It’s so American, really, to be built up on hype, to impossible heights, just to make the fall so much more devastating. He engineered and fed the world with his prodigious activism, before he was co-opted into laissez faire governments so they could share his shiny veneer – before completely undermining his approach. The smartest, brightest boy, who went west, like the country, from Iowa to Oregon and California, a sunny optimist about to run into the darkest depression in American history. Perhaps he became too much like those around him, after he was surrounded by power, in marble halls far from the prairie of his birth. Perhaps, this is all of our destiny, to become what others’ success demands, if we are all really powerless against the drumbeat of progress, or, alternatively, for those with plenty in hand, the status quo. 

It is hard to see photos of him as an elderly, diminished man, with the ghosts of Hoovervilles surrounding him like a grimy aura. Later presidents tried to humanize him, inviting him to public events, even soliciting his counsel. They, like those before him, were still taken by the sheer talent of that once golden boy. He acquiesced as they beckoned, for he knew what great things he knew, but he had already soured past potability. In ‘32 they practically ran him out on a rail, and 25 years later they wanted him to join up again. He must have still felt the sting of one of history’s great rebukes.

He may have managed the immense task, for him, in that late era, of smiling, of forcing his face to forget what was lost in that great fall from grace, but those pictures, just like his kind, are rarities. 

–Danny Grosso