Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Visionary Kloppenberg, James T. Reviews in American History, Volume 34, Number 4, December 2006, pp. 509-520 (Review) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/rah.2006.0062 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rah/summary/v034/34.4kloppenberg.html Access Provided by Harvard University at 07/27/11 4:20PM GMT Franklin Delano roosevelt, visionary James t. kloppenberg elizabeth Borgwardt. A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 437 pp. Notes, bibliography, illustrations, and index. $35.00. Cass r. sunstein. The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever. New York: Basic Books, 2004. vii + 294 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper). Visitors to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C. find themselves face to face with FDR’s boldest challenge to the American people. Carved in the granite walls of the Memorial are the Four Freedoms that FDR proclaimed in January 1941. Joined to the Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Worship guaranteed by the original Bill of Rights are two new freedoms to be secured by Americans then confronting new dangers, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The two books under review address the history and significance of those latter freedoms, which remain as elusive in 2006 as they were sixty-five years ago. Most Americans today, lulled into smug contentment with their role as consumers rather than citizens, and provoked by endless harangues into demonizing a shadowy and little understood enemy, seem as determined not to confront the reasons behind the problems of want and fear as FDR was determined to force the nation to face them. FDR’s urgent calls for greater equality at home and for a multilateral approach to global affairs may seem as quaint as the cape he wears in sculptor Neil Estern’s powerful portrayal of the president at the Memorial. Cass Sunstein’s and Elizabeth Borgwardt’s books are particularly valuable now, when the distance separating American politics from the principles of FDR has rarely seemed greater. These books matter in part because they dem- onstrate so clearly something that has been in doubt for several decades now. As I’ve tried to signal with the title of this review, Sunstein and Borgwardt both show that Franklin Roosevelt did indeed have ideals both for domestic politics and foreign policy. Countless historians have shown that FDR was a deft politician, shrewd in maneuvering friends and foes, but awareness of that skill should not distract us from the evidence of his guiding principles Reviews in American History 34 (2006) 509–520 © 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 510 revieWs in aMeriCan HISTORY / DeCeMBer 2006 so forcefully presented by Sunstein and Borgwardt. No less an authority than Harry Hopkins testified that the Four Freedoms speech showed “the real Roosevelt,” and these books confirm that judgment. At least from the mid- 1930s until the end of his life, FDR was animated by ideals that provided the criteria by which he wanted the members of his administration to evaluate the success or failure of the multiple experiments he prodded them to try. Those principles were effective freedom and more equal opportunity at home and greater security achieved through international cooperation abroad. The first could not be achieved without sustained government intervention to prevent the unregulated market from rewarding some while shutting out others; the second required the United States to relinquish its cherished unilateralism and join other nations to prevent war and spread prosperity. In The Second Bill of Rights, Sunstein characterizes FDR’s January 11, 1944, State of the Union Address as “the greatest speech of the twentieth century” and laments that it is not better known today. At that moment, with the Al- lied invasion of Italy bogged down and great naval victories in the Pacific still months away, FDR was already thinking about America after the war and its place in the world. He reported on the recent negotiations with Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China that had set the allied powers on course toward international cooperation both during and after the war. He excoriated those Americans “‘with selfish and partisan interests’” who had tried to profit from the war and those who had sought to avoid the “‘prodigious sacrifices’” it required. “‘If there was ever a time to subordinate individual or group selfish- ness to the national good,’” FDR proclaimed, “‘that time is now.’” Looking forward, he envisioned an America in which the fruits of economic growth would be more widely shared. “‘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’” (pp. 235–44). In order to meet that goal, FDR proclaimed a second Bill of Rights made necessary by the expansion of America and the transformation of its economy from agricultural to industrial. “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and inde- pendence.” Certain “economic truths have become accepted as self-evident.” According to FDR, Americans had learned that their political rights must be supplemented by economic rights “under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.” Americans in 2006 might be surprised by the rights FDR believed their par- ents and grandparents had eagerly embraced. His “second bill” included the following rights: kloPPenBerG / Franklin Delano roosevelt, visionary 511 1. “‘to a useful and remunerative job’”; 2. “‘to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation’”; 3. of farmers to sell their products at a price that would yield “‘a decent living’”; 4. of businesses to be protected from “‘domination by monopolies at home or abroad’”; 5. “‘of every family to a decent home’”; 6. “‘to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health’”; 7. “‘to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment’”; and 8. “‘to a good education’” (Sunstein, pp. 242–3). Such ambitious plans were greeted with shrieks from conservatives who had resisted the New Deal from the beginning. Tough-minded historians such as Alan Brinkley and David M. Kennedy have agreed that since such ambitious plans had no chance of success in the political climate of 1944, FDR could not have been serious about this second Bill of Rights. Sunstein disagrees, as do I. One of his generation’s most learned and prolific scholars of constitutional law, Sunstein constructs a brief to establish his case, first for the solid legal and historical foundations on which FDR’s argument rested, and second for its continuing significance in our own day. Although some readers might challenge his claim for its contemporary relevance, his sturdy arguments concerning the basis of the economic bill of rights merit attention from American historians. Sunstein quotes Enlightenment figures from Locke and Montesquieu to Smith and Paine to the effect that extremes of wealth and poverty are inimical to popular government. Since so many American conservatives now treat the writings of Madison and Jefferson as sacred texts, it is worth quoting just a single passage from each to give a hint of the tune sung by the chorus Sunstein has assembled. One can combat the evil of parties, Madison wrote, first by “establishing a political equality among all” and then by “withholding un- necessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches.” How should that be done? “By the silent operation of laws, which, without violat- ing the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth to a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort” (p. 116). Madison’s ally Jefferson identified the best mechanisms to achieve that end: “I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislatures cannot invest too many devices for subdividing property,” which is why Jefferson sought to abolish entail and primogeniture. But he did not stop there. “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher proportions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. 512 revieWs in aMeriCan HISTORY / DeCeMBer 2006 Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right” (pp. 115–9). Madison and Jefferson have seldom been invoked as founders of graduated taxation or the earned income tax credit, but Sunstein makes a good case for the proposition that FDR saw himself completing the work of the first Bill of Rights. The brief reign of laissez faire in America, Sunstein correctly points out, lasted only from the end of the nineteenth century until the New Deal, and even then it was subject to repeated challenges at the local, state, and federal level. The myth that the United States has been an Eden of unregulated eco- nomic activity is, Sunstein insists, bad political economy and even worse his- tory. Economists from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek and Amartya Sen have agreed that all economic activity, indeed all preservation of property, requires the active intervention of government authority in the form of predictable and enforceable law.