FDR’s 1938 Address To Congress On Monopoly Provides A Path Forward Today
Harris/Walz Democrats Have An Opportunity To Follow FDR’s Lead
President Biden delivers the keynote address tonight to start the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago.
The ghosts and many echoes of Chicago ’68 (see:The Ghost of Hubert Humphrey Is Stalking Kamala Harris have gotten the attention of even The NY Times (see: When Chaos Came To Chicago”).
Since unfortunately I can’t be out in the streets with the protesters, I thought I’d offer moderate thoughts on a far different history, a timely focus on what FDR once described as “The Choice before Us” in his famous 1938 “Message To Congress On Curbing Monopolies”:
Examination of methods of conducting and controlling private enterprise which keep it from furnishing jobs or income or opportunity for one-third of the population is long overdue on the part of those who sincerely want to preserve the system of private enterprise for profit.
No people, least of all a democratic people, will be content to go without work or to accept some standard of living which obviously and woefully falls short of their capacity to produce. No people, least of all a people with our traditions of personal liberty, will endure the slow erosion of opportunity for the common man, the oppressive sense of helplessness under the domination of a few, which are overshadowing our whole economic life. …
The power of a few to manage the economic life of the nation must be diffused among the many or be transferred to the public and its democratically responsible government. If prices are to be managed and administered, if the nation’s business is to be allotted by plan and not by competition, that power should not be vested in any private group or cartel, however benevolent its professions profess to be.
FDR was no Socialist – he was seeking modest reforms to preserve capitalism and to derail political revolution.
Although today’s economic conditions and abuses of power of corporations and monopoly are as bad and in many ways worse than those FDR faced in 1938, I strongly doubt we’ll hear anything like that from Biden tonight.
FDR framed the issue and source of the problem in his first paragraph: the threat of fascism:
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
Today, we face not only the economic power of corporations FDR described.
Today, corporate power has expanded to entrench an Oligarchy that has bought Congress and the Supreme Court, controls the media and cultural institutions – who distribute propaganda – and are financing and stoking culture wars and Christian Nationalists with strong fascistic cultural and political tendencies.
They form the Trump base. They are not right wing Populists. They are fascists.
I urge folks to read the entirety of FDR’s message to Congress and consider the policy and program he set forth: (topical bullets from the address):
- THE GROWING CONCENTRATION OF ECONOMIC POWER.
- FINANCIAL CONTROL OVER INDUSTRY
- THE DECLINE OF COMPETITION AND ITS EFFECTS ON EMPLOYMENT
- COMPETITION DOES NOT MEAN EXPLOITATION
- A PROGRAM
FDR tied his program reforms not to a European Socialists program, but to American traditions:
No man of good faith will misinterpret these proposals. They derive from the oldest American traditions. Concentration of economic power in the few and the resulting unemployment of labor and capital are inescapable problems for a modern “private enterprise” democracy. I do not believe that we are so lacking in stability that we shall lose faith in our own way of living just because we seek to find out how to make that way of living work more effectively. …
It is a program whose basic purpose is to stop the progress of collectivism in business and turn business back to the democratic competitive order.
And that sure sounds like an effective rebuttal to Trump’s delusional attacks on the Democrats as “Communists” and “Socialists”.