“The Economic Bill of Rights” - (FDR's socialist "great society" vision 20 yrs. before LBJ)

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.

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

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 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;

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.

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

The FDR Legacy: Lest We Forget
by William P. Hoar

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected four times as President of the United States, once requested that if any memorial were built to him, it should be no larger than his desk. There actually is one about that size in the nation's capital, which was erected outside the National Archives in 1945. Nonetheless this May, 52 years after the death of FDR, an outdoor memorial to the 32nd President was dedicated -- encompassing seven and one-half acres and costing some $52 million dollars, about four-fifths of it paid for with federal tax dollars.

The overblown aggrandizement is, in many regards, itself a testament to what FDR brought to Washington: Prodigal spending to glorify pretense and illusion -- a manifestation of the welfare state.

The memorial consists, in part, of four "rooms" -- depicting four "highlights" of FDR's Administration: His first election in 1932; the Great Depression; World War II (highlighted by a Roosevelt quotation declaring, "I Hate War"); and the efforts (as personified by a statue of wife Eleanor) to construct what FDR called "the structure of world peace" -- the United Nations.

The characterizations of these four elements are largely irreconcilable with the historical facts; in a paradoxical way, however, such fallacies are befitting the man, though Roosevelt's boosters meant them as the highest of accolades.

President Clinton, in his dedicatory remarks, praised his Democratic ancestor. FDR, he claimed, "electrified the nation, instilled confidence with every tilt of his head." Yet it is a "strange irony of our time," said Mr. Clinton, that "here, at the moment of our greatest prosperity and progress in so many years, [at] the pinnacle that Roosevelt hoped America would achieve ... we still strangely fight battles with doubts."

Those doubts, continued Mr. Clinton, FDR would "treat with great impatience and disdain, doubts that lead some to urge us to pull back from the world at the very first time since Roosevelt's time when we actually can realize his vision of world peace and world prosperity and the dominance of the ideals for which he gave his life."

It is predicted that some two million people will visit the memorial each year. Relatively few, however, will know the ugly truth about the real "legacy" FDR left this nation. On the other hand, if a more accurate accounting were given to the aspects of FDR's Administration which make up the quartet of rooms, it would include the following.

Among the chief legends associated with FDR is that his election and subsequent massive intervention in the economy were necessitated by the failure of free markets and the lack of action taken by his predecessor, President Herbert Hoover. That doesn't square with the facts. While Congress was certainly inept and the suffering brought on by the Great Depression was all too real, the problems were not caused by too little federal action.

One of the foremost experts on the economic origins of the Depression was the late Murray Rothbard. He explained why it is accurate to refer to the earlier period as Hoover's New Deal, since it included the expansion of credit, the propping up of weak companies, and an increase in government spending in such forms as subsidies for unemployment and public works. The mess created under Hoover, as Professor Rothbard wrote in his 1963 work The Great Depression, "must be set down as a failure of government planning and not of the free market."

Roosevelt, who ran against interventionist policies pursued by the Hoover Administration, was to subsequently build upon them once in office. "I accuse the Hoover Administration," emphasized candidate Roosevelt, "of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission...." Furthermore, said the Democratic candidate in 1932, "I regard reduction in federal spending as one of the most important issues of this campaign."

During the post-election period, but before FDR took office, there was a worsening of the economic conditions. More and more state banking holidays were being called. In March 1993, Hoover wanted to call by executive order a federal bank holiday, but President-elect Roosevelt would not endorse such a move. As a result, when he took office the economic situation was in virtual paralysis. That was the idea. The previous month Barron's magazine had declared that "a mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead." Action was needed. The Nation, a "progressive" journal, published a piece entitled, "Wanted: A Mussolini."

FDR would oblige such demands. "We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline," he said in his first inaugural. "I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people." Nor would he hesitate to take matters into his own hands: "In the event that the Congress shall fail to [act] and in the event that the national emergency is still critical ... I shall ask the Congress for ... broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

FDR was himself a creature of Wall Street, and those very "economic royalists" had helped elect him governor of New York; he was a friend of the very bankers he often disparaged to great political effect. For example, just after assuming office, FDR wrote to Edward Mandell House, one of the founders of the ubiquitous and influential Council on Foreign Relations: "The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson -- and I am not wholly excepting the Administration of W.W. [Woodrow Wilson, to whom House was an intimate adviser]."

Emergencies are a boon to the power-hungry, as Hitler and Mussolini -- both statists like FDR -- had proven. Hoover would later express dismay at how far FDR would go with his power grab, including proposing a bank holiday three days after refusing to go along with Hoover's similar proposal. Roosevelt, by Hoover's count, came up with "emergency" executive orders more than 200 times. The new President, recalled Professor Robert Higgs in his masterful Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987), also used the term "emergency" in various public statements more than 400 times during his first two years in office.

