Noam Chomsky Explains the Best Way for Ordinary People to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunting

The threat of wide­spread vio­lence and unrest descends upon the coun­try, thanks again to a col­lec­tion of actors vicious­ly opposed to civ­il rights, and in many cas­es, to the very exis­tence of peo­ple who are dif­fer­ent from them. They have been giv­en aid and com­fort by very pow­er­ful enablers. Vet­er­an activists swing into action. Young peo­ple on col­lege cam­pus­es turn out by the hun­dreds week after week. But for many ordi­nary peo­ple with jobs, kids, mort­gages, etc. the cost of par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­stant protests and civ­il actions may seem too great to bear. Yet, giv­en many awful exam­ples in recent his­to­ry, the cost of inac­tion may be also.

What can be done? Not all of us are Rosa Parks or Howard Zinn or Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. or Thich Nat Hanh or Cesar Chavez or Dolores Huer­ta, after all. Few of us are rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and few may wish to be. Not every­one is brave enough or tal­ent­ed enough or knowl­edge­able enough or com­mit­ted enough or, what­ev­er.

The prob­lem with this kind of think­ing is a prob­lem with so much think­ing about pol­i­tics. We look to leaders—men and women we think of as supe­ri­or beings—to do every­thing for us. This can mean del­e­gat­ing all the work of democ­ra­cy to some­times very flawed indi­vid­u­als. It can also mean we fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand how demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments work.

In the video above, Noam Chom­sky address­es the ques­tion of what ordi­nary peo­ple can do in the face of seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able injus­tice. (The clip comes from the 1992 doc­u­men­tary Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent.) “The way things change,” he says, “is because lots of peo­ple are work­ing all the time, and they’re work­ing in their com­mu­ni­ties or their work­place or wher­ev­er they hap­pen to be, and they’re build­ing up the basis for pop­u­lar move­ments.”

In the his­to­ry books, there’s a cou­ple of lead­ers, you know, George Wash­ing­ton or Mar­tin Luther King, or what­ev­er, and I don’t want to say that those peo­ple are unim­por­tant. Mar­tin Luther King was cer­tain­ly impor­tant, but he was not the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. Mar­tin Luther King can appear in the his­to­ry books ‘cause lots of peo­ple whose names you will nev­er know, and whose names are all for­got­ten and who may have been killed and so on were work­ing down in the South.

King him­self often said as much. For exam­ple, in the Pref­ace of his Stride Toward Free­dom he wrote—referring to the 50,000 most­ly ordi­nary, anony­mous peo­ple who made the Mont­gomery Bus Boy­cott happen—“While the nature of this account caus­es me to make fre­quent use of the pro­noun ‘I,’ in every impor­tant part of the sto­ry it should be ‘we.’ This is not a dra­ma with only one actor.”

As for pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als like him­self engaged in polit­i­cal strug­gle, Chom­sky says, “peo­ple like me can appear, and we can appear to be promi­nent… only because some­body else is doing the work.” He defines his own work as “help­ing peo­ple devel­op cours­es of intel­lec­tu­al self-defense” against pro­pa­gan­da and mis­in­for­ma­tion. For King, the issue came down to love in action. Respond­ing in a 1963 inter­view above to a crit­i­cal ques­tion about his meth­ods, he coun­ters the sug­ges­tion that non­vi­o­lence means sit­ting on the side­lines.

I think of love as some­thing strong and that orga­nizes itself into pow­er­ful, direct action…. We are not engaged in a strug­gle that means we sit down and do noth­ing. There’s a great deal of dif­fer­ence between non­re­sis­tance to evil and non­vi­o­lent resis­tance. Non­re­sis­tance leaves you in a state of stag­nant pas­siv­i­ty and dead­en­ing com­pla­cen­cy, where­as non­vi­o­lent resis­tance means that you do resist in a very strong and deter­mined man­ner.

