Roosevelt's or Reagan's America? A time for choosing.

• Author: Marini, John
• Position: American Thought - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan - Essay

ON JAN. 11, 1944, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt sent the text of his Annual Message to Congress. Under normal conditions, he would have delivered the message in person that evening at the Capitol, but he was recovering from the flu, and his doctor advised him not to leave the White House. So, he delivered it as a fireside chat to the American people. It has been called the greatest speech of the century by Cass Sunstein, a prominent liberal law professor at the University of Chicago. It is an important speech because it probably is the most far-reaching attempt by an American president to legitimize the administrative or welfare state, based on the idea that government must guarantee social and economic security for all.

Thirty-seven years later, in his First Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1981, Pres. Ronald Reagan would deny that government could provide such a broad guarantee of security in a manner consistent with the protection of American liberty. Indeed, he would insist that bureaucratic government had become a danger to the survival of our freedom. In looking at the differences between the views of Roosevelt and Reagan, we can discern the distinction between an administrative state (which presupposes the rule of a bureaucratic or intellectual elite) and a constitutional regime (in which the power of government is limited so as to enable the people to rule).

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When Roosevelt spoke to the nation that January night, he was looking beyond the end of World War II. In recent years, he said, "Americans have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule, but I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival. Sacrifices that we and our Allies are making impose upon us all a sacred obligation to see to it that out of this war we and our children will gain something better than mere survival."

What was this "sacred obligation?" Roosevelt continued: "The one supreme objective for the future, which we discussed for each nation individually, and for all the United Nations, can be summed up in one word, security--and that means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors. It means also economic security, social security, moral security--in a family of Nations."

Government has a sacred duty, in other words, to provide security as a fundamental human right. Roosevelt was well aware that this was a departure from the traditional understanding of the role of American government: "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. As our nation has grown in size and stature, however--as our industrial economy expanded--these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and 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," FDR asserted.

Among these new fights, Roosevelt indicated, are "The fight 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 fight of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent...