Depression. He links evil with capitalist excess and the poverty it engenders. His successor, Harry S. Truman, continues to associate evil with poverty even as he worries about the potential for evil linked to technological development. At the same time, his language comes to express the polarities that will structure the Cold War. Evil, however, is not an element in this articulation. Thus, while evil's primary rhetorical host is economic distress, a secondary variant of evil also emerges in the initial years of the Cold War. This evil rides in on complexity and its challenge to power in a democracy.
Roosevelt's 1933 inaugural address is known primarily for its oft-repeated line "the only thing we have to fear is fear itsel<sup>£:'2</sup>6 Evil, then, is nothing to fear. Government can address and manage evil. Performing this address and management, Roosevelt speaks of evils in the plural and expels these evils to the past. He observes that there are two safeguards against a return of the "evils of the old order:" strict supervision of al banking, credits, and investment and an end to speculation with other people's money. In Roosevelt's second and third inaugural addresses, evil inhabits the same rhetorical environment. Not only does Roosevelt continue to criticize those who "betray for profit the elementary decencies of life" but he also notes that Americans no longer tolerate abuses of power and heedless selfinterest, "evil things formerly accepted" but now not so easily condone& The third inaugural address announces that the country has survived its crisis and "put away evil things:'
Even as evil is cornfortable in the register of past economic practices no longer threatening America, an evil variant appears in the · second inau;. gural address. Evil remains something to be managed through governance, but its temporality changes. Rather than banished to the past, it is pro-F�cted into a sort of indefinite future-present, the universal extratemporal;. ity of moral engagement. Suggesting that the strength of democracy stems from the power lodged in the people, Roosevelt advises that "as intricacies of human relationships increase, so power to govern them also must increase, power to stop evilj power to do good:'
In his first years as president, Truman reiterates Roosevelt's associations of evil with poverty. His 1948 State of the Union address refers to economic distress as a "disease whose evil efects spread far beyond the boundaries of the aflicted nation:' The following year, in a general treatment of economic and social problems such as low minimum wage, growing monopolies, prejudice, and intolerance as opportunities for the Congress and the president to work together for the good of the people, he underscores that "our first great opportunity is to protect our economy against the evils ofboom and bust."
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