Both Chom­sky, King, and every oth­er voice for jus­tice and human rights would agree that the peo­ple need to act instead of rely­ing on move­ment lead­ers. What­ev­er actions one can take—whether it’s engag­ing in informed debate with fam­i­ly, friends, or cowork­ers, writ­ing let­ters, mak­ing dona­tions to activists and orga­ni­za­tions, doc­u­ment­ing injus­tice, or tak­ing to the streets in protest or acts of civ­il disobedience—makes a dif­fer­ence. These are the small indi­vid­ual actions that, when prac­ticed dili­gent­ly and coor­di­nat­ed togeth­er in the thou­sands, make every pow­er­ful social move­ment pos­si­ble.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky & Har­ry Bela­fonte Speak on Stage for the First Time Togeth­er: Talk Trump, Klan & Hav­ing a Rebel­lious Heart

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

‘Tired of Giv­ing In’: The Arrest Report, Mug Shot and Fin­ger­prints of Rosa Parks (Decem­ber 1, 1955)

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Cre­at­ing Mean­ing­ful Social Change

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Last Surviving Witness of the Lincoln Assassination Appears on the TV Game Show “I’ve Got a Secret” (1956)


Let’s rewind the video­tape to 1956, to Samuel James Sey­mour’s appear­ance on the CBS tele­vi­sion show, “I’ve Got a Secret.” At 96 years of age, Sey­mour was the last sur­viv­ing per­son present at Ford’s The­ater the night Abra­ham Lin­coln was assas­si­nat­ed by John Wilkes Booth (April 14, 1865).

Only five years old at the time, Mr. Sey­mour trav­eled with his father to Wash­ing­ton D.C. on a busi­ness trip, where they attend­ed a per­for­mance of Our Amer­i­can Cousin. The young­ster caught a quick glimpse of the pres­i­dent, the play began, and the rest is, well, his­to­ry.

A quick foot­note: Samuel Sey­mour died two months after his TV appear­ance. His longevi­ty had some­thing to do, I imag­ine, with declin­ing those Win­stons over the years.

Find cours­es on the Civ­il War in our list of Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in August, 2011.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

The Poet­ry of Abra­ham Lin­coln

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

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Legendary Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

While our coun­try looks like it might be com­ing apart at the seams, it’s good to revis­it, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nos­tal­gic about a lost time, but so that we can remind our­selves how, giv­en the right con­di­tions, things could work well once again.

One exam­ple from his­to­ry (and recent­ly redis­cov­ered by a num­ber of blogs dur­ing the AHCA deba­cle in Con­gress) is this gov­ern­ment pro­pa­gan­da film from 1949—the Har­ry S. Tru­man era—that pro­motes the idea of cra­dle-to-grave health care, and all for three cents a week. This mon­ey went to school nurs­es, nutri­tion­ists, fam­i­ly doc­tors, and neigh­bor­hood health depart­ments.

Direct­ed by Chuck Jones, bet­ter known for ani­mat­ing Bugs Bun­ny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and the Road Run­ner, “So Much for So Lit­tle” fol­lows our main char­ac­ter from infancy—where doc­tors help immu­nize babies against whoop­ing cough, diph­the­ria, rheumat­ic fever, and smallpox—through school to dat­ing, mar­riage, becom­ing par­ents, and set­tling into a nice, healthy retire­ment. Along the way, the gov­ern­ment has made sure that health care is noth­ing to wor­ry about.

The film won an Acad­e­my Award in 1950 for Doc­u­men­tary Short Subject—not best sci-fi, despite how rad­i­cal this all sounds.

So what hap­pened? John Maher at the blog Dot and Line puts it this way:

Par­ti­san­ship and cap­i­tal­ism and racist zon­ing poli­cies shat­tered its ide­al­is­tic dream that Amer­i­cans might actu­al­ly pay com­mu­nal­ly for their health as well as that of their neigh­bors and fel­low cit­i­zens.

Three cents per Amer­i­can per week wouldn’t cut it now in terms of uni­ver­sal health cov­er­age. But accord­ing to Maher, quot­ing a 2009 Kingsepp study on the orig­i­nal Afford­able Care Act, tax­pay­ers would have to pay $3.61 a week.

So folks, don’t get despon­dent, get ide­al­is­tic. The Great­est Gen­er­a­tion came back from WWII with a grand ide­al­ism. Maybe this cur­rent gen­er­a­tion just needs to fight and defeat Nazis all over again…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Chuck Jones, the Artist Behind Bugs Bun­ny, Daffy Duck & Oth­er Looney Tunes Leg­ends: A Video Essay

How to Draw Bugs Bun­ny: A Primer by Leg­endary Ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones

This Amer­i­can Life Demys­ti­fies the Amer­i­can Health­care Sys­tem

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Color Palettes of Your Favorite Films: The Royal Tenenbaums, Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner & More

