FDR뭩 Warning of the Tyranny of Economic Royalists in the U.S.

Time for change

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Oct-25-06 01:36 PM
Original message

FDR뭩 Warning of the Tyranny of Economic Royalists in the U.S.

Edited on Wed Oct-25-06 01:38 PM by Time for change

In June of 1936, with Fascism on the rise in Europe, the man who is generally regarded as the second greatest president in the history of the United States gave one of the greatest speeches ever given in this country. In that speech Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned his countrymen, not of external dangers, but of the internal dangers to our country from what he called 밻conomic royalists�.

I came across this speech for the first time a few days ago, and I was astounded both by how pertinent it is to the grave challenges that we face today and how closely FDR뭩 밻conomic royalists� resemble today뭩 Republican Party, except that FDR did not speak of the moral bankruptcy of the subjects of his speech.

Though FDR emphasized our Constitution in his speech, his warning went well beyond the need for us to maintain the political freedoms guaranteed to us in our Constitution. The Great Depression, out of which FDR was still leading us almost four years into his Presidency, had demonstrated that economic freedom is essential as well, if American citizens are to have the right to the 몆ursuit of happiness� claimed in our Declaration of Independence to be an unalienable right of all people.

Our Founding Fathers had either not anticipated that need when they wrote our Constitution, or else they had felt that our fledgling country was not yet ready for that concept. But as FDR pointed out in his speech, many things had changed since then. And his greatest legacies to our country were the recognition that people need a government that understands and acts upon the necessity for people to have economic freedom as well as political freedom, along with the enactment of the myriad of programs required by that recognition.

Here are some excerpts from FDR뭩 great and prophetic speech, as he accepted his second nomination for President of the United States at the Democratic National Convention of 1936:

� That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy-from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people.. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution-all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital-all undreamed of by the fathers-the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor-these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age-other people's money-these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.

Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.

An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living-a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor-other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this Convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that Government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them�.

We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude�.

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference�.

Here in America we are waging a great and successful war (FDR is not talking here of WW II, which had not yet started, but rather the war against our own 밇conomic Royalists�, as he called them � the forerunners of today뭩 Republican Party). It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.

I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.

Roosevelt did indeed enlist for the duration� of his life. He may not have foreseen, however, that his great success in combating the wealth and power of the economic royalists would create deep and lasting hatred towards him and his ilk; that this hatred would smolder in the breasts of the economic royalists and their descendents until, 35 years after FDR뭩 death they would create a President of the United States who would begin to turn back the tide of economic freedom that FDR had begun.

And by that time the economic royalists had more thoroughly recognized the mutually reinforcing nature of economic and political hegemony. They recognized, in fact, that in order to obtain the unlimited wealth that they hungered for they would have to attack both economic freedom and political freedom simultaneously. For the American people had become accustomed to the economic rights that FDR had worked so hard to give them, and they would not give them up easily.

So the economic royalists commenced an attack, while in the midst of dismantling FDR뭩 legacy, on our first amendment rights � first through control and intimidation of our independent news media; then by neutralizing laws designed to make our press accountable to the public; and finally by allowing the monopolization of our national news media into fewer and fewer hands until a small handful of the wealthiest men in our country controlled the great majority of news heard by the average American citizen. And when that degree of control was felt to be insufficient, another presidential creation of the economic royalists would denote �zones� in which Americans could exercise their first amendment rights away from the eyes and ears of the rest of the country, would produce his own propaganda disguised as news, and would threaten to jail reporters who strayed too far from the Republican Party line.

The effect of all this has been to shield our government with a thick wall of secrecy and to mislead the American people into believing that the replacement of FDR뭩 myriad of programs for the advancement of economic freedom for all Americans with programs specifically designed to restore the economic royalists to their former positions of wealth and power � and beyond � is really done in the name of democracy, freedom, patriotism and the welfare of the American people. In other words, they attempt to make us believe that up is down and down is up.

And to prepare for the possibility that even the loss of our First amendment rights will not suffice to fool most of us, they have invented machines that count our votes in secret, hatched a thousand different plans to prevent us from voting, developed a campaign finance system that ensures that they play an obscenely disproportionate role in our elections, and have even installed justices on our Supreme Court who in a pinch will tell us that the American people have no Constitutional right to vote.

And to top it all off, their latest creation, selected by the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2000 to be President of the United States, has no regard for the Constitution of the United States whatsoever, and has acted accordingly to dismantle as much of our constitution as he can.

And that is where we stand now, with perhaps the most important mid-term election in the history of our country just a few days in front of us. It is essential that we now return control of Congress to the Party of FDR, in order to prevent further grave damage to our country (including another war), and so that we may turn the tide in our struggle against the economic royalists that FDR began almost three quarters of a century ago, starting with the restoration of our political and economic rights that are the hallmarks of a true democracy.