|
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT IN CALIFORNIA
- SEPTEMBER 1932
FDR's Commonwealth Club Address
It follows the full text transcript of
Franklin D. Roosevelt's Commonwealth Club
Address, delivered at San Francisco, California - September
23, 1932.
 |
My friends, |
I count it a
privilege to be invited to address the
Commonwealth Club. I count it a privilege to be
invited to address the Commonwealth Club. It has
stood in the life of this city and State, and it
is perhaps accurate to add, the nation, as a
group of citizen leaders interested in
fundamental problems of government, and chiefly
concerned with achievement of progress in
government through non-partisan means. The
privilege of addressing you, therefore, in the
heat of a political campaign, is great. I want
to respond to your courtesy in terms consistent
with your policy.
I want to speak not of politics but of
government. I want to speak not of parties, but
of universal principles. They are not political,
except in that larger sense in which a great
American once expressed a definition of
politics, that nothing in all of human life is
foreign to the science of politics.
I do want to give you, however, a recollection
of a long life spent for a large part in public
office. Some of my conclusions and observations
have been deeply accentuated in these past few
weeks. I have traveled far—from Albany to the
Golden Gate. I have seen many people, and heard
many things, and today, when in a sense my
journey has reached the half-way mark, I am glad
of the opportunity to discuss with you what it
all means to me.
Sometimes, my friends, particularly in years
such as these, the hand of discouragement falls
upon us. It seems that things are in a rut,
fixed, settled, that the world has grown old and
tired and very much out of joint. This is the
mood of depression, of dire and weary
depression.
But then we look around us in America, and
everything tells us that we are wrong. America
is new. It is the process of change and
development. It has the great potentialities of
youth and particularly is this true of the great
West, and of this coast, and of California.
I would not have you feel that I regard this as
in any sense a new community. I have traveled in
many parts of the world, but never have I felt
the arresting thought of the change and
development more that here, where the old,
mystic East would seem to be near to us, where
the currents of life and thought and commerce of
the whole world meet us. This factor alone is
sufficient to cause man to stop and think of the
deeper meaning of things, when he stands in this
community.
But more than that, I appreciate that the
membership of this club consists of men who are
thinking in terms beyond the immediate present,
beyond their own immediate tasks, beyond their
own individual interests. I want to invite you,
therefore, to consider with me in the large,
some of the relationships of government and
economic life that go deeply into our daily
lives, our happiness, our future and our
security.
The issue of government has always been whether
individual men and women will have to serve some
system of government or economics, or whether a
system of government and economics exists to
serve individual men and women. This question
has persistently dominated the discussion of
government for many generations. On questions
relating to these things men have differed, and
for time immemorial it is probable that honest
men will continue to differ.
The final word belongs to no man; yet we can
still believe in change and in progress.
Democracy, as a dear old friend of mine in
Indiana, Meredith Nicholson, has called it, is a
quest, a never ending seeking for better things,
and in the seeking for these things and the
striving for them, there are many roads to
follow. But, if we map the course of these
roads, we find that there are only two general
directions.
When we look about us, we are likely to forget
how hard people have worked to win the privilege
of government. The growth of the national
governments of Europe was a struggle for the
development of a centralized force in the
nation, strong enough to impose peace upon
ruling barons. In many instances the victory of
the central government, the creation of a strong
central government, was a haven of refuge to the
individual. The people preferred the master far
away to the exploitation and cruelty of the
smaller master near at hand.
But the creators of national government were
perforce—ruthless men. They were often cruel in
their methods, but they did strive steadily
toward something that society needed and very
much wanted, a strong central State able to keep
the peace, to stamp out civil war, to put the
unruly nobleman in his place, and to permit the
bulk of individuals to live safely. The man of
ruthless force had his place in developing a
pioneer country, just as he did in fixing the
power of the central government in the
development of the nations. Society paid him
well for his services and its development. When
the development among the nations of Europe,
however, had been completed, ambition and
ruthlessness, having served their term, tended
to overstep their mark.
There came a growing feeling that government was
conducted for the benefit of a few who thrived
unduly at the expense of all. The people sought
a balancing—a limiting force. There came
gradually, through town councils, trade guilds,
national parliaments by constitution and by
popular participation and control, limitations
on arbitrary power.
Another factor that tended to limit the power of
those who ruled, was the rise of the ethical
conception that a ruler bore a responsibility
for the welfare of his subjects.