We tend to think of film as rough­ly divid­ed into the “black and white” and “col­or” eras, the lat­ter ush­ered in by such lav­ish Tech­ni­col­or pro­duc­tions as Gone with the Wind and The Wiz­ard of Oz. But we also know it’s not as sim­ple as that: those pic­tures came out in Hol­ly­wood’s “gold­en year” of 1939, but some film­mak­ers had already been exper­i­ment­ing with col­or, and the gold­en age of black-and-white film would con­tin­ue through the 1960s. Movies today still occa­sion­al­ly dare to ven­ture into the nev­er-entire­ly-shut­tered realm of the mono­chrome, but on the whole, col­or reigns supreme.

Even though most movies now use col­or, few use it to its fullest advan­tage. Col­or gives view­ers some­thing more to look at, of course, but it can also give a movie its visu­al iden­ti­ty. Think of the films you’ve seen that you can call back most vivid­ly to mind, almost as if you had a pro­jec­tor inside your head, and most of them will prob­a­bly have a dis­tinc­tive col­or palette.

The most mem­o­rable cin­e­mat­ic images, in oth­er words, will have been com­posed not just with any col­or they hap­pened to need, but with a very spe­cif­ic set of col­ors, delib­er­ate­ly assem­bled by the film­mak­ers for its par­tic­u­lar expres­sive­ness.

For a few years now, the Twit­ter account Cin­e­ma Palettes has drawn out and iso­lat­ed those col­ors, ten per film, for all to see. “Though based on a momen­tary still, each spec­trum of shades seems to encap­su­late its movie’s over­all mood,” writes My Mod­ern Met’s Leah Pel­le­gri­ni, point­ing to “the somber, oth­er­world­ly blues of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows: Part 2, the dream­like pinks and pur­ples of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the cloy­ing­ly pret­ty pas­tels of Edward Scis­sorhands, and the earth­ly, organ­ic greens and browns of Atone­ment.”

It will sur­prise nobody to see the work of Wes Ander­son, famed for the care he gives not just to col­or but every visu­al ele­ment of his film, appear more than once on the feed. Here we see Cin­e­ma Palettes’ selec­tions from The Roy­al Tenen­baums, as well as from Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Reser­voir Dogs, Stan­ley Kubrick­’s A Clock­work Orange, and Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner. The project reveals an aspect of film­mak­ing that few of us may think con­scious­ly about, but nev­er­the­less reflects the nature of cin­e­ma itself: the best films select not just the right col­ors but the right aspects of real­i­ty itself to present, to inten­si­fy, to dimin­ish, and to leave out entire­ly.

Explore more films and col­ors at Cin­e­ma Palettes.

via My Mod­ern Met and h/t Natal­ie W‑S

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Like Kubrick, Jodor­owsky, Taran­ti­no, Cop­po­la & Miyaza­ki Use Col­or to Tell Their Sto­ries

“Bleu, Blanc, Rouge”: a Strik­ing Super­cut of the Vivid Col­ors in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s Films

Wes Ander­son Likes the Col­or Red (and Yel­low)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Obses­sion with the Col­or Red: A Super­cut

Ear­ly Exper­i­ments in Col­or Film (1895–1935)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Prince Gets an Official Purple Pantone Color

Image by Ann Alt­house, via Flickr Com­mons

It was bound to hap­pen…

The Pan­tone Col­or Insti­tute has announced that they’ve cre­at­ed “a stan­dard­ized cus­tom col­or to rep­re­sent and hon­or inter­na­tion­al icon, Prince.” Called “Love Sym­bol #2”, the col­or (below) draws inspi­ra­tion from Prince’s Yama­ha pur­ple piano. Some­where, Marie Schrad­er is jeal­ous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

Prince Plays Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solos On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and “Amer­i­can Woman”

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Ralph Steadman’s Surrealist Illustrations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1995)

As a nov­el­ist, George Orwell did not traf­fic in sub­tleties, but then nei­ther did the authors of Medieval moral­i­ty plays. The alle­gor­i­cal Ani­mal Farm per­forms a sim­i­lar, if sec­u­lar, func­tion, giv­ing us unam­bigu­ous vil­lainy and clear didac­tic intent. Orwell not­ed in his essay “Why I Write” that he meant the book to “fuse polit­i­cal pur­pose and artis­tic pur­pose into one whole.“ Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished with the sub­ti­tle A Fairy Sto­ry, the nov­el car­i­ca­tures Stal­in­ism and the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, and Orwell left no mys­tery as to his intent when he com­ment­ed in the pref­ace to a 1947 Ukrain­ian edi­tion that he meant the book to “end on a loud note of dis­cord” meant to sig­ni­fy what he saw as the insta­bil­i­ty of the Tehran Con­fer­ence.

