I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear.

This week on Moorers & Company, lessons from the past for our troubled present.

We need to remember that we're the children and the grandchildren of the generation that beat the Great Depression and defeated fascism and imperialism in World War II,

and went on to create the strongest and most prosperous country in human history.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're still reeling from the Supreme Court's McCutcheon decision,

giving corporations and oligarchs even more power to corrupt democracy with impunity,

and if the greatest income in equality since

the first-guided age and the roaring 20s has you gasping at the realization that it's happening

in America again, and if you have trouble reconciling the promise of America, life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness for every citizen with the facts of America,

including the fact of immense power and privilege in the hands of so few.

If all these bad tidings have you down in the dumps, I have an assignment for you.

Read this book, The Fight for the Four Freedoms, What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation

Truly Great by

Harvey J.K. published this very week on the 69th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt's

death, the 12th of April, 1945. At its core, is the famous speech FDR made to America less than

a year before Pearl Harbor in 1941, calling

on the nation to prepare to protect and defend the four essential freedoms, freedom of speech

and religion and freedom from want and fear. It's not the first time this historian has

reached into the past to find inspiration for our troubled present.

His book, Thomas Payne, and The Promise of America, was a rousing invocation of the radical patriot who became the conscience of the American Revolution.

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