The American colonies were born in this
struggle. The American Revolution was a turning
point in it. After the Revolution the struggle
continued and shaped itself in the public life
of the country. There were those who because
they had seen the confusion which attended the
years of war for American independence
surrendered to the belief that popular
government was essentially dangerous and
essentially unworkable. They were honest people,
my friends, and we cannot deny that their
experience had warranted some measure of fear.
The most brilliant, honest and able exponent of
this point of view was Hamilton. He was too
impatient of slow-moving methods. Fundamentally
he believed that the safety of the republic lay
in the autocratic strength of its government,
that the destiny of individuals was to serve
that government, and that fundamentally a great
and strong group of central institutions, guided
by a small group of able and public spirited
citizens, could best direct all government.
But Mr. Jefferson, in the summer of 1776, after
drafting the Declaration of Independence turned
his mind to the same problem and took a
different view. He did not deceive himself with
outward forms. Government to him was a means to
an end, not an end in itself; it might be either
a refuge and a help or a threat and a danger,
depending on the circumstances. We find him
carefully analyzing the society for which he was
to organize a government. "We have no paupers.
The great mass of our population is of laborers,
our rich who cannot live without labor, either
manual or professional, being few and of
moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class
possess property, cultivate their own lands,
have families and from the demand for their
labor, are enabled to exact from the rich and
the competent such prices as enable them to feed
abundantly, clothe above mere decency, to labor
moderately and raise their families."
These people, he considered, had two sets of
rights, those of "personal competency" and those
involved in acquiring and possessing property.
By "personal competency" he meant the right of
free thinking, freedom of forming and expressing
opinions, and freedom of personal living, each
man according to his own rights. To insure the
first set of rights, a government must so order
its functions as not to interfere with the
individual. But even Jefferson realized that the
exercise of property rights might so interfere
with the rights of the individual that the
government, without whose assistance the
property rights could not exist, must intervene,
not to destroy individualism, but to protect it.
You are familiar with the great political duel
which followed; and how Hamilton, and his
friends, building toward a dominant centralized
power were at length defeated in the great
election of 1800, by Mr. Jefferson's party. Out
of that duel came the two parties, Republican
and Democratic, as we know them today.
So began, in American political life, the new
day, the day of the individual against the
system, the day in which individualism was made
the great watchword of American life. The
happiest of economic conditions made that day
long and splendid. On the Western frontier, land
was substantially free. No one, who did not
shirk the task of earning a living, was entirely
without opportunity to do so. Depressions could,
and did, come and go; but they could not alter
the fundamental fact that most of the people
lived partly by selling their labor and partly
by extracting their livelihood from the soil, so
that starvation and dislocation were practically
impossible. At the very worst there was always
the possibility of climbing into a covered wagon
and moving west where the untilled prairies
afforded a haven for men to whom the East did
not provide a place. So great were our natural
resources that we could offer this relief not
only to our own people, but to the distressed of
all the world; we could invite immigration from
Europe, and welcome it with open arms.
Traditionally, when a depression came a new
section of land was opened in the West; and even
our temporary misfortune served our manifest
destiny.
It was in the middle of the nineteenth century
that a new force was released and a new dream
created. The force was what is called the
industrial revolution, the advance of steam and
machinery and the rise of the forerunners of the
modern industrial plant. The dream was the dream
of an economic machine, able to raise the
standard of living for everyone; to bring luxury
within the reach of the humblest; to annihilate
distance by steam power and later by
electricity, and to release everyone from the
drudgery of the heaviest manual toil. It was to
be expected that this would necessarily affect
government. Heretofore, government had merely
been called upon to produce conditions within
which people could live happily, labor
peacefully, and rest secure. Now it was called
upon to aid in the consummation of this new
dream. There was, however, a shadow over the
dream. To be made real, it required use of the
talents of men of tremendous will and tremendous
ambition, since by no other force could the
problems of financing and engineering and new
developments be brought to a consummation.
So manifest were the advantages of the machine
age, however, that the United States fearlessly,
cheerfully, and, I think, rightly, accepted the
bitter with the sweet. It was thought that no
price was too high to pay for the advantages
which we could draw from a finished industrial
system. This history of the last half century is
accordingly in large measure a history of a
group of financial Titans, whose methods were
not scrutinized with too much care, and who were
honored in proportion as they produced the
results, irrespective of the means they used.
