By Karen Sternheimer

“Excuse me, do you know who that is?” asked a woman with an Eastern European accent. I was taken aback, because she was pointing to a bust of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). We were standing on Roosevelt Island, just east of Manhattan, named for our 32^nd president.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park plaque, facing Manhattan. Photo courtesy of the author.

“Who is he?” I asked incredulously. “That’s Franklin Roosevelt. He was President of the United States from 1933 to 1945. During the Great Depression and World War II.”

While the woman appeared to be middle aged, she also didn’t sound like she was from the United States, so I can understand how she might not know who he was. (Although New York is filled with Roosevelt-named places, notably FDR Drive, a major highway running along the eastside of Manhattan. He had also been governor of New York before being elected president.)

But it’s not just people from other countries who might not be clear on who FDR was or his impact on the country. Many of my students ironically confuse him with Ronald Reagan, who largely sought to undo FDR’s New Deal era policies that strengthened the social safety net. What are the costs of forgetting—not just FDR, but history itself?

Sociologists study collective memory, the stories that we tell ourselves about our society. As I wrote about in 2012, what we choose to remember, and how we choose to remember, are meaningful to study. Why do we collectively remember some things, at some times, but not other things, at other times?

Forgetting is also sociologically important. What happens when we forget the scourge of infectious diseases, or the economic collapse following the Great Depression?

Part of my interest in visiting Roosevelt Island was to see the remnants of a smallpox hospital, built in the 1850s to isolate and treat people with smallpox. As you can see from the photos below, only the building’s façade still stands. The plaque on the gate tells its story—built by prison labor in the 1850s—meant to keep people with a highly contagious disease away from the densely populated city.

Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island, NY. Photos courtesy of the author.

Smallpox, and all infectious diseases, historically ripped through communities without much recourse until the advent of vaccines. Human history has been plagued by outbreaks of infection; a large proportion of people died of infectious diseases. Historian Leigh Shaw-Taylor notes that global life expectancy in 1800 was likely around 30; infant and child mortality were particularly high. In the U.S. in 1900, approximately 30 percent of all deaths were children under 5.

Smallpox was caused by a virus that created small bumps all over the skin, and it was fatal in about 1 in 3 cases. The disease was largely eradicated through vaccination; the campaign was so successful that the U.S. stopped widespread use of the vaccine in the early 1970s. I was among the last children vaccinated against smallpox; like people my age and older, I still have a small scar under my left arm from the vaccine.

I was born in the decade after the first measles vaccine was created, and my parents knew children who died or became severely ill from diseases like measles, mumps, and polio. Children who lived were sometimes gravely ill, hospitalized for weeks, months, or years at a time. This was part of the collective memory for people born earlier in the twentieth century. That I would be vaccinated was never in question.

Today, news of measles outbreaks have become more common, as vaccination rates drop. Despite the eradication of measles in the U.S. in 2000, it has started to spread because of travel and declining vaccination rates. Many people fear vaccines more than the diseases themselves because collective memory of the realities of these diseases has disappeared.

Likewise, collective memories of the devastating effects of the Great Depression fade as those that lived through it pass away. As many people might forget that FDR was president during the Great Depression, or the government programs created to try to save the economy, it is easy to forget the systemic effects of a major economic downturn. As the social safety net continues to be eroded, with cuts to SNAP reducing food aid and cuts to Medicaid reducing access to health care, it is important to remember that these programs initially began to offset major economic downturns. Today, as the growth of Artificial Intelligence threatens to destabilize the workforce, we will likely need more, not less of a social safety net.

As memories of FDR and smallpox fade, it has perhaps never been more important to remind ourselves of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, referenced in the first photo above, delivered to Congress on January 6, 1941, eleven months before the U.S. was attacked and entered World War II:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement.
As examples:

We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.

We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

Although delivered 85 years ago, and often overshadowed by FDR’s first inaugural address (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and his speech after the attack on Pearl Harbor (“the day that will live in infamy”), the ideas in this speech remind us of the importance of “simple and basic things” that we should always remember.