A Rendezvous With Destiny

This was a speech from my father’s generation, a call to arms for the American people. My father had always told me he felt this speech was directed at him specifically. I would suppose that would be a hallmark of a great speech to reach people and connect with them on a personal level. This speech was different however the country was mired in a deep depression and the population was very well aware of it Hoover had ignored it and Roosevelt could not. Instead the speech was a clarion cry and a veiled warning that the failure of capitalism meant revolution.

The seeds of revolution were sprouting across Roosevelt’s America and the speech was designed to define the parameters and to acknowledge the real problems loosed on the American population.

"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."

Words from the world of 1936 yet they ring ever truer today then when originally spoken.

"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."

Perestroika in the Soviet Union and the fall of the Soviet block symbolized by the fall of the Berlin wall meant that Soviet style Communism had failed. Politicians in the West claim it proved that it was a failure as an ideology. But capitalism has failed as well, for example in Cuba, so is Capitalism as well, a failed ideology? Or was it that the tenants of capitalism weren't respected? Repressive governments ruling by police powers more than ruling by the will of it's people caused what was called capitalism to fail.

The rules are cut and dried, they have been well documented and been expounded upon by the great economists multiple times. Under the alleged rules of capitalism if a job is dangerous or unpleasant requiring brute strength or perseverance, it's difficulty or unpleasantness causes the wage to rise. But politicians of both parties’ today try to use immigration, as a Trojan horse to explain Americans won't do those jobs. American politics’ is the art of wrapping a germ of truth in a hospital of fabrication.

American's won't do the job for free or for less than what they were paid five years ago to do it. Our politicians want to violate the rules of the system or as Roosevelt explained,

"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."

Free trade and globalism has created a siphon of the American middle class, a spiral of economic decline, a decade of stagnant wages coupled with what can only be called a Mexican economic collapse. And the politician's only answer is, "What we need is more!" Republicans and Democrats alike, the message is identical only wrapped in different approaches to achieving the same goal. Roosevelt's Royalist's indeed, our government provides an ever-increasing flow of foreign goods not only to please the economic royalist's but by currency manipulation to hide the disappearance of wealth in this country.

Rapidly disappearing from America is the mom and pop operation the corporations rein supreme. Middle class incomes from individual small businesses are falling away, replaced by salaried employees. Auto parts, auto repair, and restaurants through out the entire scope of the economy family businesses are being erased from the landscape.

" 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."

If we as American's in modern America have no voice in government policy in either party, is it merely a failure of politics? Or could it be, as Roosevelt warned the failure of Capitalism? There were and are no magic's bullets or secret formulas to repair our economy, for mark well, as Roosevelt acknowledged the failure to make the corrections leads us down the road to decline and possibly even revolution.

Roosevelt's policies once beloved by democratic politicians are routinely ignored in practice and spat out with disdain by the Republicans were the sane solution at the most dangerous moment in American history. Not the failure of the economy but the failure of the ideology.

"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 the 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."