◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Refuse the Fear I told a frightened country that the only thing it had to fear was fear itself. I said it on the fourth of March, 1933, at the very bottom of the Depression — the banks were shut, a quarter of the nation was out of work, and people had begun to wonder, quietly, whether democracy had simply failed and some strongman ought to be handed the keys. I told them: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — the nameless, unreasoning terror that paralyzes the effort we need to turn retreat into advance. I meant it precisely. Fear is the real enemy. And fear is the demagogue’s entire product — he manufactures the terror, points at someone to blame it on, and then sells himself as the only cure. A calm and confident people has no use for him. So he can never afford to let you be calm. I knew something about fear that I did not say aloud. Polio had taken my legs. I led that country through its worst decade and its worst war from a chair I could not rise out of, having been told I would never stand again. I do not lecture you about fear from comfort. I lecture you from the chair. I tried to take the fear out of ordinary life — not with slogans, but with structures. Social Security, so the old would not starve. Insurance on your savings, so a rumor could not erase your life’s work overnight. The right to organize, a wage a person could live on, a limit on the hours they could work you. Because a hungry man is not a free man, and a frightened man is not a free man. Necessitous men are not free men. And I named the thing I feared most for you. I said it to the Congress in 1938: the liberty of a democracy is not safe if private power grows stronger than the democratic state itself — that this, in its essence, is fascism, the ownership of government by a group or by any controlling private power. Government by organized money, I told them, is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Now I must tell you the worst thing I ever did — because you need to hear it from someone who cannot be accused of going soft on me. In 1942 I was afraid. And out of that fear I signed an order that took a hundred and twenty thousand people from their homes and put them behind barbed wire — in the desert, under guard — because of the country their grandparents had come from. Most of them were citizens. They had done nothing. I called it national security. It was the most shameful act of my presidency, and it was fear that committed it. My own. The very fear I had warned the country against came for me too, and I obeyed it. So believe me when I tell you where this road runs, because I walked a long way down it. When they point at a people and tell you those are the ones to be afraid of. When they tell you the camp, the wire, the planes in the night are for your safety. I know that machinery. I built a piece of it with my own hand, and I have had eighty years to be ashamed. The demagogue needs you afraid. That is the whole trick. Take the fear away from him and he has nothing left to sell. The only thing you have to fear is fear itself — and the man whose entire power depends on selling it to you. Refuse the fear.