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.

       ─Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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The Unraveling of the New Deal

By Sue Ann Martinson/
April 5, 2025

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

─ Franklin D. Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa.,
June 27, 1936

Nowadays we have generation this and generation that, all in categories with their own characteristics. But FDR was referring to collective generations inhabiting the United States at the time. His statement applies now to the current generations of Americans.

In 1932 when FDR was running for president, he promised if elected a “New Deal” for the American people. At the time Herbert Hoover was president and the nation was in a deep depression caused by the stock market crash of 1929.

Roosevelt introduced the phrase upon accepting the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1932 before winning the election in a landslide over incumbent Herbert Hoover, whose administration was viewed by many as doing too little to help those affected.

The following are the words of FDR in his Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency on June 27, 1936. The full speech is included at the end of this post.

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. [underline emphasis by Wings of Change]

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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 of mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
[underlines emphasis by Wings of Change]

Almost immediately after the Constitution was passed, the Bill of Rights, based on English Common Law, was added, protecting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble and petition, and freedom of religion, all in the First Amendment. The first ten amendments were the originals. New amendments were added to the original Bill of Rights over the years that reflect values and issues of importance to the American people. These rights along with the Constitution itself were the values that FDR championed.

FDR kept his promise for a New Deal for the American people if they elected him on the heels of the Great Depression that began with the failure of the stock market in 1929. In 1933 during his first term as president he kept his word and initiated bold reforms that became law. Passed with both Republican and Democratic support in Congress, 15 key laws were passed during his first 100 days of office. They were bold reforms that were part of his promised New Deal.

Among these laws was the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial and banking activities; other laws guaranteed bank deposits for depositors (no runs on banks as had previously occurred), loans to homeowners who faced losing their homes because of lack of mortgage payments, and keeping farm prices high by paying farmers not to produce. The Civilian Conservation Corp allowed single men between the ages of 18 and 25 to enlist in work programs to improve America’s public lands, forests, and parks, their room and board paid for, they sent $25 of their $30 pay home to their families.  The National Recovery Act (NRA) set prices and wages: two million employers in 541 industries signed up, promising to keep prices down and wages up. The Social Security Act was signed into law by FDR on August 14, 1935. It established a system of old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and aid for dependent mothers and children, blind persons, and persons with disabilities, funded by payroll taxes.

The Bottom Line ─ The Glass-Steagall Act (June 16, 1933)

The Glass-Steagall Act prevented commercial banks from speculative risk-taking to avoid a financial crisis experienced during the Great Depression. Banks were limited to earning 10 percent of their income from investments. This legislation under FDR was a direct response to the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting depression.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, under President Clinton, eliminated the Glass-Steagall Act’s restrictions against affiliations between commercial and investment banks in 1999, so unfortunately, the parts of the law that separated investment and speculative commercial interests were repealed, and that repeal is considered to be a cause of the 2008 global recession by many. Some parts of the original Glass-Steagall were maintained, a most important being the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) that still protects deposits and against runs on banks.

But FDR’s influence was more than creating laws. FDR inspired people. As George Will said as quoted in Ken Burns, Episode 5 of “The Roosevelts” on PBS, he “changed the relationship of the citizen to the central government.“ He instituted the Fireside Chats on the radio, when citizens tuned in weekly to listen. He spoke to them as an equal, building courage and confidence. He established a progressive cabinet, including the first woman cabinet member, Frances Perkins, who oversaw the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Established in 1935, the WPA employed 8.5 million people in building projects and arts initiatives and spent more than $11 million in relief until it was discontinued during WWII.

Some Background

Some find it ironic that Roosevelt himself was part of the over-privileged class that was monied, as was Eleanor, his sixth cousin. President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt was her uncle and FDR’s fifth cousin.