The financiers who pushed the railroads to the
Pacific were always ruthless, often wasteful,
and frequently corrupt; but they did build
railroads, and we have them today. It has been
estimated that the American investor paid the
American railway system more than three times
over in the process; but despite this fact the
net advantage was to the United States. As long
as we had free land; as long as population was
growing by leaps and bounds; as long as our
industrial plants were insufficient to supply
our own needs, society chose to give the
ambitious man free play and unlimited reward
provided only that he produced the economic
plant so much desired. During this period of
expansion, there was equal opportunity for all
and the business of government was not to
interfere but to assist in the development of
industry. This was done at the request of
businessmen themselves. The tariff was
originally imposed for the purpose of "fostering
our infant industry," a phrase I think the older
among you will remember as a political issue not
so long ago. The railroads were subsidized,
sometimes by grants of money, oftener by grants
of land; some of the most valuable oil lands in
the United States were granted to assist the
financing of the railroad which pushed through
the Southwest. A nascent merchant marine was
assisted by grants of money, or by mail
subsidies, so that our stream shipping might ply
the seven seas. Some of my friends tell me that
they do not want the government in business.
With this I agree; but I wonder whether they
realize the implications of the past. For while
it has been American doctrine that the
government must not go into business in
competition with private enterprises, still it
has been traditional particularly in Republican
Administrations for business urgently to ask the
government to put at private disposal all kinds
of government assistance. The same man who tells
you that he does not want to see the government
interfere in business—and he means it, and has
plenty of good reasons for saying so—is the
first to go to Washington and ask the government
for a prohibitory tariff on his product. When
things get just bad enough—as they did two years
ago—he will go with equal speed to the United
States government and ask for a loan; and the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation is the
outcome of it. Each group has sought protection
from the government for its own special
interests, without realizing that the function
of government must be to favor no small group at
the expense of its duty to protect the rights of
personal freedom and of private property of all
its citizens.
A glance at the situation today only too clearly
indicates that equality of opportunity as we
have known it no longer exists. Our industrial
plant is built; the problem just now is whether
under existing conditions it is not overbuilt.
Our last frontier has long since been reached,
and there is practically no more free land. More
than half of our people do not live on the farms
or on lands and cannot derive a living by
cultivating their own property. There is no
safety valve in the form of a Western prairie to
which those thrown out of work by the Eastern
economic machines can go for a new start. We are
not able to invite the immigration from Europe
to share our endless plenty. We are now
providing a drab living for our own people.
Our system of constantly rising tariffs has at
last reacted against us to the point of closing
our Canadian frontier on the north, our European
markets on the east, many of our Latin American
markets to the south, and a goodly proportion of
our Pacific markets on the west, through the
retaliatory tariffs of those countries. It has
forced many of our great industrial institutions
who exported their surplus production to such
countries, to establish plants in such
countries, within the tariff walls. This has
resulted in the reduction of the operation of
their American plants, and opportunity for
employment.
Just as freedom to farm has ceased, so also the
opportunity in business has narrowed. It still
is true that men can start small enterprises,
trusting to native shrewdness and ability to
keep abreast of competitors; but area after area
has been pre-empted altogether by the great
corporations, and even in the fields which still
have no great concerns, the small man starts
under a handicap. The unfeeling statistics of
the past three decades show that the independent
businessman is running a losing race. Perhaps he
is forced to the wall; perhaps he cannot command
credit; perhaps he is "squeezed out," in Mr.
Wilson's words, by highly organized corporate
competitors, as your corner grocery man can tell
you. Recently a careful study was made of the
concentration of business in the United States.
It showed that our economic life was dominated
by some six hundred odd corporations who
controlled two-thirds of American industry. Ten
million small businessmen divided the other
third. More striking still, it appeared that if
the process of concentration goes on at the same
rate, at the end of another century we shall
have all American industry controlled by a dozen
corporations, and run by perhaps a hundred men.
But plainly, we are steering a steady course
toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there
already.
Clearly, all this calls for a re-appraisal of
values. A mere builder of more industrial
plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an
organizer of more corporations, is as likely to
be a danger as a help. The day of the great
promoter or the financial Titan, to whom we
granted everything if only he would build, or
develop, is over. Our task now is not discovery,
or exploitation of natural resources, or
necessarily producing more goods. It is the
soberer, less dramatic business of administering
resources and plants already in hand, of seeking
to reestablish foreign markets for our surplus
production, of meeting the problem of under
consumption, of adjusting production to
consumption, of distributing wealth and products
more equitably of adapting existing economic
organizations to the service of the people. The
day of enlightened administration has come.