Everyone, related Higgs, "who had not already jumped on the emergency bandwagon now hastened to do so. Congressmen attached the emergency label to almost every bill they enacted. In their rush to legislate, they often conformed to their characterization of the laws they passed. For example, the Emergency Banking Act of March 9, 1933, which validated the President's legally questionable declaration of a national banking closure, was approved by a unanimous shout in the House of Representatives after thirty-eight minutes of debate, even though no member of the House had a copy of the bill."

To find an ostensible basis for declaring the banking holiday, Roosevelt looked at what had been done during World War I and went so far as to invoke the Trading with the Enemy Act. In the name of fixing the crisis, property rights of bank depositors were abrogated, gold was confiscated, and, as noted by Professor Rothbard, the federal government was placed "in control of a vast, managed engine of inflation."

In 1932 the Democratic Platform had called for a 25 percent reduction in federal spending. In fact, such a bill was pushed through Congress almost immediately upon Roosevelt's election. The problem is that the program was never put into effect. What amounted to a New Deal party tossed those promises onto the trash heap. Planned deficit spending became the order of the day. The famous "100 days" of action -- which produced a deficit larger than Hoover had managed in his final two years -- was met with almost no resistance. More and more power accrued to the office of the President.

Under FDR, as M. Stanton Evans recounted in his book Clear and Present Dangers (1975), "executive legislation" became commonplace. Roosevelt "secured emergency power to reorganize the government as he pleased, subject only to a veto by the legislature -- a reversal of constitutional functions that has become quite customary since. His agents drafted bills and carried them to Congress for enactment."

Not that everyone was taken in by FDR. Consider the comments of one "progressive" Republican, who accused the New Deal of "making false promises to the needy," of administering welfare so as "to leave a stench in the nostrils of decent people," and of destroying the U.S. "morally and spiritually and ruining it materially." Moreover, said this critic publicly in 1935 as if addressing FDR himself: "You have been faithless. You have usurped the functions of Congress, hampered the freedom of the press.... You have urged Congress to pass laws you knew were unconstitutional.... You have broken your sacred oath taken on the Bible." The critic was Ted Roosevelt, a cousin of the President.

Much like the pharaohs, Roosevelt pushed public works. Back when a dollar was worth much more, FDR's spending on public works projects totalled $10.5 billion, plus another $2.7 billion on sponsored projects -- employing, as historian Paul Johnson detailed in Modern Times (1983), "at one time or another 8.5 million people and constructing 122,000 public buildings, 77,000 new bridges, 285 airports, 664,000 miles of roads, 24,000 miles of storm and water sewers, plus parks, playgrounds, and reservoirs." Some viewed this work as a necessity, under the theory that any port will do in a storm. Dictators throughout history have used such ploys.

But at least all of this ended unemployment and the Depression, right? Wrong. Despite all of FDR's power grabbing, in 1938 there were more Americans unemployed than in 1932. It took a dozen years after the stock market crash, into the war year of 1941, before the dollar value of American production returned to the level of 1929. In the meantime, consider just a few of the statist programs and precedents established under FDR: In 1933, came authorizations of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Industrial Recovery Act, voiding of gold contracts, and (when Moscow was in dire need of assistance) diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union.

Some of my best friends are communists, said Franklin Roosevelt when there were complaints about his coziness with the Reds on the domestic front. If anything, Eleanor Roosevelt was more obviously in league with the Reds than was FDR. The communist-dominated American Youth Congress even ran some of its operations right out of the White House; the radicals had turned from anti-intervention to pro-intervention after Hitler and Stalin had a falling-out and Moscow was threatened. The Youth Congress at that point didn't hesitate to publicly boo President Roosevelt for militarizing too slowly; nonetheless, Mrs. Roosevelt kept up her sponsorship.

The head of the Communist Party, USA, Earl Browder, worked on political deals with FDR. The arrangements were mutually beneficial. House Rules Chairman John O'Connor told the Senate Judiciary Committee that during 1938 and 1939, when Earl Browder was a frequent guest at the White House, he helped direct a "purge" of conservative Democrats who had opposed FDR's policies. "In fact," the congressman acknowledged, "during the President's 'purge' of 1938, Browder directed a purge operation from the White House, from which he telephoned instructions, from time to time."

In 1934 and 1935 the dollar was devalued and the Civil Works Emergency Act passed; there was the authorization of the Works Progress Administration, establishment of the Rural Electrification Administration and National Youth Administration, and passage of the Social Security Act.

