FDR's Economic Bill of Rights

Franklin D. Roosevelt

“The Economic Bill of Rights”

Excerpt from 11 January 1944 message to Congress on the State of the Union

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It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. 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.

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.

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source: The Public Papers & Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Samuel Rosenman, ed.), Vol XIII (NY: Harper, 1950), 40-42

12 How. 152: “Necessitous men,” says the Lord Chancellor, in Vernon v Bethell, 2 Eden 113 (1762), “are not, truly speaking, free men; but, to answer a present emergency, will submit to any terms that the crafty may impose on them.”

Posted at TPM Cafe by M. J. Rosenberg.

Did FDR's attempt to enlarge the Supreme Court end the New Deal?

Mark Graber kicked off an interesting discussion over at Balkinization. Here is the beginning:

Professor David Adamany in an essay written many years ago maintained that one consequence of the FDR's Court-packing plan of 1937 was that Roosevelt lost vital political capital that could have been spent on other liberal reforms. Most scholars agree that after the failed Court-packing plan and the failed purge of southern conservatives in 1938, the momentum for the Second New Deal was largely over, not to be revived until the 1960s.

Roosevelt’s experience may teach two related lessons about politics. The first is that politics cannot be about everything at once. Political movements must choose their issues. Abraham Lincoln urged his former Whig followers not to raise tariff issues in order to maintain a united front against the expansion of slavery. Ronald Reagan during his first term downplayed opposition to abortion in order to maintain a united front in favor budget cuts. Roosevelt, by choosing to emphasize judicial reform, diverted vital resources from previous fights for economic equality. The second is that politics makes strange bedfellows. To paraphrase Churchill on his alliance with Stalin, he would make a pact with the Devil to fight Hitler (I’ve forgotten the exact quote). Roosevelt’s coalition of racist southern populists and northern workers (who, as Paul Frymer points out, were not exactly racial egalitarians) accomplished much good. Roosevelt’s effort to forge a purer coalition stalled his program completely.
[Emphasis mine - editor.]

I was ready to buy this reasoning completely, until further down I read this comment by Bart DePalma:

Professor David Adamany in an essay written many years ago maintained that one consequence of the FDR's Court-packing plan of 1937 was that Roosevelt lost vital political capital that could have been spent on other liberal reforms. Most scholars agree that after the failed Court-packing plan and the failed purge of southern conservatives in 1938, the momentum for the Second New Deal was largely over, not to be revived until the 1960s.

Forget the "Second New Deal." The First New Deal would not have survived constitutional muster without expending that political capital bullying the Supreme Court. From FDR's perspective, if not arguably the country's, that was political capital well worth expending.

The New Deal was hardly a case of a job half done. FDR was one of the two most powerful Presidents in the 20th Century because he finished the job of convincing the country to embrace the concept of government run social insurance and entrenched the Dems as the majority party for a half century as the defender of that concept.

This part of Depalma's comment I agree with. He goes on to accuse the New Left of attempting the guarantee an equality of outcome, which I don't think is true. But that's neither here nor there.

The real question is whether FDR's effort to restructure the Supreme Court actually derailed the New Deal, or if it was merely an event that occurred at the same time the New Deal was winging down, or (as a third possibility) if it was a necessary effort to ensure that the New Deal could survive intact. [I suspect that the options are not mutually exclusive. All three could have been true at once.]

The key issue as I see it is that the Constitution set up a very conservative structure, one that demanded a true super majority to effect permanent change. Another comment by someone named Joe added:

Many constitutional historians have pointed out there was no one "switch in time that saved nine," but actually a steady development of constitutional law that increased the understanding of "public interest" in the early 1900s up to the 1930s. This reflected a growing understanding, by a super majority, of what the Constitution meant. One that involved a "living Constitution"...

which I found to be an interesting insight.

It seems to me that what America has is a Constitution that requires a long-term super majority before any permanent structural change can be made. Until such a permanent change is locked in by a change to the Constitution, we have a system that permits flexibility, currently described by the term "a living Constitution". The "living Constitution" allows some things to be tried out, but if they don't gain a super majority of acceptance they are not locked in permanently. An example was the income tax - first imposed during the Civil War, then later declared unconstitutional. But it gained sufficient acceptance (apparently a super majority) so that the 16th amendment was passed to permit it in spite of Supreme Court objection. The income tax thus became locked in permanently to the basic law of the land.

That seems to me to be an interesting combination of a rigid base law (the Constitution) with flexibility provided within the boundaries set by the Constitution by both Stare Decisis from the Common Law and the concept of the "living Constitution". Both the rigidity of the base Constitution and the flexibility to experiment provided by the concept of the "living Constitution" will have strong opponents.

I don't think that the efforts by the religious right (and currently Presidential candidate for the Republican nomination Huckabee) to impose a theocracy on the U.S. can make it through this system. Thank god. But those of us in Texas and Oklahoma will suffer from the theocrats for quite a while anyway.