Do you believe in the promise proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence?
Do you believe that all of us are created equal and that we have a natural right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And do you also believe that we should
guarantee those rights to all Americans? Of course, you do. So, let’s think about
what that means. Let’s look back….
On January 11, 1944, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt – FDR – delivered his 11th State of the Union Message to Congress.
The United States was in the middle of its biggest and most consequential war,
pitted against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. But Roosevelt didn’t just talk about winning
the war. He also spoke of what Americans needed to do to win the peace to come.
In his speech to Congress that day, he called for a new Bill of Rights – an Economic Bill of Rights.
In the 1930s, Roosevelt and the American people had fought the Great Depression,
the worst economic and social catastrophe in US history. Rallying to the President’s New Deal,
they not only had revived the economy. They had also subjected business and finance to public
supervision and regulation, empowered the federal government to address the needs of working people,
mobilized and organized labor unions and civil rights groups,
established a Social Security system, expanded and upgraded the nation’s public infrastructure,
improved the environment, and cultivated and promoted the arts.
In 1941, however, Americans confronted a new crisis – the Second World War. But here too
they went all “All Out!” In fact, they not only did all they could to fight Fascism overseas,
but also fought for democracy at home by dramatically expanding the labor and
civil rights movements. And by early 1944, there was good cause to believe both that
Victory might soon be at hand and that further progressive action was possible.
At the outset of the State of the Union speech,
Roosevelt urged Americans to sustain the war effort. But he also now looked ahead,
confident that Americans – who had achieved so much – wanted to not only revive the New Deal,
but in every way expand upon it. Opinion polls conducted in 1943 indicated, for example,
that 83 percent of Americans wanted a guarantee of health care for all, 73 percent supported
launching new public works programs, and 79 percent wanted a federal jobs guarantee.
Though he was too sick to appear in person before Congress to deliver the speech,
Roosevelt went on radio and delivered a spirited address. And after reviewing the continuing war
effort, he turned to the question of the postwar peace effort in the United States.
“This Republic,” he said, “had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the
protection of certain inalienable rights.… They were our rights to life and liberty. As our
Nation has grown in size and stature, however – as our industrial economy expanded – these
political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.”
The words that followed are among the most radical in Presidential history: “We have come”
FDR contended, “to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without
economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’”
What he then proposed would be seen as far-left today.
Though, as he reminded his fellow Americans, it was not a repudiation of the promises enshrined
in the Declaration and Bill of Rights, but a continuation and realization of them.
Indeed, only with ECONOMIC rights could POLITICAL rights be made real.
As Roosevelt said:
In our day certain economic truths have become accepted
as self-evident. A Second Bill of Rights under which a new basis
of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, or race, or creed.
The rights Roosevelt was proposing – a right to a home, to healthcare, to earn enough money
to live comfortably, a guaranteed job – would be called “socialism” or even “communism” by
the conservatives of today. But whatever they might be labeled, they were rooted,
as FDR made clear, in America’s promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Empowered by the aspirations of those who had fought the Depression and were now fighting
Fascism, Roosevelt was projecting a path to a better, brighter, happier, and healthier future.
“All of these rights,” he said, “spell SECURITY.
And after this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward,
in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.”
But FDR knew all too well that there were those who would fiercely oppose
them – as they always had. And he warned his fellow citizens against what he called
“the grave dangers of rightist reaction.”
What Roosevelt laid out in his State of the Union was something simple,
but radical. It was that history wasn’t something to be left in the past, but to be
constantly renewed and remade. New times demand new freedoms.
Just a few years earlier, his Solicitor-General Robert H.
Jackson – a future Supreme Court Justice – told the members of the National Lawyers Guild:
“We too are Founders. We too are makers of a nation. We too are called upon to write,
to defend, and to make live, new bills of right.”
And this was a task that a majority of Americans were ready to take up. At a demonstration in New
York City, 1.4 million people showed up to hear Senator Robert Wagner enthusiastically defend
the call for a Second Bill of Rights. Labor and civil rights groups
actively campaigned for it. And in the presidential election later that year,
Roosevelt won a fourth term as President with a resounding 432 electoral votes.
Roosevelt would not live to achieve his dream. At his fourth and final inauguration in 1945,
he appeared sick and frail. While he was getting his portrait painted a few months later in Warm
Springs, Georgia, he put his hand over his forehead, slumped over, and died.
The Second Bill of Rights was never realized. The
forces of “rightist reaction” that FDR had warned of were too powerful.
Corporate executives and conservatives soon took to fomenting Cold War fears and purging
public life of leftists not only to block the hoped-for revival and expansion of the New Deal,
but also to crush the very idea and memory of Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that his vision has to remain shrouded and forgotten.
What FDR promised, though still radical, remains
deeply possible – if we have the will to recover it and to advance it.
We, too, can be Founders. We, too, can be makers of a nation. We, too,
are called upon to write, to defend, to make live, new bills of rights.
I’m Harvey Kaye, professor emeritus of Democracy and Justice Studies at
the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, for the Gravel Institute.