Between 1936 and 1938 came, among many other measures, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, the Farm Security Administration, and the National Housing Act. Also put into law were another Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act.

So what was the bottom line? Commentator and former New Deal enthusiast John T. Flynn looked back in 1955, using figures complied by the AFL and reporting as follows in The Freeman:

In 1932, when Roosevelt was elected, there were on relief 4,155,000 households, containing 16,620,000 persons. In 1940, eight years later, there were 4,227,000 households on relief, containing 16,908,000 persons. In this period farm employment fell off and has never recovered.

There were 11,586,000 unemployed in 1932 when Roosevelt was elected. In 1939, in spite of all the spending and borrowing, there were still 11,369,000 unemployed. In the next year, as the European war got under way and Roosevelt began to turn to war measures, there were still 10,656,000 unemployed. [Emphasis in the original.]

Such facts are inconvenient to the fiction that FDR put the country back to work.

There are certain time-tested ways of getting people to work. One of these is war. Bread lines are replaced with a draft, mobilization, and wide-scale bloodshed. But here at least the employment numbers are likely to go up -- certainly in the ranks of government. So it was in the U.S., as the war became the crutch for economic infirmity. In 1929, the number of those employed by the government in both civilian and military capacities was a bit over 850,000. By the end of World War II, the comparable number in both military and civilian government ranks was some 15,692,000 -- an increase of more than 1,700 percent.

Though he declared the opposite, Roosevelt desperately wanted to get the country into the World War. In a speech in late 1940 he said to the American people, "I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Of course, that was not to be so. Already Roosevelt had committed the U.S. to a huge program of military aid to Britain. As The Economist of London later put it, FDR "had drawn up the Rainbow contingency plans for a simultaneous war with Germany and Japan, and was soon to slap on Japan the embargoes which some people still believe pushed the Japanese into their attack on Pearl Harbor."

Two months after the 1940 election, FDR's "alter ego," Harry Hopkins, was bringing quite a different message to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: "The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He had sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through ... there is nothing that he will not do so far as he has human power."

The idea was to provoke an incident to force the reluctant American people into the conflict. As FDR later told Churchill at the Atlantic Conference, he would use U.S. vessels aggressively to create just such an incident to serve to justify war.

One prominent Roosevelt apologist, Thomas Bailey, in his 1948 book The Man in the Street, attempted to justify Roosevelt's manipulations: "Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor.... The country was overwhelmingly non-interventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a consequent defeat of his ultimate aims." In Bailey's mind, since the "people are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesman are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests."

Another apologist for FDR, biographer Robert Sherwood, told the head of British intelligence in this country that if the "isolationists had known of the full extent of the secret alliance between the United States and Britain, their demands for the President's impeachment would have rumbled like thunder through the land." Nevertheless, the way to war in Europe still eluded Roosevelt.

But there was a back door to getting nto the war. Here was the way -- to quote Secretary of War Stimson in his diary, "The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves." The U.S. had broken Tokyo's code, and had intercepted secret messages about a major declaration to come, among other warnings. So obvious was what was about to ensue that Roosevelt himself said to his closest advisers on December 6, 1941, the day before the date that will live in infamy: "This means war." But still Pearl Harbor was not warned. FDR told the American people that Tokyo's message "contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack."

The details of American foreknowledge of what was coming are too lengthy to repeat at this juncture. (It has been covered previously in THE NEW AMERICAN: See, for example, "The Great Deceivers" in our December 9, 1996 issue). Suffice it to say that both allies and foes could see what happened. For example, Italy's foreign minister, Count Ciano, wrote in his diaries: "Now that Roosevelt has succeeded in his maneuver, not being able to enter the war directly, he has succeeded by an indirect route -- forcing the Japanese to attack him."

Expressing what seemed obvious to him, Oliver Lyttelton, the production minister in Churchill's Cabinet, told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in London in 1944, "America provoked Japan to such an extent that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor. It is a travesty on history ever to say that America was forced into war." Certainly the Japanese move was a devastating and perfidious surprise attack, but it would be fraudulent to say that FDR was caught unawares. Many still prefer that illusion.

By the end of World War II, the great victory in Europe, for which so many had died, left Stalin in the catbird seat. FDR had "negotiated" with Stalin and boasted to one of his Cabinet members that, after some doing, he had made "Uncle Joe" laugh -- as well the dictator might. At Yalta, Stalin must have been positively ecstatic, for sitting at FDR's side advising him was Soviet agent Alger Hiss. It was Hiss who later became Secretary-General of the United Nations' founding conference.

