The Lost Roadmap: FDR's Second Bill of Rights
"Necessitous men are not free men." Roosevelt showed us how we should use America’s institutions of self-government to make people more free. Democrats should follow his roadmap today.
Post 10: 11 March 2025
Democrats have to tell the American people how we can use America’s institutions of self-government to make people more free.
Much of the brain trust nowadays is focused on preserving the institutions of self-government both in the United States and elsewhere. It is hard to argue with this defensive posture. It seems odd to talk about home décor, or about fire safety features, when the house is on fire. We have to put out the fire. But that is actually a good time to re-imagine the house—to think about how we would rather live. Not only is the argument about the future the best way to nurture hope, just having the conversation demonstrates that these institutions can function. Dissatisfaction with the way things were was one of the root causes of the present crisis, so it won’t do just to restore the status quo ante. We have to offer a different vision.
A number of institutional reforms will be needed in the wake of the disastrous Trump presidency. While that conversation is essential, most people will not be motivated by process debates.1 Instead, regular voters need a policy conversation about what the government will do and how it will affect their lives. Right now, most of that discussion is muffled or missing all together. What’s worse, deeply held but incorrect assumptions about the way the social and economic world works unnecessarily limit our collective sense of what it’s possible to achieve. Where do we start this conversation?
I propose starting at the beginning, with the initial idea of what the American welfare state should be. That vision was offered by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union Address. It was January 11, 1944, still almost six months to D-Day—the house was still on fire—but FDR was already very confident about the eventual Allied victory and wanted to talk about what the post-war future should look like. The President was under the weather and delivered the speech directly to the American people on the radio, his natural element. The roadmap he laid out that day is still there. We should follow it.
In the speech, FDR shifted the way we ought to think about rights. He had done this before. In the “Four Freedoms” speech, delivered three years earlier, he tried to expand our understanding of what freedom is: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear (January 6, 1941). The 1944 speech was different. He did not talk about “freedom from” but “rights to”. It was a positive vision, one requiring a large federal role, and Congressional action.
Here's the critical part of the speech:
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.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact, however, that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry, people who are 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, or race or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of farmers to raise and sell their products at a return which will give them and their families a decent living;
The right of every business man, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
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, and sickness, and accident and unemployment;
And finally, the right to a good education.
…
I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights -- for it is definitely the responsibility of the Congress so to do, and the country knows it.*
What Roosevelt was calling for are the social rights of citizenship, and the details he offered are still a pretty good list of what they ought to be. The foundation for these rights is a civic republican understanding of liberty: “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” This remains the ground of all social rights. We have a duty to guarantee these things because people cannot be free without them. This is not a Christian duty to help the needy (not that there is anything wrong with that), it is a public duty to ensure that every person—including oneself—can be a full citizen. As with other rights, this is “self-evident”—it requires no proof—though the implication is that it took a great deal of experience to arrive at this “clear realization.” Roosevelt emphasizes the macro-political risk of not acting in this sphere. This is, he says, “the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Given the context of a global war against dictators, this is not surprising, but may have not been the best rhetorical move on his part: Were Americans concerned about dictatorship here?2
At their essence, these rights refer to a standard of adequacy. Importantly, this standard is much higher than subsistence. People have a right to earn enough, not just to eat, but also for “recreation.” Farmers a right to a “decent” living. All of us, the right to a “decent” home. Finally, and I would say most importantly, we all have a right to a “good” education. These references underscore that these rights are grounded in freedom. We are not seeking merely to have people get by, but to participate fully in society.3
This is even more clear when FDR refers to farmers and business owners, who have a right to a level economic playing field. Here, the president presents social rights as the remedy to abuses of private economic power. Small producers have a right to protection against “unfair competition and domination by monopolies”. This linkage has long been part of the American self-image, whether it was Jefferson’s nation of yeomen farmers or Wilson’s nation of shopkeepers. Small-scale enterprise provided the economic independence required for secure personal freedom. My criticism here is that Roosevelt does not go far enough. We can’t all be shopkeepers or farmers. How do we make this a universal vision? I argue that we can and will return to this theme in a later post.4
Ensuring this independence requires that individuals (and small producers) have price protection. Farmers, FDR implies, have a right to sell their products at some minimum price. Workers, “the right to earn enough” in a “remunerative” job.5 Thus, an adequate minimum wage is a social right. (Again, this is good, but it is not enough.)
Roosevelt leads his list off with the most problematic social right. He says that every American has a right to a job. Previously, he had mobilized government to help provide jobs during the Great Depression, but here he lists, not public work, but an inventory of private employments “in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation”. It is unclear to me, as an advocate for social rights, how the government can do this; it appears to compel private action, which is unacceptable. In this case, a general social goal is confounded with a specific right, a general problem I will return to in another post. Survey research shows that a majority of Americans believe the government has a responsibility to ensure that everyone have “an adequate standard of living”,6 but tying this to a guaranteed job is another matter. This is definitely worth revisiting.