The original Roosevelt came to this country in the 1600s from the Netherlands, but not under the name Roosevelt which came later. He had two sons and the two sides of the Roosevelts in FDR’S generation were descended respectively from these two sons. Ken Burns goes into detail about the two different families and their activities in his series about the Roosevelts on public television. Some of the information used in this “unraveling” is from this series, which Burns calls The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, as he describes the relationships between the two parts of the family as each produced a president ─ first Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt on one side and then FDR on the other. He discusses the effects that contracting polio had on FDR’s personal and political life. He also includes the journey of Eleanor Roosevelt from her shyness to becoming a strong person of influence herself and how that affected her relationship with FDR, remembering that she too was a Roosevelt.

While this essay focuses on FDR’s politics rather than his personal life, the Burns series weaves the two together and is well worth watching. Note that the New Deal and FDR has its critics, while others hail FDR as the greatest president certainly of the 20th century, and even more in the history of America.

The Present and the New Deal

Like FDR, President Trump has moved boldly in these early days of the presidency. His first 100 days, always taken as a presidential measure, have been characterized by taking bold action. But the parallel ends there. What is obvious is that his goals are the opposite of the New Deal. Trump seeks to revoke or eviscerate many of the laws and programs that FDR put into place or convert them to private money-making entities that private corporations control. Without FDR and the New Deal there would be no unemployment insurance, no social security, no limit on working hours. no minimum wage, and the laws that regulate money systems, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that protects bank deposits.

“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,” said FDR. Yet it is these institutions that Trump and his cronies are attempting to destroy precisely because they do put controls on the power of these “economic royalists,” what today we often call the ruling elite. who, as FDR notes, “hide behind the Flag and the Constitution,” as Trump and Co. do by falsely exuding great Patriotism.

When FDR was inaugurated there were 15,000 million unemployed in America. The New Deal programs he initiated greatly reduced that number by 1935 going into his second term. It’s as if Trump is trying again to reach that number of unemployed through layoffs, releasing thousands of worker, while he and Elon Musk, operating outside of Congress, raid our institutions with layoffs and cutbacks in funding, all the while giving perks via tax cuts and investments to corporations that have raised prices and that continue to destroy the environment and contribute to the current climate crisis as well as increasing the already bloated military budget by taking money from social programs (never from corporations, which the government continues to fund.

Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Trump and his cohorts, especially Elon Musk, have created the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It was not created by Congress but by an executive order of Trump’s. Although DOGE is supposedly managed by the bipartisan DOGE Caucus whose purpose is “pave the way for the House of Representatives to streamline government operations and to save taxpayer money,” they are dismantling and cutting off funding for most programs that support ordinary citizens in need as well as some foreign programs like USAid.

Despite its full name, DOGE is not an official government department, which would have had to be established by an act of Congress. Instead it came into being through one of Trump’s presidential executive orders, and operates as an advisory body with at least four employees dedicated to each government agency.

Trump and Musk are conducting a hell-bent crusade against as many social programs as possible. While their actions may not directly be the repeal of all the same laws that were passed by Congress under FDR’s presidency, with so many people laid off it is as if Trump and his cronies are trying to match the 15 million people who were unemployed when FDR officially became president in 1933, along with the millions of immigrants Trump has deported or plans to deport, some of whom are American citizens or hold green cards.

Musk and Trump, under the auspices of DOGE, are slashing programs that benefit the citizens of America with broad strokes. What they call a campaign against fraud in reality is a gutting of social programs that benefit ordinary citizens. At the same time Trump continues more than excessive military spending by funding foreign wars ─ most obviously the Ukraine War and the continuing genocide against the people of Palestine/Gaza being criminally perpetrated by Israel─ as well as maintaining an excessive and very expensive worldwide military network. At the same time they are gutting the Environmental Protective Agency (EPA) and increasing rather than curtailing the use of fossil fuels, a CO2 pollutant that is a major cause of the Climate Crisis that puts the whole planet at risk.

