President Obama has succeeded in seizing new power over health care and
other swaths of American lives in part because previous presidents
muddied Americans’ understanding of freedom.
Most of the past century’s debates over the meaning of liberty have
featured one politician after another who promised people true freedom,
if only they would submit to increased government power. In the process,
politicians have been generously shrinking people’s individual liberty.
The clearest political turning point in the American understanding of
freedom came during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He often
invoked freedom, but almost always as a pretext for increasing
government power. He proclaimed in 1933, “We have all suffered in the
past from individualism run wild.” Naturally, the corrective was to
allow government to run wild.
Roosevelt declared in a 1934 fireside chat, “I am not for a return of
that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people
were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few.”
Politicians such as Roosevelt began by telling people that control of
their own lives was a mirage; thus, they lost nothing when government
took over.
In his renomination acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic Party
convention, Roosevelt declared that “the privileged princes of these new
economic dynasties ... created a new despotism.... 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.” But if wages were completely dictated
by the “industrial dictatorship” — why were pay rates higher in the
United States than anywhere else in the world, and why had pay rates
increased rapidly in the decades before 1929? Roosevelt never considered
limiting government intervention to safeguarding individual choice;
instead, he favored multiplying power to impose “government-knows-best”
dictates on work hours, wages, and contracts.
New improved freedom
On January 6, 1941, he gave his famous “Four Freedoms” speech,
promising citizens freedom of speech, freedom of worship — and then he
got creative: “The third [freedom] is freedom from want ... everywhere
in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear ... anywhere in the
world.” Proclaiming a goal of freedom from fear meant that the
government henceforth must fill the role in daily life previously filled
by God and religion. His list was clearly intended as a “replacement
set” of freedoms, since otherwise there would have been no reason to
mention freedom of speech and worship, already protected by the First
Amendment.
Roosevelt’s list of new freedoms liberated government while making a
pretense of liberating the citizen. It offered citizens no
security from the state, since it completely ignored the rights
protected by the Second Amendment (the right to keep and bear firearms),
the Fourth Amendment (freedom from unreasonable search and seizure),
the Fifth Amendment (due process, property rights, the right against
self-incrimination), the Sixth Amendment (the right to a speedy and
public trial by an impartial jury), and the Eighth Amendment (protection
against excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual
punishments). Roosevelt’s revised freedoms also ignored the Ninth
Amendment, which specifies that the listing of “certain rights, shall
not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” as
well as the Tenth Amendment, which specified that “powers not
delegated” to the federal government are reserved to the states or to
the people.
And, even though Roosevelt included freedom of speech in his new, improved list of progressive freedoms, he added,
A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups.... ... We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests....
The best way of dealing with the few slackers or troublemakers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of government to save government.
Thus, the “new freedom” required that government have power to
suppress any group not actively supporting the government’s goals. (The
United States was still at peace at the time of Roosevelt’s speech.) The
expansions of freedoms in the list were promised to the whole world —
primarily people who did not vote in U.S. elections — while the implicit
contractions of previously sanctified freedoms would affect only
Americans.
Roosevelt elaborated on his concept of freedom in his 1944 State of
the Union address. He declared that the original Bill of Rights had
“proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.”
He called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” and asserted, “True individual
freedom can’t exist without economic security.” And security, according
to Roosevelt, included “the right to a useful and remunerative job,”
“decent home,” “good health,” and “good education.” Thus, if a
government school did not teach all fifth-graders to read, the
nonreaders would be considered oppressed. Or, if someone was in bad
health, then that person would be considered as having been deprived of
his freedom, and somehow it would be seen as the government’s fault.
Roosevelt also declared that liberty requires “the right of every farmer
to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his
family a decent living” — a nonsensical concept that would require
setting food prices high enough to keep the nation’s least efficient
farmer behind his mule and plow.
Roosevelt clarified the necessary underpinnings of his new freedom
when, in the same speech, he called for Congress to enact a “national
service law — which for the duration of the war ... will make available
for war production or for any other essential services every able-bodied
adult in this Nation.” He promised that this proposal, described in his
official papers as a Universal Conscription Act, would be a “unifying
moral force” and “a means by which every man and woman can find that
inner satisfaction which comes from making the fullest possible
contribution to victory.” Presumably, the less freedom people had, the
more satisfaction they would enjoy.
Commenting on foreign policy, Roosevelt praised Soviet Russia as one
of the “freedom-loving Nations” and stressed that Marshal Stalin was
“thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution.”
Roosevelt’s concept of freedom required people to blindly trust their
leaders — a trust he greatly abused. He also denounced those Americans
with “suspicious souls” who feared that he had “made ‘commitments’ for
the future which might pledge this Nation to secret treaties” at the
summit of Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. But at that
summit, he had secretly agreed to allow Stalin to move the Soviet border
far to the West — thus consigning millions of Poles to life under
direct Soviet rule. (Roosevelt and Stalin used roughly the same dividing
line that Hitler and Stalin had used in 1939 to divide Poland into Nazi
and Soviet spheres.)
Praise for increased power
Though Roosevelt continually seized power long after he gave the Four
Freedoms speech, that oration is the one that is most frequently
invoked by subsequent presidents to sanctify their own power grabs.
President George H.W. Bush, speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Four
Freedoms speech, called Roosevelt “our greatest American political
pragmatist” and praised him for having “brilliantly enunciated the
20th-century vision of our Founding Fathers’ commitment to individual
liberty.” The elder Bush loved to invoke the Four Freedoms speech in his
appeals to vastly expand the federal war on drug users.
President Clinton declared in October 1996,
In Franklin Roosevelt’s view, government should be the perfect public system for fostering and protecting the “Four Freedoms”.... Roosevelt ... enumerated these freedoms not as abstract ideals but as goals toward which Americans — and caring people everywhere — could direct their most strenuous public efforts.
In other speeches, Clinton made it clear that the government needed
vastly more power to give Americans “freedom from fear” (except for fear
of the government).
Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech provides a push-button invocation
for any U.S. president who wants to sound as though he cares about
liberty. President George W. Bush invoked Roosevelt in perhaps his most
fraudulent speech — his “Mission Accomplished” strut aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003:
Our commitment to liberty is America’s tradition — declared at our founding; affirmed in Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms; asserted in the Truman Doctrine and in Ronald Reagan’s challenge to an evil empire.... When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life. American values and American interests lead in the same direction: We stand for human liberty.
And any Iraqi or Afghan who refused to submit to the Bush-definition of freedom automatically forfeited his right to live.
Bush also invoked Roosevelt in his November 2003 speech to the
National Endowment for Democracy celebrating its 20 years of interfering
with foreign elections: “The advance of freedom is the calling of our
time; it is the calling of our country. From the Fourteen Points to the
Four Freedoms ... America has put our power at the service of principle.
We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that
liberty is the direction of history.”
Bush had a great belief in freedom in the abstract, as long as no one
tried to meddle with his boundless power. For Bush to be invoking
freedom — after he suspended habeas corpus, authorized torture, and
destroyed much of Americans’ privacy — was typical of the shenanigans
that politicians have long gotten away with in this country.
Bush again invoked Roosevelt in a March 2005 speech to the National
Defense University, trying to vindicate his war on terror as part of “a
consistent theme of American strategy — from [President Wilson’s]
Fourteen Points, to the Four Freedoms, to the Marshall plan, to the
Reagan Doctrine.... We are confident that the desire for freedom, even
when repressed for generations, is present in every human heart.”
Bush may have given this particular speech to a military audience
because the officers knew that they could not laugh outloud at his
absurdities without wrecking their careers. Unfortunately, Americans are
still paying a price because Franklin Roosevelt’s freedom demagoguery
was not laughed off the national stage decades ago.
H.L. Mencken wisely observed, “One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand
syllogisms.” Any politician who seeks more power now to give people more
freedom at some distant future point deserves all the derision
Americans can heap upon him. Citizens should not tolerate any president
who invokes freedom as he tramples the Bill of Rights.
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy [2006] as well as The Bush Betrayal [2004], Lost Rights [1994] and Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Send him email.
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