Article on the Wall Street Journal About Bread Lines. A Great Read!

WASHINGTON — The five life-sized bronze men line up, in hats and
overcoats, their shoulders slumped. Outside a closed door, they wait
for bread or, perhaps, a job.

Eva Durak, 31 years old, slipped into the queue of statues and
assumed a glum pose appropriate to the Great Depression, while a friend
snapped a picture. It wasn’t hard for her to fake the misery. Business
at the restaurant where Ms. Durak tends bar is off about 75%, she
figures.

“We’re almost there,” she told her friend, glancing at the bread line. “People are very afraid. I am, too.”

With financial markets in turmoil and the economy screeching to a
halt, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., is
taking on new meaning. These days, when visitors wander through the
monument, reading FDR’s words to a nation troubled by poverty and war,
they see eerie parallels.

They take their places in the bronze bread line and pose for photos.
“Get in line at the poor house,” Marlene Torres-Vogel, 56, a
tennis-club manager from Englewood, N.J., instructed her husband.
“We’re living the past now in the present.”

The FDR memorial is a sprawling monument, broken into large outdoor
areas that lead visitors through the president’s four terms, from the
Great Depression and the New Deal, to Pearl Harbor and the waning days
of World War II. It is peopled with bronzes — a lean farm couple, a
man leaning into his radio to catch the president’s fireside chat —
and engravings that convey the breadth of the public-works projects FDR
embraced.

There’s a tiered fountain meant to evoke the dams of the Tennessee
Valley Authority. Carved into walls of red South Dakota granite are
quotations reminding visitors of both the hardship the country faced,
and the comfort and hope FDR sought to provide.

Days of Difficulty

“Do you know what this is?” Ellen
McCarthy, a 46-year-old school principal from Nesconset, N.Y., asked
her sons Ian, 14, and Colm, 10, as they examined the queue of hungry
men. “It’s a bread line.”

She read the boys the words FDR spoke in 1937 at his second
inaugural address: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad
and ill-nourished…. The test of our progress is not whether we add
more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide
enough for those who have too little.”

Her husband, Sean McCarthy, 45, worked 22 years for securities
wholesalers at the New York Stock Exchange. He was on the trading floor
during the Black Monday crash 21 years ago. He was on Wall Street when
the planes hit the nearby World Trade Center in 2001. But he lost his
job — monitoring compliance with securities laws — when his company
shrank last year. He is still unemployed.

Above All, Try Something

“It
says it all right there on the wall,” Mr. McCarthy told his sons,
referring to FDR’s quote. “It’s a lesson we all should learn, a lesson
for today.”

He turned to Ian. “It’s your future,” he said. “What do you think?”

“I’m on vacation,” Ian answered. “I don’t have to think.”

Dean Doss, 73, a retired designer from Virginia Beach, Va., visited
with an old Army buddy. They posed next to a statue of FDR seated in
the wheelchair he was confined to for much of his adult life. “We need
him in the White House — look at the problems he solved,” Mr. Doss
said.

Joblessness during the Great Depression hit 30% of the work force. Today, though rising, it measures just 6.1%.

But banks are so nervous about the future, they’re reluctant to lend
to each other, let alone to regular customers. The world’s credit
markets have all but stopped functioning. Last week, the Dow Jones
Industrial Average fell 18%, the biggest percentage drop in the stock
index’s 112-year history. The Industrials bounced back somewhat this
week, but remain 38% off of their October 2007 high of 14164.53.

Nathan Adams, a National Park Service guide, said many visitors draw
a connection between uncertainty today and tragedy past. As he led
tourists through the memorial last weekend, he talked of bank failures,
hunger and unemployment.

“It must sound a little familiar,” he joked with a group of guests. They responded with a mirthless chuckle.

After taking Mr. Adams’s tour, Barbara Riggsbee, 69, who grew up in
Philipsburg, Penn., recalled the day FDR died in 1945, as fighting
still raged in Europe and the Pacific. She remembered her neighbor, a
boy named Franklin Delano Eboch in the president’s honor, standing
tear-streaked in the street and moaning, “What are we going to do?”

The Only Thing to Fear

Her
cousin, Robin Bridges, a 56-year-old staffer in the House of
Representatives, frets about her 30-year-old son, who recently left a
secure job with the American Library Association to manage a comic-book
shop — at a time when many retailers are struggling. “I’m worried that
this might be a bad move for him,” she said.

On the other side of the monument, Dorothy Dembowski, a 44-year-old
financial adviser with UBS Financial Services Inc., Stamford, Conn.,
posed her cockapoo, Puffy, next to a sculpture of FDR seated next to
his dog, Fala.

The Wall Street crisis absorbs much of Ms. Dembowski’s life these
days, and she came to the FDR memorial seeking reassurance and
guidance. “I have clients who don’t know how they’re going to pay their
mortgages,” she said.

Ms. Dembowski doesn’t think the country is headed into another
depression. But she worries FDR had it right — that panic only makes a
bad situation worse. “It’s about perception, and it’s about fear,” she
said.

During the
Great Depression, Roberta Smith of Pacific Grove, Calif., 80, stuffed
paper into her shoes to fill the holes. At age 12, she washed dishes at
a drug-store lunch counter. There were meatless Tuesdays and, later,
scrap-metal drives.

Her husband, Ross Smith, now 84, flew a four-engine B-24 Liberator
over the Pacific, from New Guinea and Iejima. After the war, he built a
linen-supply company, and his business card reads, “Retired
Laundryman.” The Smiths came to Washington for a reunion this week of
his Army Air Corps unit, the 90th Bomb Group.

The Smiths are Republicans. For them, the memorial to a Democratic
president evokes the shared sacrifice of their youth. Neither thinks
today’s problems yet come close to those of the Great Depression or the
subsequent world war.

“By the time we came through all that, we’d seen the worst of it and all, the rest of it looked pretty good to us,” said Mr. Smith. Today’s crisis “affects your pocketbook; that affected your life.”

Write to Michael M. Phillips at michael.phillips@wsj.com