through. Maybe Pop's credit-rating was too low at the time for the sellers.

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Buy into this barrio, this crummy slum?
Mom and Pop, Stormy Dreamer and Simple Tree.
You wouldn't think anyone could be this dumb,
But the price is right, practically free,
And we were about as poor and you can be.

Good old Sky Harbor, out over the deep end of town,
Where there is little money and fewer whites,
Not one of the funner places to hang around,
An auto shop and a convenience store for the sights,
And broken windows or gun shots will pay back slights.

But we escaped that fate and even moved,
Just in time to escape a neighbors' feud.
We certainly didn't move to Alamo Heights,
Yet life is freer and there are fewer fights:
You can walk your dog, and think, and just brood.

-- e. e. monk

1930s Franklin Roosevelt

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, in a time of serious political instability in the world, many thought that stronger government was needed. Franklin Roosevelt was not a loose cannon unmoored to any American reality.

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“Even the iron hand of a national dictator is in preference to a paralytic stroke.”

-- Alfred Landon, Republican governor of Kansas

“A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.”

-- Al Smith, Democrat leader

“People are looking to you almost as they look to God.”

-- Citizen’s letter to President Roosevelt

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Of course, people were also wary about this move toward greater consolidated power in the federal government, despite Roosevelt’s expressed intention that he was not out to destroy capitalism, but to save it, saying, “to preserve, we had to reform.” As one pro-New Deal Democrat, Senator Ashurst wrote in his diary, “behind the facade of fear and need [Congress has just made] experiments on a grand scale and temporarily transmuted our way of life from individualism into regimented state socialism. … For aught we know, this Congress may have done what Russia did by her bloody revolution.”

[Source: Jeff Shesol, “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court”]