Words Worth Remembering: FDR’s Second Bill of Rights
On the evening of Wednesday, January 11, 1944, Americans in their homes, in restaurants, and in other gathering places listened attentively as President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat summarizing his annual message to Congress, delivered just hours earlier.
It was a message dominated by the facts of a nation at war. America was, after all, “an active partner in the world’s greatest war against human slavery,” as FDR put it in his opening line. “We have joined with like-minded people in order to defend ourselves in a world that has been gravely threatened with gangster rule,” the president said in his slow, pointed, and charming Northeastern accent.
The war, he made clear, was not solely about survival — it was about survival on what grounds.
“I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival,” FDR said. “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.”
His words doubtless struck the hearts of countless Americans who had lived through the ups of the Roaring Twenties, endured the drastic downs of the Great Depression, and were now in the midst of surviving the single greatest war in human history—the stakes of which could not have been higher, not just for America, but for the entire world.
Near the end of his broadcast to the nation, FDR defined just what kind of America he hoped to see emerge from the ashes of total war. It began with a brief stroll into the past.
“This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain unalienable 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.”
Great as they were then, and still were in 1944, something had changed.
“We have come to a clearer realization of the fact,” FDR said, “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
America had moved from infancy to maturity, and with that hard-won maturity came a deeper, almost solemn understanding: freedom in the modern state was far more complex, more fragile, and more demanding than many had ever imagined.
Liberty was no longer merely the absence of chains; it was the presence of opportunity, the protection of dignity, and the security to live without constant fear of want. The fullness of American liberty must be defined, defended and renewed by each generation which alone can discern whether that liberty has grown, flourished, or weakened under pressures old, new, or unprecedented––pressures that test the very soul of a nation.
“In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident,” FDR continued. “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, or race, or creed.”
Among these new human rights FDR spoke of were the right to a good-paying job; to earn enough not merely to survive but to thrive; for farmers to raise and sell crops at a fair return; for every businessperson to live free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies; to a decent home; to quality medical care; to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and finally, to a good education.
“All of these rights spell ‘security,’” FDR concluded. “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.”
It was right because it was America. It was necessary because it honored the promise America had made to its people. And it was vital because America’s very standing in a world besieged by absolute tyranny depended upon it.
“America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens,” FDR explained. “For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”
FDR added: “Our fighting men abroad—and their families at home—expect such a program and have the right to insist on it. It is to their demands that this Government should pay heed, rather than to the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying.”
An expansion of his “Four Freedoms” speech delivered in January 1941, FDR’s Second Bill of Rights is quintessentially American in its hope. Just as Abraham Lincoln reminded Stephen Douglas that the phrase “all men are created equal” was meant “to set up a standard maxim for free society,” to be constantly looked to, constantly labored for, constantly approximated, so too did FDR remind Americans that theirs was a country of ideals—ideals to be defined, broadened, and realized anew with each passing generation.
It is a task we have neglected at times—but it remains a task that cannot be forgotten, so long as we continue to press forward with faith in that democracy meant to shine as a city on a hill, offering refuge to all who seek to be free.