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THE SPEECH FDR WOULD GIVE  
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David Dayan
June 14, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ As economic royalists ally with Trump, we have already seen an
example of a rhetorical counter that tells it like it is. _

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A first-term president is presiding over an improving economy, but
still one with severe individual hardship. His opponent is bolstered
by almost unilateral support from the business community, seeking to
regain its position of untrammeled dominion over American life. The
president decides to use the corporate tycoons’ stated preference to
frame the election, taking every opportunity to remind voters of the
wealthy and powerful forces arrayed against him.

The year is 1936, not 2024, and the president is Franklin Roosevelt.
Throughout the year, polling between Roosevelt and Alf Landon
was relatively close
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one decidedly unscientific poll taken right before Election Day
by _The Literary Digest_, which had nailed the previous five
elections, predicted a Landon victory
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close at all; in fact, one of the great landslides in U.S. politics.

FDR’s strategy to run hard against the malefactors of great wealth
was _sui generis_, never really to be replicated before or since.
While Democrats habitually become more populist
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campaign season, politics has become such a money game that
politicians have learned not to touch the third rail of inspiring a
plutocrat riot. But if there ever was a moment to pay attention to
Rooseveltian rhetoric, it’s now.

_MORE FROM DAVID DAYEN_ [[link removed]]

Wall Street donors who once rejected Donald Trump after January 6th
have returned to his side
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Silicon Valley bigwigs held a fundraiser
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Trump in the heart of San Francisco last week. Trump asked oil barons
for $1 billion
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campaign funds in exchange for regulatory relief. A hedge fund
manager pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars
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Trump minutes after he was convicted of a felony; Miriam Adelson, heir
to the casino fortune, pledged $100 million
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Even FDR would blanch at the open rallying for the presumptive
Republican nominee from those who need to use the word “billion”
to describe their net worth.

Corporate America’s sentiment was summed up pretty well by Kathryn
Wylde, who represents the Partnership for New York City, a business
lobby, who has openly described Wall Street as New York’s Main
Street
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the past. “The threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more
concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump,” Wylde
told Politico
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She will bear any burden to pay a little less in taxes and regulatory
compliance, in other words.

When people discuss how Roosevelt handled a similar mutiny by the
rich, they tend to point to a speech given on the eve of the 1936
election at Madison Square Garden, the famed “I welcome their hatred
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speech, where he openly sided against “the old enemies of
peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless
banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”

But there is another speech, far more detailed in its discussion of
economic tyranny and the dangers of concentrated power, within and
without the political realm. It was his acceptance speech
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the 1936 Democratic National Convention, given 88 years ago this
month.

What Roosevelt is doing is defining what Americans lost when their
government fell to the economic royalists.

This was the speech that brought into the political lexicon the term
“economic royalists.” Roosevelt, in full teaching mode, defined
them as the descendants of the British royalists of the Revolutionary
era, who “governed without the consent of the governed” and “put
the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to
the mercenaries of dynastic power.”

The end of political tyranny in 1776, however, in time gave way to a
new dynasty, an economic tyranny “built upon concentration of
control over material things.” The privileged class turned economic
systems to their own benefit, and cut laborers, farmers, smaller
merchants, and everybody else out of the deal.

And then FDR takes it a step further, and here he could be describing
2024: “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 … 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 new despotism. How else would you describe Silicon Valley, Big
Oil, and Wall Street coming together to back a transactional
presidential candidate who promises them specific favors, after
reducing their corporate taxes by 40 percent the last time he was
president?

What Roosevelt is doing is defining what Americans lost when their
government fell to the economic royalists: restrictions of business
initiative and opportunity, crushing of wages, inequality of wealth
and prosperity. The economy, thus controlled, imploded with the Great
Depression, and the people sought another direction. But like the
Stephen Schwarzmans and Bill Ackmans of today, the economic royalists
were appalled that anyone elected by the people could act as if they
had the authority to carry out the people’s will: “The royalists
of the economic order,” Roosevelt says, “have conceded that
political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have
maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business.”

This, Roosevelt says, cannot stand. “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.”

You almost never hear this kind of bracing talk in politics today. An
American president called out titans of industry as traitors to the
ideals of democracy, as enemies of a free people, out only to feather
their own nests and willing to take over the levers of government
power to do it. He sides with the ordinary laborer and farmer,
specifically highlighting their need for economic liberty, to pursue
their talents without the boot of monopolists hanging over their
heads.

Roosevelt had actually commissioned two different drafts for his
speech: one, a conciliatory speech from the rightward-moving Raymond
Moley, who had been close to Roosevelt during the first two years as
president, and the hard-hitting one he opted to deliver, by longtime
aide Sam Rosenman and rookie writer Stanley High, who coined the term
“economic royalists.” Roosevelt loved the phrase and made it the
centerpiece of his speech.

FDR went on to win the electoral vote 523-8, also carrying the
Democrats to their greatest congressional majority in history.

That was obviously a different time. By actually trying to do
something about the Great Depression—massive public-works and
employment programs, creating Social Security and legalizing
collective bargaining—Roosevelt earned his chance to keep at it.
Rhetoric alone did not deliver the second term; tangible improvements
did. But both FDR and Joe Biden style themselves as saviors of
democracy, which after the economic collapse of 1929 was not fated to
continue.

It turns out that Roosevelt delivered his DNC acceptance speech on
June 27, 1936. June 27 is the same day that Joe Biden will debate
Donald Trump on CNN. Though Trump is often described as a populist
with a working-class voter base, the “economic royalist” sobriquet
perfectly describes the cult of the wealthy that is determined to back
him. With the nouveau royalists’ bet on Trump, a second Trump term
is likely to upstage the first as a pay-to-play spectacle, where the
chief executive can be bought to endorse candidates
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bought to reverse his views on policy
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and bought to grease the wheels for more tax cuts, less restriction on
business, and generally whatever they ask for.

Trump’s occasional broadsides at big business in 2016 have really
melted away in today’s speeches and rallies. He is all personal
grievance, all the time. But that masks an agenda of favors to his
billionaire backers, who are enraged by having their power diminished
by the likes of Lina Khan or Gary Gensler or Rohit Chopra or Jennifer
Abruzzo.

These royalists believe that worker rights, consumer protection, and
open markets meddle dangerously with the established order of things,
where regulation is historically set in the corporate boardroom, and
everyone submits to their will. The anti-democratic, anti-patriotic,
freedom-restricting spirit that animated the rich enemies of Roosevelt
is more than present with the super-rich enemies of the Biden
administration.

No road to 523 electoral votes is available today, not even for FDR
himself. But I know how he would respond to this moment, as the forces
of wealth and privilege unite against him. Biden’s choice lies in
whether he will describe the situation as it is, and the struggle for
power at the heart of it.

_David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has
appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is
‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’_

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved. Click here
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* economic inequality
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* Money in Politics
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* FDR
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* Joe Biden
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