A RECKONING WITH LIBERTY

The Depression made inevitable, in the words of one writer, a “reckoning with liberty.” For too many Americans, Roosevelt proclaimed, “life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.” The 1930s produced an outpouring of books and essays on freedom. The large majority took for granted the need for a new definition. In a volume entitled Land of the Free (1938), the poet Archibald MacLeish used photographs of impoverished migrants and sharecroppers to question the reality of freedom in desperate times. “We told ourselves we were free,” he wrote. Now, “we wonder if the liberty is done ... or if there’s something different men can mean by Liberty.”

FDR delivering one of his “fireside chats” in 1938. Roosevelt was the first president to make effective use of the radio to promote his policies.

Like the Civil War, the New Deal recast the idea of freedom by linking it to the expanding power of the national state. “Our democracy,” wrote Father John A. Ryan, a prominent Catholic social critic, “finds itself... in a new age where not political freedom but social and industrial freedom is the most insistent cry.” Influenced by Ryan, the National Catholic Welfare Conference in 1935 declared that “social justice” required a government guarantee of continuous employment and a “decent livelihood and adequate security” for all Americans. A 1935 survey by Fortune magazine found that among poor respondents, 90 percent believed that the government should guarantee that “every man who wants work has a job.”

FDR AND THE IDEA OF FREEDOM

Along with being a superb politician, Roosevelt was a master of political communication. At a time when his political opponents controlled most newspapers, he harnessed radio’s power to bring his message directly into American homes. By the mid-1930s, more than two-thirds of American families owned radios. They listened avidly to Roosevelt’s radio addresses, known as “fireside chats.”

Roosevelt adeptly appealed to traditional values in support of new policies. He gave the term “liberalism” its modem meaning. In the nineteenth century, liberalism had been a shorthand for limited government and free-market economics. Roosevelt consciously chose to employ it to describe a large, active, socially conscious state. He reclaimed the word “freedom” from conservatives and made it a rallying cry for the New Deal. In his second fireside chat, Roosevelt juxtaposed his own definition of liberty as “greater security for the average man” to the older notion of liberty of contract, which served the interests of “the privileged few.” Henceforth, he would consistently link freedom with economic security and identify entrenched economic inequality as its greatest enemy. “The liberty of a democracy,” he declared in 1938, was not safe if citizens could not “sustain an acceptable standard of living.”

Even as Roosevelt invoked the word to uphold the New Deal, “liberty”— in the sense of freedom from powerful government—became the fighting slogan of his opponents. Their principal critique of the New Deal was that its “reckless spending” undermined fiscal responsibility and its new government regulations restricted American freedom. When conservative businessmen and politicians in 1934 formed an organization to mobilize opposition to Roosevelt’s policies, they called it the American Liberty League. Robert Taft of Ohio, leader of the Republicans in Congress, accused Roosevelt of sacrificing “individual freedom” in a misguided effort to “improve the conditions of the poor.”

From Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat” (1934)

President Roosevelt pioneered the use of the new mass medium of radio to speak directly to Americans in their homes. He used his “fireside chats” to mobilize support for New Deal programs, link them with American traditions, and outline his definition of freedom.

To those who say that our expenditures for public works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that in the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade. What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility to determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed....

In our efforts for recovery we have avoided, on the one hand, the theory that business should and must be taken over into an all-embracing Government. We have avoided, on the other hand, the equally untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help. The course we have followed fits the American practice of Government, a practice of taking action step by step, of regulating only to meet concrete needs, a practice of courageous recognition of change. I believe with Abraham Lincoln, that “the legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”

I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.

From John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath (1938)

John Steinbeck’s popular novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and the film version that followed shortly thereafter, focused national attention on the plight of homeless migrants displaced from their farms as a result of the Great Depression. Before that book appeared, Steinbeck had published a series of newspaper articles based on eye witness accounts of the migrants, which became the basis for his novel.

In California, we find a curious attitude toward a group that makes our agriculture successful. The migrants are needed, and they are hated. . . . The migrants are hated for the following reasons, that they are ignorant and dirty people, that they are carriers of disease, that they increase the necessity for police and the tax bill for schooling in a community, and that if they are allowed to organize they can, simply by refusing to work, wipe out the season’s crops....

Let us see what kind of people they are, where they come from, and the routes of their wanderings. In the past they have been of several races, encouraged to come and often imported as cheap labor. Chinese in the early period, then Filipinos Japanese and Mexicans. These were foreigners, and as such they were ostracized and segregated and herded about. . . . But in recent years the foreign migrants have begun to organize, and at this danger they have been deported in great numbers, for there was a new reservoir from which a great quantity of cheap labor could be obtained.

The drought in the middle west has driven the agricultural populations of Oklahoma, Nebraska and parts of Kansas and Texas westward.... Thousands of them are crossing the borders in ancient rattling automobiles, destitute and hungry and homeless, ready to accept any pay so that they may eat and feed their children....

The earlier foreign migrants have invariably been drawn from a peon class. This is not the case with the new migrants. They are small farmers who have lost their farms, or farm hands who have lived with the family in the old American way.... They have come from the little farm districts where democracy was not only possible but inevitable, where popular government, whether practiced in the Grange, in church organization or in local government, was the responsibility of every man. And they have come into the country where, because of the movement necessary to make a living, they are not allowed any vote whatever, but are rather considered a properly unprivileged class....

As one little boy in a squatter’s camp said, “When they need us they call us migrants, and when we’ve picked their crop, we’re bums and we got to get out.”

QUESTIONS

1. What does Roosevelt mean by the difference between the definition of liberty that has existed in the past and his own “broader definition of liberty”?

2. According to Steinbeck, how do Depression-era migrant workers differ from those in earlier periods?

3. Do the migrant workers described by Steinbeck enjoy liberty as Roosevelt understands it?

This 1933 cartoon by William Gropper portrays Uncle Sam as Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians in the famous eighteenth-century novel Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. In this case, the bonds are the numerous agencies and laws created by the New Deal which, Gropper suggests, are inhibiting the country from getting back on its feet during the Great Depression.

As the 1930s progressed, opponents of the New Deal invoked the language of liberty with greater and greater passion. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce charged FDR with attempting to “Sovietize” America. Even though his own administration had abandoned laissez-faire in the face of economic disaster, former president Hoover launched strident attacks on his successor for endangering “fundamental American liberties.” In The Challenge to Liberty (1934), Hoover called the New Deal “the most stupendous invasion of the whole spirit of liberty” the nation had ever seen.

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