PALO ALTO, Calif.

IN TIMES OF TRIAL, we turn instinctively to the words of the masters: maybe the Prophets or the Evangelists, or a favorite poet. Or perhaps the trenchant lyricism of Abraham Lincoln, especially those two masterworks chiseled in the Indiana lime-stone walls of the Lincoln Memorial: the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural.

In this summary season of reflection on a year that has offered more than its quota of trials, and on the eve of inaugurating a new president in Washington, few words from the American past seem more relevant than those of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural.

By this time, the parallels between our time and FDR’s scarcely need elaborating. Then, as now, the nation confronted a gathering economic crisis of epic proportions. Then, as now, a discredited Republican president gives way to a Democrat promising change and renewal. In both moments, pundits read portents of the death of an era, the collapse of the American dream, the eclipse of the U.S. as a great power, the end of civilization as we know it, nothing less than Armageddon. Were those apocalyptic prophecies warranted then? Are they now?

By the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, on March 4, 1933, it surely seemed that way. The Depression was in its fourth winter. Stocks had lost 75 percent of their 1929 values. Industrial output and consumption had been cut in half. New investment had fallen effectively to zero. Millions of foreclosed homes and farms had gone under the auctioneer’s hammer. Some 5,000 banks had failed. Some 13 million people were unemployed, 25 percent of the work force.

The crisis could by then legitimately be called the “Great Depression,” not just another familiar downswing of the business cycle, but a historical event without precedent. It was deeper, broader and clearly threatening to last much longer — as it did — than anything that had come before.

So what words did FDR summon in 1933 against all that gloom and despair? The line in his inaugural that was destined to become the most famous was, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But of at least equal interest to us today is the sentence that preceded that homely maxim: “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.”

The revival part took some doing — eight more years, to be exact, until mobilization for World War II finally lifted the pall of depression. On that count, Roosevelt’s New Deal was an unarguable failure. But when it came to enduring, and eventually prospering, FDR voiced an important truth: American political institutions and core values proved impressively resilient. There was no wholesale rioting in the streets, no cries for a man on horseback to rescue the Republic, no serious appearance of a political party dedicated to revolution from the right or left.

The Constitution, both the symbol and substance of the Republic’s stability and durability, emerged from the ordeal of depression intact and, yes, unamended. The Constitution, as FDR said in his inaugural address, “has met every stress of expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.” It passed the test of cataclysmic economic collapse, too.

And as for prospering — well, it’s worth recollecting that the young men and women raised in the Depression not only emerged as the “Greatest Generation” who won World War II; they also gave birth to the Baby Boomers and to more than half a century of phenomenal affluence that made Americans one of the first peoples in human history to count the poor among them as a minority.

(It’s also no accident that the nation’s largest racial minority — black Americans — saw the century-old promise of civil equality redeemed at last in that context of rising incomes and the national self-confidence they underwrote.)

The same generation also led the U.S. to a position of prominence in the international order to a degree that rivaled Britain’s imperial sway in the previous century. Those longer-term historical perspectives should serve us now as a prophylaxis against succumbing to the counsel of despair du jour.

But let’s go back to the fear part, and Roosevelt’s labeling of it as the single greatest enemy menacing the Republic in 1933. By giving such prominence to what he called “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror,” FDR was rightly emphasizing the psychological and perceptual causes that had brought the economy to a near standstill.

“Our distress comes from no failure of substance,” he said, but from the grasping incompetence of a malfeasant few, and the damage they had done especially to the intangible but crucial matter of trust. This was a powerful reminder, as pertinent today as it was then, that attitudes and expectations — the soft stuff of human feelings — were every bit as important as ledger books and assembly lines in explaining the causes of the Depression and in mapping the exit from it.

For all the statutory tinkering and institutional innovation that even then were taking shape in Roosevelt’s mind, he knew that in the realm of hearts and minds, including a measure of confidence in leadership and hope for the future, were to be found the major causes of the slump and the indispensable ingredients for a recovery.

Fear had another meaning in the America of 1933, one that mercifully doesn’t resonate so frightfully today. There was then no well-articulated ethos of social responsibility, and of government’s duties and responsibilities, to offset the long-regnant orthodoxy of laissez-faire.

Accordingly, neither was there anything remotely resembling the “safety net,” frayed though it might be, that today affords the elderly and the unemployed at least some shelter against the vagaries of a free-wheeling, beggar-thy-neighbor, devil-take-the-hindmost market.

A pioneering work of social psychology, Mirra Komarovsky’s The Unemployed Man and His Family, published in 1940, documented what might be called the spiritual implications of such an austere social contract. The principal psychological reaction of the unemployed, she reported, was a feeling of personal guilt, shame and self-recrimination.

Here was revealed the dark obverse of the vaunted American value of individualism, the reassuring philosophy that we are the captains of our destiny, the masters of our fate, beholden to none other than ourselves for our success — and our failure. That such an attitude endured even in the face of systemic breakdown is, among other things, arresting testimony to the inertial persistence of cultural values even when they have become demonstrably obsolete.

Americans remain a remarkably individualistic people. Individualism has been one of our defining characteristics since Alexis de Tocqueville’s invention of the term to describe the peculiar psychology he found in the U.S. of Andrew Jackson.

But we have by now managed to reconcile our pride in self-sufficiency with recognition that in some matters — our participation in a shared economic system, for example — we are all in the same boat. That attitudinal shift has underlain the readiness of George W. Bush’s administration, and the eagerness of Barack Obama’s team, to use the considerable powers of government to cope with the present crisis.

Seventy-five years ago, doubt about the legitimacy of such interventions was paralyzing. The economy continued on its downward path; even FDR wasn’t wholly unfettered from the restraints of that stubborn ideological legacy, which is among the reasons that the Great Depression lasted as long as it did. And the manifest obsolescence of that way of thinking is why the current crisis isn’t likely to endure nearly as long.

Lincoln once told a story about an eastern monarch who charged his wise men to craft him a sentence that would be “true and appropriate in all times and situations.” Lincoln said: “They presented him the words ‘And this too shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

The Great Depression passed away. This one will, too, and probably a lot quicker. Whether it will deserve to be called “Great,” and whether its lasting results will compare with the legacy of the 1930s are questions whose answers lie in the lap of the future. But there can be little doubt this great nation will continue to endure, revive and prosper.

David M. Kennedy teaches history at Stanford University. His book Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for history.