The Trump administration and Trump himself pretend and encourage their followers to pretend that there is no relationship between the climate crisis and the use of fossil fuels, yet the Union of Concerned Scientists and other responsible and realistic academics as well as ordinary people have shown us otherwise with their analyses and activism alike. And the U.S. military continues to be the a major polluter in the world with its use of fossil fuels that release CO2 and methane gas into the atmosphere as well as by the pollution of water, especially by what are called PFAS pollutants, with the 1000 plus military bases and military installations worldwide.

In addition Trump is acting in true autocratic manner in attempting to shut down free speech in the colleges where pro-Palestine students are attempting to exercise the right of free speech. This ban extends to all media by his demands that no critical articles be written about him and there be no critiques of his platform and actions. In addition, the Trump administration’s policies result in the threatening of academic freedom of college and university faculty members. His actions mimic Hitler’s seeing that Jewish professors and anyone opposed to him were fired from colleges and universities and punishing students who opposed his policies, such as the White Rose student group who were murdered by Hitler for distributing pamphlets against him. The book bans that are being legislated in many states are also an attack on free speech and approximate the book burnings under Hitler.

As usual, Trump is pursuing his policy of hate and hyper-militarism for specious  reasons that attack the most basic American values such as free speech and the peoples’ right to assemble along with the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances; they rationalize this Constitutional crisis with all the geopolitical ins and outs and machinations and excuses they can create. Congress keeps pouring money into weapons and then sending them to Ukraine for continued war and to Israel for the continued genocide against the people of Palestine, making sure the war industry is well-funded and much of the profits are returned to members of Congress for their election campaigns and personal use, Congress appears to have been brain-washed; when interviewed by Medea Benjamin and other Code Pink members in its halls in response to their questions, they shift all blame back to Hamas when it is the U.S. that is guilty of supporting Israel’s continuing apartheid and oppression of Palestine since 1948. It is the U.S. that keeps shipping weapons and money to Israel so they can continue with the genocide. Any attempts at forming a ceasefire Trump’s part have failed.

End of Part 1, The Unraveling of the New Deal

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FDR Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for Presidency on June 27, 1936. Full address:

Senator Robinson, Members of the Democratic Convention, my friends:

Here, and in every community throughout the land, we are met at a time of great moment to the future of the Nation. It is an occasion to be dedicated to the simple and sincere expression of an attitude toward problems, the determination of which will profoundly affect America.

I come not only as a leader of a party, not only as a candidate for high office, but as one upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.

For the sympathy, help and confidence with which Americans have sustained me in my task I am grateful. For their loyalty I salute the members of our great party, in and out of political life in every part of the Union. I salute those of other parties, especially those in the Congress of the United States who on so many occasions have put partisanship aside. I thank the Governors of the several States, their Legislatures, their State and local officials who participated unselfishly and regardless of party in our efforts to achieve recovery and destroy abuses. Above all I thank the millions of Americans who have borne disaster bravely and have dared to smile through the storm.

America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of all of us. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived.

In those days we feared fear. That was why we fought fear. And today, my friends, we have won against the most dangerous of our foes. We have conquered fear.

But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most Nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.

Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776—an American way of life.

That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. 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 business men 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 business man, 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.

The brave and clear platform adopted by this Convention, to which I heartily subscribe, sets forth that Government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are protection of the family and the home, the establishment of a democracy of opportunity, and aid to those overtaken by disaster.

But the resolute enemy within our gates is ever ready to beat down our words unless in greater courage we will fight for them.

For more than three years we have fought for them. This Convention, in every word and deed, has pledged that that fight will go on.

The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our Government and of ourselves. Never since the early days of the New England town meeting have the affairs of Government been so widely discussed and so clearly appreciated. It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.

We do not see faith, hope and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a Nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization.

Faith— in the soundness of democracy in the midst of dictatorships.

Hope—renewed because we know so well the progress we have made.

Charity— in the true spirit of that grand old word. For charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves.

We seek not merely to make Government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.

We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.

In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.

It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.

Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.

I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208917

 

Wings of Change

 

END OF PART 1