![]() ![]() ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made. “We have come to a clear realization,” he says, “of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security. In his 1944 speech, Roosevelt strongly suggests that economic inequality is a precursor to Fascism, and he offers a progressive political theory as a hedge against Soviet Communism. ![]() Philip Randolph, and other activists, he desegregated federal hiring and the military. Though its role in his early policies was sorely lacking, he showed in 1941 that he could be moved on civil rights issues when, in response to a march on Washington planned by Bayard Rustin, A. Roosevelt did not take the value of equality for granted or merely invoke it as a slogan. The speech is most extraordinary, however, for the turn it takes at the end, when the president proposes and clearly articulates a “second Bill of Rights,” arguing that the first one had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” These include taxing “all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate” and enacting regulations on food prices. He went on to enumerate a series of proposals “to maintain a fair and stable economy at home” while the war still raged abroad. In his 1944 State of the Union address, he denounced war profiteers and “selfish and partisan interests,” saying, “if ever there was a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good, that time is now.” Yet, for all his serious lapses and wartime crimes, FDR consistently had an astute and idealistic economic vision for the country. His commitment to isolationism before the war and his “ moral failure-or indifference” to the plight of European Jews, thousands of whom were denied entry to the U.S., has come under justifiable scrutiny from historians.īoth blame and praise are well warranted, and not his alone to bear. soil when he interned over 100,000 Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. He is lauded as a wartime leader in the fight against Nazism. But Roosevelt also compromised with racist southern senators like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, and underwrote housing segregation, job and pay discrimination, and exclusions in his economic recovery aimed most squarely at African-Americans. His New Deal policies are credited for lifting millions out of destitution, and they created opportunities for struggling artists and writers, many of whom went on to become some of the country’s most celebrated. It’s difficult to appraise the complicated legacy of Franklin D. ![]()
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