FDR became a charismatic folk hero, in no small part because he defined himself as the scourge of Wall Street: Roosevelt offered himself as the leader in a fight against the “economic royalists” who, he charged, “had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” He shut down all the banks on the third day of his administration.
[...] In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy – from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.
And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.
Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution – all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital – all undreamed of by the Fathers – the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small-businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor – these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-businessmen, the investments set aside for old age – other people’s money – these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.
Throughout the nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted. Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise.
An old English judge once said: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Liberty requires opportunity to make a living – a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike. [...]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Speech before the 1936 Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 27, 1936, “A Rendezvous With Destiny”
FDR pointed directly to those who were responsible for the crash of 1929: “The rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed,” he said, “through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.”
The same situation seems to be occurring right now. So, why is it that none of the Economic Royalists are going to prison? And what about Obama’s policies? The priorities of the financial stabilization program seem to be: revive the shadow banking system and its practices; get securitization moving again; stave off any Glass-Steagall-type inquiries; keep hostile hands off the insolvent commercial banking sector, which got that way because they imitated the practices of the investment banks and hedge funds. Perhaps one day, his actions on mitigating the catastrophic results of the “free trade” agreements (WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, etc.) will match his professed concern about the consequences.
I have watched, literally, decades of “Free Market” rip-off [free trade + free market = exclusive access + power to plunder and pillage, worldwide]… it’s damned sickening to listen to DLC / GOP corporatist business-people talk about the “free market” economy when it’s all been pretty much downhill since we stopped following FDR’s plans. This economy is just beginning to tank. The worst is yet to come. Ignore what’s being said on Wal*Street, K Street, or even C Street. It doesn’t matter how fast they’re bailing the banking boat, they aren’t bailing out you or me.
This disaster, like the 1929 crash, was brought to you by the Economic Royalists, Inc.
Further Research:
Posts
