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Chapter 4 The House I Built with My Own Hands
The cold, hardwood chairs in the library's special archives have lost their physical significance.
Leo Wallace's body was still sitting there, but his consciousness, his entire perception, had floated in another space, a space enveloped by the heat of an invisible fireplace.
Here, he saw the spiritual figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt "face to face" for the first time.
That wasn't the smiling, waving, and approachable politician whose image hung on his apartment wall and was printed in history books.
This is a man sitting in a wheelchair.
The wheelchair made no sound on the soft Persian carpet; it was more like a throne.
A thick wool blanket was draped over his legs. He was neither carrying a pipe nor wearing his signature pince-nez glasses.
His eyes were the true source of light in this space, sharp as an eagle, insightful, and filled with the suffocating pressure of a strategist deploying thousands of troops.
All the banter and teasing that had been conveyed through sound had disappeared.
All that remains is a pure sense of existence.
"...Our work shall now officially begin."
Roosevelt repeated his words, his voice echoing in the virtual space.
"The first step," he continued, "is to acknowledge that what I did back then is no longer sufficient. This country needs surgery, not a few aspirin pills. What we need to do is begin with a people-centered transformation."
people?
This word struck Leo like a bullet, hitting the very core of his knowledge as a historian.
All the absurdity, fear, and awe he had experienced over the past few days were now replaced by an inescapable, immense academic perplexity.
He took a deep breath and mustered all the courage he had in his life.
He was facing the men he had studied throughout their youth, the gods of his academic world.
But he had to ask.
"Mr. President..." Leo began, his voice trembling slightly, "I...I have studied your entire career, I have read all your speeches, and analyzed all your policies. You are the savior of capitalism, not its gravedigger."
He forced himself to look directly into those hawk-like eyes.
"In your famous speech at Madison Square Garden in 1936, you called 'organized money' the enemy. But your aim was to tame it, not kill it."
"The social security system you built, your regulation of Wall Street, the public works projects you promoted... all of these ultimately led to the most glorious thirty years for the United States since the war. The system you built saved this country."
Leo's speech became faster and faster, an instinct he had as a history PhD student.
"Why?" he asked the most fundamental question. "Why do you now want me to take a completely opposite path? A path that, in my view, is closer to the Soviet Union?"
Roosevelt did not answer immediately.
He simply looked at Leo quietly, a complex smile on his face.
That smile contained a mixture of approval, self-mockery, and a bottomless sorrow.
"A good question," Roosevelt began, his voice softening.
He leaned forward slightly, and the wheelchair made a soft sound.
"Language is cheap, Leo. Even the words of a president are distorted by time and interpreted and used by later generations for their own purposes. You read the book, you analyzed my speech, you memorized every detail of the New Deal... but you're like an audience member who only read the script, you haven't seen the movie."
Roosevelt's voice was weary.
"And I..." he said, "I watched the whole movie, including all the sequels, including everything that happened in this country after I died, right up to this day."
He held up one finger.
In Leo's perception, it was a real finger, with warmth and the texture of skin.
It gently touched Leo's forehead.
"Your textbooks, your mentors, your heavy historical works," Roosevelt's voice echoed, "they told you what happened, but they never made you feel anything."
"Child, close your eyes."
"Don't use your brain to analyze, use your heart to see."
In that instant, Leo's consciousness was violently pulled backward by an irresistible force.
The entire warm study crumbled before his eyes, turning into countless swirling points of light.
He seemed to have been thrown into a vortex of time, falling into the depths of history.
The vortex of time turned Leo's consciousness upside down, then gently tossed him out.
When his vision returned to normal, he found himself floating over postwar America.
At first, the ground beneath his feet was black and white, just like the old documentaries he had watched countless times.
But soon, like an old movie being breathed new life, vibrant colors, starting from the ports on the east coast, quickly spread throughout the country.
He saw a nation brimming with primal vitality, a giant rising from the ruins of war and running at an unprecedented pace.
His perspective was first drawn to a university campus.
Beside the Gothic buildings, thousands of young people are flocking to classrooms.
Many of them still had the short hair typical of soldiers, and their gait still carried the upright posture of soldiers.
But instead of M1 Garand rifles, they carried stacks of heavy textbooks.
Their faces showed no confusion or fear from the battlefield, only an almost greedy hope and longing for the future.
Leo could sense their inner thoughts: I want to be an engineer, a doctor, an accountant, I want to build a family, I want to have a future of my own.
"We invest in people, not war machines."
Roosevelt's voice echoed in his mind, carrying an undisguised pride.
This is the Veterans Rights Act, also known as the GI Act.
The scene shifts, and Leo's perspective flies to the industrial heartland of the Midwest.
The thick smoke billowing from chimneys is no longer a symbol of pollution, but a harbinger of prosperity.
He saw a huge conference room, with the CEO of General Motors in a suit on one side, and a group of burly men in slightly cramped suits on the other.
They were representatives of the United Auto Workers and the Steelworkers.
They sat at the same table negotiating, their voices loud and clear, arguing their points forcefully.
This is not begging, but an equal dialogue.
The camera then pulls out of the conference room and onto a newly developed community on the outskirts of Detroit.
Rows of neat and beautiful detached houses, each with a green lawn in its backyard.
A father, clearly a blue-collar worker, is teaching his son how to throw a baseball, while his wife watches them with a smile from the porch.
A brand-new Chevrolet sedan gleamed in the setting sun.
Leo could clearly sense the man's emotions.
That's a sense of security.
His salary, the salary of one person working, is enough to pay the mortgage, support his wife and two children, and he can even save some money every year.
He doesn't have to worry about going bankrupt because of an illness, nor does he have to worry about his boss firing him at will.
He is the backbone of this country.
Then, the perspective shifts again, this time to New York, overlooking Wall Street.
But the atmosphere here was completely different from what Leo had imagined.
There was no hysterical frenzy; the people in the exchange were busy, but their expressions were serious.
He saw inside the bank that the bankers looked more like a group of meticulous accountants wearing arm sleeves than high rollers betting with bloodshot eyes in a casino.
The Glass-Steagall Act strictly separates depositors' life savings from high-risk investment games.
"I've put Wall Street in a cage," Roosevelt's voice-over says with a hint of satisfaction. "They're very unhappy, very unhappy, but the country is safe."
These scenes together depict a warm, bright, and hopeful era.
This is not a myth, but true history.
Leo could sense the sense of satisfaction, security, and optimism that was prevalent among ordinary Americans during that era.
This is an era of unprecedented growth of the middle class, an era in which class mobility truly exists.
A truck driver's son can indeed become a lawyer through hard work.
That was Roosevelt's answer.
This is the result of his choice to tame rather than kill capitalism.
The image finally froze.
The image is frozen in time at a backyard barbecue party in a typical middle-class family.
The father, wearing a comical apron, was grilling hamburger patties, while the mother came out of the kitchen carrying a plate of salad, and several children were screaming and running under the sprinkler.
The radio was playing Elvis Presley's songs, creating a peaceful atmosphere, much like the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
This golden age's pinnacle moment has come to a standstill.
Roosevelt's voice-over suddenly turned cold at this moment.
All warmth and pride vanished, replaced by an ominous premonition.
"This is a house I built with my own hands, Leo."
"Sturdy, beautiful, and able to keep out the wind and rain."
"But after I died, a group of well-dressed and eloquent termites began to gnaw at it from the foundation."