The coronavirus pandemic has produced several different kinds of crises. It is of course a public health crisis, first and foremost. But it's also an economic crisis, an international-relations crisis and a crisis of public morale. Fear is widespread and mounting.
The United States has not been here before, but it has been in the vicinity. In some ways, the closest analogy is to the Great Depression. There was no pandemic, of course, but the economic crisis was far worse. And the crisis of public morale, though also much worse, had similar features.
To get a sense of how leaders of all kinds might handle that part of the crisis, we cannot do better than to travel back to March 4, 1933, when U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his first inaugural address.
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