Stalin told Churchill that he expected to keep all that he had been dealt in the pact with Hitler, including a chunk of Poland and the Baltic states. Churchill told him to take it up with FDR -- who had asked to deal directly with Stalin. At Teheran, when faced with the Soviet dictator's demands, as Robert Nisbet noted in Roosevelt and Stalin (1988), "Roosevelt conceded all of this to Stalin."

The most resistance to Stalin's demands seems to have been getting him to back off from his demands for 16 votes in the post-war UN -- to a "mere" three votes. In The Struggle for Europe (1952), Chester Wilmot wrote:

Even before Teheran it was inevitable that the enforcement of "Unconditional Surrender" upon Germany would leave the U.S.S.R. the dominant power in Eastern Europe, but it was by no means inevitable that Russian influence would extend deep into Central Europe and the Balkans. After Teheran, it became almost a certainty that this would happen. Thus the Teheran Conference not only determined the military strategy for 1944, but adjusted the political balance of post-war Europe in favor of the Soviet Union. [Emphasis in the original.]

FDR seemed to see in the Soviet Union, opined Nisbet, "its record of terror and slaughter, its omnipresent dictatorship and despotism notwithstanding, as containing a greater promise of democracy and freedom in the long run than Great Britain. Somehow in Roosevelt's vision all the ugly was squeezed out and what was left was a system in Russia not extremely different from his own American New Deal."

Things didn't appear so benevolent to those who were turned over to the mercies of the Reds. When the smoke from the war finally cleared, Stalin and company had brought down more than a dozen countries into the hell of communist slavery. As summarized by John T. Flynn in The Roosevelt Myth (1956), Stalin "added to his empire some 725 million people, which with the 193 million in Russia gave him dominion over 918 million human beings...."

This was part of what resulted from the partnership of Stalin and Roosevelt to set up the United Nations. The undercover role of Alger Hiss was later revealed, but he was not alone. Hiss brought in many people to the UN who would take the Fifth Amendment when the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley raised suspicions about Red infiltration and influence.

Indeed, in 1952, after an 18-month grand jury investigation, a presentment was made. The jury informed the people of the U.S. that "startling evidence has disclosed infiltration into the United Nations of an overwhelmingly large group of disloyal United States citizens, many of whom are closely associated with the international Communist movement. This group numbers scores of individuals, most of whom have long records of federal employment, and at the same time have been connected with persons and organizations subversive to this country. Their positions at the time we subpoenaed them were ones of trust and responsibility in the United Nations Secretariat, and its specialized agencies...." That is what happens when Americans become, as FDR urged in his fourth inaugural, "citizens of the world...."

Nor was the domestic situation propitious. Official historians of the mobilization have been forced to admit that over "the war period, government regulations and restrictions invaded one area of economic life after another and with constantly increasing stringency." Just to choose one example, consider the withholding tax that was supposedly a war emergency measure. Despite the war's end, wage earners would never again get a full paycheck, and the government to this day demands its cut up front.

After the war there remained, for example, a military-industrial complex and Selective Service, as well as an increasingly hungry tax monster to feed at home and black holes overseas into which to shovel our dollars in foreign aid.

More importantly, noted Professor Robert Higgs in Crisis and Leviathan, "the war left the constitutional structure of the country deeply altered in the direction of judicial abdication and executive autonomy; the nation no longer possessed a 'peacetime Constitution' to which it could return. Most significantly the war moved the prevailing ideology markedly toward acceptance of an enlarged government presence in the economy. At last even the majority of businessmen had come to accept, and often to demand, Big Government."

Roosevelt claimed to be against Leviathan Government. "We must eliminate the functions of government," he said before taking office. We must "merge, we must consolidate subdivisions of government and, like private citizens, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford."

What was the upshot? By the time FDR's terms had ended, he had expended more than his 31 predecessors put together, actually spending three times more than all Presidents from George Washington to Herbert Hoover.

At the dedication of the Roosevelt memorial, President Clinton praised the man whose undercover deals were so costly in blood and treasure, here and abroad, by saying: "His was an open, American spirit, with a fine sense for the possible and a keen appreciation of the art of leadership."

FDR's spirit lives on with us: Today it's called the Welfare State. President Clinton gives away more greenbacks in a mere two days than FDR did in all of 1935. Does Mr. Clinton foresee an even bigger memorial someday to himself?

But there is always an ultimate price to pay, one that escalates as the day of reckoning is postponed. To utilize a phrase of FDR: If we are to have a rendezvous with destiny, and we continue down the trail he blazed, it will be an ominous encounter.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1997/vo13no13/vo13no13_fdr.htm

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