Lead­en state­ments like these aside, Orwell swore he “did not wish to com­ment on the work,” writ­ing, “if it does not speak for itself, it is a fail­ure.” The book does indeed speak, in two par­tic­u­lar ways: its vivid­ly grotesque char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of the humans and ani­mals on the farm and its indeli­ble col­lec­tion of pro­pa­gan­dis­tic slo­gans.

These are the fea­tures best cap­tured by gonzo illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man, famous for his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Hunter S. Thomp­son. Pub­lished in 1995—with the Fairy Sto­ry sub­ti­tle restored—the Stead­man-illus­trat­ed 50th anniver­sary edi­tion real­izes anoth­er pre­vi­ous vari­a­tion on the book’s title: Ani­mal Farm: A Con­tem­po­rary Satire.

These images draw out the exag­ger­at­ed absur­di­ties of the nov­el as only an artist with Steadman’s twist­ed, sur­re­al­ist sense of visu­al humor could. They are pro­found­ly effec­tive, though there’s no telling what Orwell would have thought of them. Steadman’s car­i­ca­tures uni­ver­sal­ize the book’s dra­ma, pro­vid­ing the kind of stock char­ac­ters we find in folk­lore, “fairy sto­ries,” and reli­gious alle­go­ry. But Orwell wrote that he wished us not to mis­take his express polit­i­cal intent: “It was of the utmost impor­tance to me that peo­ple in West­ern Europe should see the Sovi­et regime for what it real­ly was…. I have been con­vinced that the destruc­tion of the Sovi­et myth was essen­tial if we want­ed a revival of the Social­ist move­ment.”

Stead­man, to his great cred­it, felt no need to lit­er­al­ize Orwell’s stat­ed inten­tions in his illus­tra­tions, but rather took the book’s bizarre world on its own terms. You can read more quotes from Orwell’s earnest, intend­ed pref­ace for the book, restored in the Stead­man edi­tion, at Brain Pick­ings, where you’ll also find a good num­ber of the illus­tra­tions as well. Copies of the out-of-print book can be pur­chased on Ama­zon and Abe’s books.

Stead­man not only applied his skill as a car­i­ca­tur­ist to Orwell’s fic­tion­al farm denizens, we should note, but also to the author him­self. He made sev­er­al sketch­es of Orwell, such as that below of the writer with a cage of rats around his neck. You can see sev­er­al more of Steadman’s draw­ings of Orwell at The Guardian.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Break­ing Bad Illus­trat­ed by Gonzo Artist Ralph Stead­man

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm into Their 1977 Con­cept Album, Ani­mals (a Cri­tique of Late Cap­i­tal­ism, Not Stal­in)

Gun Nut William S. Bur­roughs & Gonzo Illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man Make Polaroid Por­traits Togeth­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zimmer Soundtracks: Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight & Much More

No name has become more syn­ony­mous with the very con­cept of “movie music” than that of Hans Zim­mer. Begin­ning in the 1980s by com­pos­ing for such cult film­mak­ers of dis­tinc­tive vision as Jerzy Skolimows­ki, Nico Mas­torakis, and Nico­las Roeg, Zim­mer soon rose to Hol­ly­wood heights, cre­at­ing the scores for big hits like Rain ManThe Lion KingAs Good as It Gets, Glad­i­a­tor, and the Pirates of the Caribbean series. In recent years, he has entered into an ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with the direc­tor Christo­pher Nolan, him­self an indie favorite turned block­buster king, scor­ing his Bat­man movies as well as Incep­tionInter­stel­lar, and Nolan’s new World War II pic­ture Dunkirk, whose unusu­al son­ic inten­si­ty the Vox video above explains.

“My weak­ness is that I didn’t go to music school, and that my for­mal edu­ca­tion is two weeks of piano lessons,” Zim­mer told Indiewire a cou­ple years ago, after the release of Inter­stel­lar. “My strength is that I know how to lis­ten,” and “the way Chris Nolan and I work is we lis­ten to each oth­er.”

