Words that ring as loudly and clearly as they did 71 years ago: FDR's nomination/acceptance speech.

[Gabi Hayes]

Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history. This is fitting ground on which to reaffirm the faith of our fathers; to pledge ourselves to restore to the people a wider freedom; to give to 1936 as the founders gave to 1776 - an American way of life.

That very word freedom, in itself and of necessity, suggests freedom from some restraining power. In 1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy - from the eighteenth-century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed; that they denied the right of free assembly and free speech; that they restricted the worship of God; that they put the average man's property and the average man's life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power; that they regimented the people.

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own government. 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.

http://www2.austincc.edu/lpatrick/his2341/fdr36acceptancespeech.htm




This is FDR's "rendezvous with destiny" speech, some of which was included in a science fiction trilogy I just finished, and which I can't recommend highly enough, as it deals with the coming climate crisis disaster (as presciently set forth in the book, with New Orleans replaced by DC in the first book), and the eventual election of a truly progressive president, who apparently spent all his free time at DU.

the book even goes as far as predicting that the White House TV Correspondents' Dinner will be informally renamed the "Colbert Hour!"

[Bitwit1234]

1. You should have added to this that bush's speech writer

culled the archives for FDR and JFK speeches. And that he plagiarized a lot of the speeches and gave them to bush. Typical. Now people are thinking bush said all those good American things.

[Vidar]

2. They certainly do. He was/is a man for the ages.