Tuesday Reads: The Anniversary of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights

Good Morning!!

History Reads

Ever so often, we need to be reminded of history.  I read a tweet yesterday by one of our long time news anchors down here in New Orleans.

normanrobinson1 norman robinson

Wondering if we as Americans really value what we have and whether we really care about leaving a future for the generations to follow.

This started me thinking about what future was left to me by the generations directly before me.    Of course, we’re living in a world mostly free of NAZIs and Fascists because of the greatest generation.  We’re living in a world where the Jim Crow Laws of Separate-But-Equal were torn down by the generation after that with the sacrifice of the heroic leaders of the civil rights movement.   I have the right to vote because of my grandmother’s generation and her mother’s generation and what they did for us.  I’ve also had consistent access to family planning and birth control because the first women of the baby boom generation and several generations of women before them worked hard for it.  Stonewall made a tremendous difference in the lives of GLBTs.  Then, there are programs like Social Security and institutions like the United Nations that came from the vision and leadership of  FDR and the people who served in his cabinets like Francis Perkins, Henry Wallace, Cordell Hull and many others.  They cared enough to build us quite a legacy.

Today is the 67th anniversary of a speech that was to convey that vision of a post-war America.  The Second Bill of Rights was part of a State of the Union speech.  I’m bringing this up for two reasons.  First, because it clearly provides a road map–even today–for “what Americans really value”. I say that because poll after poll shows that the majority of American’s agree with these values even though our government doesn’t seem to reflect that at the moment.   For that reason, I share with you today, the words of a leader with a vision and a gift for elocution.

From the FDR American Heritage Center Museum’s Website:

On January 11, 1944, in the midst of World War II, President Roosevelt spoke forcefully and eloquently about the greater meaning and higher purpose of American security in a post-war America. The principles and ideas conveyed by FDR’s words matter as much now as they did over sixty years ago, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center is proud to reprint a selection of FDR’s vision for the security and economic liberty of the American people in war and peace.

The second reason I want to share this is that we’re coming close to President Obama’s third State of the Union Address. It is scheduled for January 25th.  My guess is that FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and the vision he elucidated will officially die on that day. I am not expecting any thing close to the utterance of ‘Necessitous men are not free men’ or “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made”.

Despite the obvious parallels between right now and  the Great Depression–the high unemployment rates, the incredible number of foreclosures, and the breadth of necessitous men and women and children–I’m expectting many of the vestiges of FDR’s vision that prevent future calamities to be assaulted during Obama’s third State of the Union Address.  Look closely at the list I put up top because so much of what was handed us has been trickling away.

As Norman Robinson contemplated via tweet, do we really value what we have today? Will we witness the destruction of what was handed to us and hand our children and grandchildren broken infrastructure, no hope for upward mobility, and useless institutions drained of funds by the greedy?  Will any shell of what was envisioned for us in both the first bill of rights and the second remain? Frankly, I am expecting an ‘austerity’ speech that endorses the findings of the cat food commission. I also expect we will hear nothing of overreaching intrusion by the Patriot Act into our internet and cell phones. We are expected to diligently watch Football and bail out billionaires while everything else trickles up and away.

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