Unlike many pro­duc­tions where “the com­pos­er is this near­ly uncon­trol­lable ele­ment that comes into the film” and to whom the direc­tor must defer, Zim­mer starts work­ing on Nolan’s movies from the begin­ning, a process he describes as a con­ver­sa­tion: “While he was writ­ing, while he was shoot­ing, I was writ­ing, and the music was hap­pen­ing sort of in a — to use an Inter­stel­lar term — par­al­lel uni­verse, real­ly.” With no need for the dread­ed “temp score,” the dra­ma of Zim­mer’s music and Nolan’s sto­ries devel­op togeth­er.

You can hear the results of Zim­mer’s process in this nine-hour playlist, which includes Zim­mer’s work for Nolan’s films up to Dunkirk–its sound based in part on the tick­ing of a watch Nolan had giv­en him–and oth­ers besides. (The playlist also includes Zim­mer’s sound­tracks for Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Ris­es, Black Hawk Down, Sher­lock Holmes, Glad­i­a­tor, and The Thin Red Line.) If it leaves you with the desire to learn a bit more about how this instinc­tive mas­ter of movie music does it, have a look at the trail­er above for “Hans Zim­mer Teach­es Film Scor­ing,” his $90 course from the online edu­ca­tion­al plat­form Mas­ter­class. The very first piece of wis­dom he offers reflects the fact that his instinct for back-and-forth col­lab­o­ra­tion extends well beyond his part­ner­ship with Nolan to his view on the craft itself: “In music, you’re basi­cal­ly hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion” — with your artis­tic col­lab­o­ra­tors, with your fel­low musi­cians, with any­one to whom you can lis­ten.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Known Uni­verse: The Hay­den Planetarium’s Tour of the Cos­mos Gets a Hans Zim­mer Sound­track

Hear 5 Hours of Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Clas­sic West­ern Films: From Ser­gio Leone’s Spaghet­ti West­erns to Tarantino’s The Hate­ful Eight

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

F.D.R. Proposes a Second Bill of Rights: A Decent Job, Education & Health Care Will Keep Us Free from Despotism (1944)

It’s dif­fi­cult to appraise the com­pli­cat­ed lega­cy of Franklin D. Roo­sevelt. His New Deal poli­cies are cred­it­ed for lift­ing mil­lions out of des­ti­tu­tion, and they cre­at­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties for strug­gling artists and writ­ers, many of whom went on to become some of the country’s most cel­e­brat­ed. But Roo­sevelt also com­pro­mised with racist south­ern sen­a­tors like Mississippi’s Theodore Bil­bo, and under­wrote hous­ing seg­re­ga­tion, job and pay dis­crim­i­na­tion, and exclu­sions in his eco­nom­ic recov­ery aimed most square­ly at African-Amer­i­cans. He is laud­ed as a wartime leader in the fight against Nazism. But he built con­cen­tra­tion camps on U.S. soil when he interned over 100,000 Japan­ese Amer­i­cans after Pearl Har­bor. His com­mit­ment to iso­la­tion­ism before the war and his “moral failure—or indif­fer­ence” to the plight of Euro­pean Jews, thou­sands of whom were denied entry to the U.S., has come under jus­ti­fi­able scruti­ny from his­to­ri­ans.

Both blame and praise are well war­rant­ed, and not his alone to bear. Yet, for all his seri­ous laps­es and wartime crimes, FDR con­sis­tent­ly had an astute and ide­al­is­tic eco­nom­ic vision for the coun­try. In his 1944 State of the Union address, he denounced war prof­i­teers and “self­ish and par­ti­san inter­ests,” say­ing, “if ever there was a time to sub­or­di­nate indi­vid­ual or group self­ish­ness to the nation­al good, that time is now.”

He went on to enu­mer­ate a series of pro­pos­als “to main­tain a fair and sta­ble econ­o­my at home” while the war still raged abroad. These include tax­ing “all unrea­son­able prof­its, both indi­vid­ual and cor­po­rate” and enact­ing reg­u­la­tions on food prices. The speech is most extra­or­di­nary, how­ev­er, for the turn it takes at the end, when the pres­i­dent pro­pos­es and clear­ly artic­u­lates a “sec­ond Bill of Rights,” argu­ing that the first one had “proved inad­e­quate to assure us equal­i­ty in the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness.”

