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ACCORDING TO LIZ - The following suggestions are not original: most were set forth by Franklin Delano Roosevelt over eighty years ago following his swearing-in as President of the United States for an unprecedented fourth term.
Boy, I wish we had him back today.
The 1944 State of the Union Address to the Nation was delivered to all Americans as a Fireside Chat from the White House and as a written report to Congress. Additionally, the President selected two excerpts of the longer radio address that were filmed as newsreels to be shown in movie theatres, reinforcing his most important points.
The section that shines proposed "a second Bill of Rights" to provide a new sense of economic security and empowerment for Americans still struggling under a war economy and following the decade-long Great Depression.
As it elaborates:
“In this war, we have been compelled to learn how interdependent upon each other are all groups and sections of the population of America.
“Increased food costs, for example, will bring new demands for wage increases from all war workers, which will in turn raise all prices of all things including those things which the farmers themselves have to buy. Increased wages or prices will each in turn produce the same results. They all have a particularly disastrous result on all fixed income groups.
“And I hope you will remember that all of us in this Government represent the fixed income group just as much as we represent business owners, workers, and farmers. This group of fixed income people includes: teachers, clergy, policemen, firemen, widows and minors on fixed incomes, wives and dependents of our soldiers and sailors, and old-age pensioners. They and their families add up to one-quarter of our one hundred and thirty million people. They have few or no high pressure representatives at the Capitol. In a period of gross inflation they would be the worst sufferers.”
Reading further reveals many parallels to today in what Roosevelt proposed for Americans at home at a time of war and international crises:
“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.
“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
“In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
“Among these are:
· The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation
· The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation
· The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living
· The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad
· The right of every family to a decent home
· The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health
· The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment
· The right to a good education.
“All of these rights 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.
“America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
“One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of "rightist reaction" in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.
“I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights- for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to do.”
These ideas did not arise spontaneously but built upon Roosevelt's Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
And on the last three of the eight points of the Atlantic Charter for a post-war world, hashed out between England’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Roosevelt on a ship in August of 1941:
· free trade
· self-determination
· international security
· arms control
· social welfare
· economic justice, and
· human rights
They drew as well from the methodology of a president who had previously faced wartime economics. Woodrow Wilson’s government focused on efficiency in managing the American war effort in the First World War by relying on proven data: that reasonable hours, appropriate working conditions, and decent wages were essential for productivity.
Both Wilson’s and Roosevelt's policies were seen as revolutionary in their times as they are today, but Wilson’s allowed America to come to the rescue of Europe in 1917, and Roosevelt's lifted the United States out of the Great Depression and set the country on the path to move out of isolation and become the leading power of the post-war world.
Opposed by corporate leadership and the Courts – then, as now, stacked by Republican conservatives, and white supremacist Southerners – the New Deal empowered the Roosevelt government to address the needs of working people and the poor; subjected capital to public account and regulation; established a social security system; built schools, libraries, post offices, and parks; expanded the America’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams; improved the country’s natural environments; and invested in the arts and culture.
Throughout the challenges of the Depression and the war years, Roosevelt and his fireside chats gained him the support of ordinary Americans, Americans who had felt discounted and ignored for generations.
And his Economic Declaration of Rights was intended to compensate them for their tribulations, to redeem and renew the revolutionary promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.
The resurgence of conservative politics in the decades after his death, the pivot to fighting perceived communist influencers, and the rising power of the plutocrats blunted Roosevelt’s proposal, but his ideals still stand for the present to embrace and act upon.
Leading Democrats today – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ro Khanna, as well as their Progressive Caucus colleagues – have rekindled the call for a new economic patriotism, an Economic Bill of Rights for the American people.
Roosevelt's New Deal and Economic Declaration of Rights would have given the secular government an ethical grounding in the vein of the Bible, the Koran and other religious works, now desperately needed in the wake of Trump and Biden.
As Obama in his role as a legal scholar once put it: the Left had ceded the high ground of family values and moral responsibility to the Right and needed to gain it back because a language of moral responsibility was what the whole nation needed.
“We have to take this same language – these same values that are encouraged within our families – of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other – and apply them to a larger society.”
The question: is the United States now ready to emerge from the quagmire of the early decades of the twenty-first century with the moral promise, one that values all of its people, of its foundation intact, or will it continue to be a purveyor of greed and selfishness.
Are Americans ready to really make America great again?
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
