In the last weeks, there has been a ton of attention to the so-called Greatest Generation and to the spirit of those who fought World War II – and to some apparent parallels between that generation and our own. During the opening of the new memorial in Washington, President Bush drew particular attention to that generation and especially to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saying, “Across the years, we still know his voice.”
Do we really?
I’ve spent much of the last three years with FDR and his amazing voice, hearing it on tapes (in the car, boring my teenage daughter) and on the VCR, and pouring over countless speeches and papers from the FDR library. (And yes, a book, called The Second Bill of Rights, will be published soon from these efforts.)
Here’s my conclusion: In all the celebration, we’ve lost sight of what FDR and his generation were all about. We’ve decorated them in a gauzy, complacent nostalgia that has betrayed their pragmatic, forward-looking spirit. If we want to understand our own history, we should be listening, a bit, to what FDR actually had to say.
On January 11, 1944, the United States was involved in its longest conflict since the Civil War. The war effort was going well. Victory was no longer in serious doubt. The real question was the nature of the peace. At noon, Roosevelt sent the text of his most ambitious State of the Union address to Congress. Ill with a cold, Roosevelt did not make the customary trip to Capitol Hill to appear in person. Instead he spoke to the nation via radio – the first and only time a State of the Union address was also a Fireside Chat.
Roosevelt’s speech wasn’t elegant. It was messy, sprawling, unruly, a bit of a pastiche, upbeat, and not at all literary. It was the opposite of Lincoln’s tight, poetic, elegiac Gettysburg Address. But because of what it said, it has a strong claim to being the greatest speech of the twentieth century.
Roosevelt began by emphasizing that the “supreme objective for the future” — the objective for all nations — was captured “in one word: Security.” Roosevelt argued that the term “means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors,” but includes as well “economic security, social security, moral security.” Roosevelt insisted that “essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.”
Roosevelt looked back, and not entirely approvingly, to the framing of the Constitution. At its inception, the nation had grown “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.”
But over time, these rights had proved inadequate. Unlike the Constitution’s framers, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” As Roosevelt saw it, “necessitous men are not free men,” not least because those who are hungry and jobless “are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made.” Recalling the New Deal, he cut to the chase: The nation had “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.”
Then he listed the relevant rights:
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.
Having catalogued these eight rights, Roosevelt said that “we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights.” Roosevelt asked “the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights—for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress to do so.”
Let’s put to one side, for the moment, whether Roosevelt was right to call for a Second Bill of Rights; let’s even acknowledge that it’s unclear what he meant by it. (I’ll have a bit more to say about that.) For now, the central point is that we’ve missed a huge piece of our own history. The leader of the Greatest Generation had a distinctive project, running directly from the New Deal to the war on Fascism — a project that he believed to be radically incomplete. We don’t honor him, and we don’t honor those who elected him, if we forget what that project was all about.
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