Roo­sevelt did not take the val­ue of equal­i­ty for grant­ed or mere­ly invoke it as a slo­gan. Though its role in his ear­ly poli­cies was sore­ly lack­ing, he showed in 1941 that he could be moved on civ­il rights issues when, in response to a march on Wash­ing­ton planned by Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Ran­dolph, and oth­er activists, he deseg­re­gat­ed fed­er­al hir­ing and the mil­i­tary. In his 1944 speech, Roo­sevelt strong­ly sug­gests that eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty is a pre­cur­sor to Fas­cism, and he offers a pro­gres­sive polit­i­cal the­o­ry as a hedge against Sovi­et Com­mu­nism.

“We have come to a clear real­iza­tion,” he says, “of the fact that true indi­vid­ual free­dom can­not exist with­out eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty. ‘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.” In the footage at the top of the post, you can see Roo­sevelt him­self read his new Bill of Rights. Read the tran­script your­self just below:

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 regard­less of sta­tion, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right 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 right of every farmer to raise and sell his prod­ucts at a return which will give him and his fam­i­ly a decent liv­ing; 

The right of every busi­ness­man, large and small, to trade in an atmos­phere of free­dom from unfair com­pe­ti­tion and dom­i­na­tion by monop­o­lies at home or abroad;

The right of every fam­i­ly to a decent home;

The right to ade­quate med­ical care and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to ade­quate pro­tec­tion from the eco­nom­ic fears of old age, sick­ness, acci­dent, and unem­ploy­ment;

The right to a good edu­ca­tion.

All of these rights spell secu­ri­ty. And after this war is won we must be pre­pared to move for­ward, in the imple­men­ta­tion of these rights, to new goals of human hap­pi­ness and well-being.

Roo­sevelt died in office before the war end­ed. His suc­ces­sor tried to car­ry for­ward his eco­nom­ic and civ­il rights ini­tia­tives with the “Fair Deal,” but con­gress blocked near­ly all of Tru­man’s pro­posed leg­is­la­tion. We might imag­ine an alter­nate his­to­ry in which Roo­sevelt lived and found a way through force of will to enact his “sec­ond Bill of Rights,” hon­or­ing his promise to every “sta­tion, race” and “creed.” Yet in any case, his fourth term was near­ly at an end, and he would hard­ly have been elect­ed to a fifth.

But FDR’s pro­gres­sive vision has endured. Many seek­ing to chart a course for the coun­try that tacks away from polit­i­cal extrem­ism and toward eco­nom­ic jus­tice draw direct­ly from Roosevelt’s vision of free­dom and secu­ri­ty. His new bill of rights is strik­ing for its polit­i­cal bold­ness. Its pro­pos­als may have had their clear­est artic­u­la­tion three years ear­li­er in the famous “Four Free­doms” speech. In it he says, “the basic things expect­ed by our peo­ple of their polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic sys­tems are sim­ple. They are:

Equal­i­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty for youth and for oth­ers.

Jobs for those who can work.

Secu­ri­ty for those who need it.

The end­ing of spe­cial priv­i­lege for the few.

The preser­va­tion of civ­il lib­er­ties for all.

The enjoy­ment of the fruits of sci­en­tif­ic progress in a wider and con­stant­ly ris­ing stan­dard of liv­ing.

These are the sim­ple, the basic things that must nev­er be lost sight of in the tur­moil and unbe­liev­able com­plex­i­ty of our mod­ern world. The inner and abid­ing strength of our eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal sys­tems is depen­dent upon the degree to which they ful­fill these expec­ta­tions.

Guar­an­tee­ing jobs, if not income, for all and a “con­stant­ly ris­ing stan­dard of liv­ing” may be impos­si­ble in the face of automa­tion and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. Yet, most of Roo­sevelt’s prin­ci­ples may not only be real­iz­able, but per­haps, as he argued, essen­tial to pre­vent­ing the rise of oppres­sive, author­i­tar­i­an states.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franklin D. Roo­sevelt Says to Mon­eyed Inter­ests (EG Bankers) in 1936: “I Wel­come Their Hatred!”

Rare Footage: Home Movie of FDR’s 1941 Inau­gu­ra­tion

Strik­ing Poster Col­lec­tion from the Great Depres­sion Shows That the US Gov­ern­ment Once Sup­port­ed the Arts in Amer­i­ca

 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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