Just as in older times the central government
was first a haven of refuge, and then a threat,
so now in a closer economic system the central
and ambitious financial unit is no longer a
servant of national desire, but a danger. I
would draw the parallel one step farther. We did
not think because national government had become
a threat in the 18th century that therefore we
should abandon the principle of national
government. Nor today should we abandon the
principle of strong economic units called
corporations, merely because their power is
susceptible of easy abuse. In other rimes we
dealt with the problem of an unduly ambitious
central government. So today we are modifying
and controlling our economic units.
As I see it, the task of government in its
relation to business is to assist the
development of an economic declaration of
rights, an economic constitutional order. This
is the common task of statesman and businessman.
It is the minimum requirement of a more
permanently safe order of things.
Every man has a right to life; and this means
that he has also a right to make a comfortable
living. He may by sloth or crime decline to
exercise that right; but it may not be denied
him. We have no actual famine or dearth; our
industrial and agricultural mechanism can
produce enough and to spare. Our government
formal and informal, political and economic,
owes to every one an avenue to possess himself
of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his
needs, through his own work.
Every man has a right to his own property, which
means a right to be assured, to the fullest
extent attainable, in the safety of his savings.
By no other means can men carry the burdens of
those parts of life which, in the nature of
things, afford no chance of labor; childhood,
sickness, old age. In all thought of property,
this right is paramount; all other property
rights must yield to it. If, in accord with this
principle, we must restrict the operations of
the speculator, the manipulator, even the
financier, I believe we must accept the
restriction as needful, not to hamper
individualism but to protect it.
These two requirements must be satisfied, in the
main, by the individuals who claim and hold
control of the great industrial and financial
combinations, which dominate so large a part of
our industrial life. They have undertaken to be
not businessmen, but princes—princes of
property. I am not prepared to say that the
system which produces them is wrong. I am very
clear that they must fearlessly and competently
assume the responsibility which goes with the
power. So many enlightened businessmen know this
that the statement would be little more than a
platitude, were it not for an added implication.
This implication is, briefly, that the
responsible heads of finance and industry
instead of acting each for himself, must work
together to achieve the common end. They must,
where necessary, sacrifice this or that private
advantage; and in reciprocal self-denial must
seek a general advantage. It is here that formal
government—political government, if you choose,
comes in. Whenever in the pursuit of this
objective the lone wolf, the unethical
competitor, the reckless promoter, the Ishmael
or Insull whose hand is against every man's,
declines to join in achieving an end recognized
as being for the public welfare, and threatens
to drag the industry back to a state of anarchy,
the government may properly be asked to apply
restraint. Likewise, should the group ever use
its collective power contrary to the public
welfare, the government must be swift to enter
and protect the public interest.
The government should assume the function of
economic regulation only as a last resort, to be
tried only when private initiative, inspired by
high responsibility, with such assistance and
balance as government can give, has finally
failed. As yet there has been no final failure,
because there has been no attempt; and I decline
to assume that this nation is unable to meet the
situation.
The final term of the high contract was for
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have
learnt a great deal of both in the past century.
We know that individual liberty and individual
happiness mean nothing unless both are ordered
in the sense that one man's meat is not another
man's poison. We know that the old "rights of
personal competency—the right to read, to think,
to speak, to choose and live a mode of life,
must be respected at all hazards. We know that
liberty to do anything which deprives others of
those elemental rights is outside the protection
of any compact; and that government in this
regard is the maintenance of a balance, within
which every individual may have a place if he
will take it; in which every individual may find
safety if he wishes it; in which every
individual may attain such power as his ability
permits, consistent with his assuming the
accompanying responsibility.
Faith in America, faith in our tradition of
personal responsibilities, faith in our
institutions, faith in ourselves demands that we
recognize the new terms of the old social
contract. We shall fulfill them, as we fulfilled
the obligation of the apparent Utopia which
Jefferson imagined for us in 1776, and which
Jefferson, Roosevelt and Wilson sought to bring
to realization. We must do so, lest a rising
tide of misery engendered by our common failure,
engulf us all. But failure is not an American
habit; and in the strength of great hope we must
all shoulder our common load.
More History
|
|
