![]() ![]() These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. For too many of us life was no longer free liberty no longer real men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.Īgainst economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. 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. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.Īn 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.įor too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. 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. 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. ![]() They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. 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. 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. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. 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.įor out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. 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. 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.Īnd so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy-from the eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. 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. … Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. ![]() In his acceptance speech, Roosevelt laid out his understanding of what “freedom” and “tyranny” meant in an industrial democracy. In July 27, 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt accepted his re-nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential choice. Franklin Roosevelt’s Re-Nomination Acceptance Speech (1936) ![]()
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