Roosevelt's words worth remembering

STEPHEN HAYCOX COMMENT

On Jan. 6, 1941, 65 years ago today, President Franklin Roosevelt articulated in his annual State of the Union address the essence of and American vision for the world, his famous "four freedoms" speech. America looked forward to a future characterized by freedom of speech and expression everywhere; freedom to worship God each in his or her own way; freedom from want, meaning, Roosevelt said, an economic understanding that would secure every nation a healthy, peacetime life; and freedom from fear, meaning so thorough an arms reduction as would preclude any act of physical aggression.

Roosevelt's world was different from our own in many respects. But his message was driven by much the same vision Americans aspire to today, empowering citizens the world over to translate the American dream of peace, prosperity and self-realization into personal reality.

The domestic context of the message was the Great Depression. Faced with the manifest failure of capitalism to provide the country's citizens with the wherewithal to provide minimum food, shelter and clothing for themselves, Roosevelt and his advisers set out in 1933 to save capitalism. With the regulating mechanisms they put in place, including strengthening Securities and Exchange Commission safeguards on negotiable investments and generating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to secure bank deposits, they largely succeeded. Capitalism survived the Depression, and the New Deal, intact.

One of Roosevelt's more remarkable policies was to try to stabilize prices, and in some cases actually drive them up. The reason was to make it possible for producers, both agricultural and industrial, to stay in business, and thus provide jobs. When the Supreme Court invalidated principal instruments created for this purpose, the AAA and the NRA, Roosevelt found ways of preserving the essence of the policy without them.

Consistent with the vision he articulated in 1941, Roosevelt's economic program mandated that workers be paid a living wage and that unions be strengthened in protecting workers' opportunities to improve their circumstances and participate in the dream of prosperity. This necessarily reduced employers' profits, justified, Roosevelt understood, as a condition of ensuring opportunity for all.

Today's supply-side economic policy, with its tax cuts and protected privileges for the rich, abetted by the wide use of low pricing and heavily advertised loss leaders, led by Wal-Mart, eliminates American jobs instead of guaranteeing them. Cheaper goods imported from China, beguiling to consumers besotted with an increasingly mechanistic and material conceptualization of "the good life," exacerbate the growing marginalization of workers and inequity in the distribution of American wealth. There is little self-realization or sense of achievement in the acquisition of larger and larger piles of material goods. Roosevelt's vision was more democratic, inclusive and ennobling.
In foreign affairs Roosevelt envisioned a world of citizens freed from the crippling fear of war and threats of force. He hoped to produce stability through negotiation and community, "the very antithesis of the so-called 'new order' of tyranny which dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb," words that have an uncanny resonance as a critique of American policy today. Roosevelt maintained his vision even in the face of world war, and worked in coalition with Winston Churchill and others toward establishing the United Nations as a platform for achieving it, work continued by his wife after his death in 1945. To the tyranny of power Roosevelt opposed a "greater conception," as he called it: "the moral order."

His words of 1941 explaining the moral foundation of the four freedoms have the power to inspire still today. Since the beginning of our history, he said, "this nation has placed its destiny in the hands, heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is in our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory."
Roosevelt wanted America to stand for this inclusive, moral faith in people and their rights. So did most of his fellow citizens. It's a faith worth working to rekindle today.

Stephen Haycox is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.