News Journal: Roosevelt’s ‘Rendezvous with Destiny’ speech warned us about ‘economic royalists’

I opened a copy of the new 10th edition of “A Documentary History of the United States,” edited by Richard and Alexander Heffner, and leafing through it came upon Franklin Roosevelt’s famous “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech.
He made the speech more than 80 years ago. What struck me was how relevant it would have been had he given it today.
He started the speech by laying out a series of problems that faced the country in the 1930s. First was the “impact of technology.”
Of course the new technologies were different then; he listed machinery, railroads, steam, electricity, telegraph, radio, mass production and mass distribution. These had all led to giant steps forward for the economy, but they also had a number of ugly side effects — much in the way advances in computing technology, the internet, marketing, and social media have created huge problems for us in the areas of privacy, cyber security, clean air and water, climate change, stagnant wages, and major retail marketing bankruptcies.
FDR put much of the blame on what he called economic royalists who had managed to gain enormous power through what he called “concentration of control.” Does that sound familiar?
Think about what’s happening today in any number of areas, from Amazon’s dominance of internet retailing to the mergers that have left us with very few airlines, cable services, internet search, broadcasting, and telephone companies.
He went on to attack “economic royalists” who carved new “dynasties” built on “concentration of control,” and the new uses of “corporations, banks and securities” to further their ends.
His words are much more eloquent than any I could give you, so I’ll quote him. If you don’t think they speak to problems we face today, you haven’t been paying attention.
Here is the most relevant portion of his speech. I recommend reading it all.
“Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people.
“The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free. For out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things.
Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed-of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.
“There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.
“It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
“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. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small-business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people’s money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.
“Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities. Throughout the Nation, opportunity was limited by monopoly. Individual initiative was crushed in the cogs of a great machine. The field open for free business was more and more restricted.
“Private enterprise, indeed, became too private. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise. An old English judge once said: “Necessitous men are not free men.” Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
“For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
“Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people’s mandate to end it. Under that mandate, it is being ended.
“The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.
“Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.”
The United States behind FDR’s leadership brought us back into economic balance. There is no reason through dedication and hard work we cannot do the same.

Ted Kaufman is a U.S. Senator from Delaware.