American progress across Roosevelt’s eight social rights has been mixed at best. Starting next week, and continuing over the next few months, many of my posts will examine our specific social rights to income, education, health, housing, and jobs. Here’s the short version of the scorecard: Most people are working but pay has not kept pace with productivity. Largely due to pressure from the largest economic actors, here and abroad, I believe it is harder now to maintain a small farm or small business than it was in 1944. Home ownership is higher now, but we are in a housing crisis. We have made progress on access to health care, but only through extremely costly political fights. By many measures (not all), inequality in education is rising. Old age security is arguably the area where we have done the best. Social Security was the signature achievement of New Deal policy making. But even here, too many Americans face an insecure retirement, partly because the legislation itself is not secure.
I close today with a few historical points. First, Roosevelt himself failed to make much, if any, progress on his list of social rights. To be fair to him, these were all intended to be post-war achievements, and he did not survive the war. Much of the spirit of this list was embedded in the G.I. Bill that passed in June 1944. A reasonable argument can be made that this bill, directed at veterans, actually short-circuited the political effort to provide comparable benefits to the population as a whole. This is the case Edwin Amenta makes in Bold Relief. He concludes that, “new rights for veterans tended to undermine the possibility of comprehensive social policy for all citizens.”7 This is an odd confirmation of a point made in last week’s post about service and citizenship. I note here only that the political climate in the post-war United Kingdom led to universal health care and other nation-wide benefits. Apparently, the shared sense of collective sacrifice was greater there than in the United States.
Finally, many of the items in FDR’s social rights agenda are reflected in the subsequent discourse on “human rights” beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, an effort spearheaded by Eleanor Roosevelt. The UN Declaration is much broader than this social rights list, but their overlap raises the question of how much social rights guarantees are universal aspects of the human personality, owed equally to everyone on the planet, and how much they are the historically and culturally specific endowments of a particular people. As a universal projection of fundamental liberal values, the Declaration has great value, but this very universality implies relatively low least-common-denominator standards for the substantive or positive duties it describes. These are almost certainly going to be much lower than what is required to ensure full participation in countries with more advanced economies. I will be careful to associate “social rights” with society-specific efforts to ensure that everyone has adequate resources to participate fully in society. The politics of social rights do not conflict with global efforts to ensure human dignity, but there is some risk that minimal global standards could interfere with the process of setting higher national ones.
Next Post: The Right to a Home (18 March 2025)
<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>
Notes
*See the full text of the speech at the FDR library: http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html. Cass Sunstein wrote a whole book about this moment, which I recommend: Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights (Basic Books, 2004).
Image: President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, DC, January 11, 1944, delivering the State of the Union radio address. National Archives, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/196062
1. We need new laws/amendments would make explicit the limits of the Office of the President, strengthen Congress, ensure the independence of certain agencies, especially the Department of Justice, and possibly better delineate the authority of the Court. Since all of these would (should) rely on civic republican principles, I will devote some space to them at some point.
2. I am well aware of how this statement scans in 2025. I would argue that, prior to entering the war, Roosevelt had a hard time convincing Americans to be concerned about dictatorship in Europe, much less here. He ought to have struck at the freedom theme he opened with more. See my closing comments on the GI Bill.
3. The exact standards are vague here, the requirements of social rights are less defined, and therefore, more political than the “political rights.” Roosevelt correctly says it is the responsibility of the Congress to figure this out.
4. FDR cut his political teeth in the Wilson era, and Wilson pitched the “nation of shopkeepers” theme hard. Importantly, FDR does not mention labor unions in this speech. That, combined with his references to small owners of capital, suggests that he is still promulgating long-standing Jeffersonian assumptions about the need to have ownership stakes to achieve the independence required for freedom and full membership. To anticipate: Owning capital may be the way to universalize this, but that may not mean sole proprietorship but a renewed effort to promote profit-sharing and employee ownership stakes. More broadly, if we all have access to an adequate education, we will maximize our own economic choices across the course of a complete life, which may be the most we can do to maximize our personal independence (and freedom). More on this theme soon.
5. Just an aside here, I do wish I lived in an America where a President is willing to use the word remunerative (rather than saying “well paid”), but maybe that’s just me. To be fair, it is a tough word to say, I would probably avoid it in fear of sounding drunk, (try it, you’ll see what I mean).
6. This is from Pew Research, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/05/17/americans-see-broad-responsibilities-for-government-little-change-since-2019/ (56% agreed on the “adequate standard of living” item).
7. Edwin Amenta, Bold Relief (Princeton University Press, 1998), 202.