What do you say to the nation when accepting the Democratic nomination for president after a single term in office when your administration took a wide range of historic action to aid the economy and improve the lives of average Americans, but the job is far from done because despite all the positive action, so many working families still struggle financially?
You might not be surprised that President Joe Biden might have looked to FDR for inspiration in what Pres. Roosevelt told a packed Franklin Field when accepting his renomination in Philadelphia in the summer of 1936. (The convention itself was held just down the street at the old Convention Hall) But the fact is that FDR’s message that night — defending the economic mission of the New Deal and why its continuation was essential not just to improving Americans’ quality of life, but to a democratic system that was then under attack both at home and abroad by the rise of fascism — provides just as good a model for Vice President Kamala Harris this year, especially with a running mate like Gov. Tim Walz.
To be sure, other critical issues will inform voter choices this year, especially with a pro-choice woman running against a Trump-Vance ticket that is dedicated to taking away abortion rights, voting rights and civil rights. Yet poll after poll tells us that the economy and cost of living remain at the top of most voters’ minds.
FDR’s speech may be best known for the iconic line “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” But what makes the speech so apt today wasn’t just lyrical prose. It was how effectively it didn’t just play defense of an active governing agenda aimed at making life better for Americans. It went on the offense against the “economic royalists” who cloaked themselves in the flag and rhetoric of patriotism, but in fact offered nothing for the common man. Sound familiar? You should read the whole thing, and not just because it was such an historic moment in West Philly.
After giving a graceful nod to the bipartisan support so much of his New Deal programs did receive in Congress and among state governors, and its success in ending the feeling of fear he spoke of in his 1933 inaugural address, FDR acknowledged the challenges that remained. And most importantly, he put his economic agenda on this side of the nation’s founding ideals of freedom against tyranny:
But I cannot, with candor, tell you that all is well with the world. Clouds of suspicion, tides of ill-will and intolerance gather darkly in many places. In our own land we enjoy indeed a fullness of life greater than that of most Nations. But the rush of modern civilization itself has raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.
FDR pointed out that “Philadelphia is a good city in which to write American history” because that’s where Americans “sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy — from the 18th century royalists who held special privileges from the crown. It was to perpetuate their privilege that they governed without the consent of the governed.”
He explained that since then, the rise of a new industrial economy of mass production and mass media had changed society and brought “with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.”
As if speaking of today’s new digital economy and technology giants (now officially found to be monopolists in Google’s case), he explained that “new kingdoms were being built upon the concentration of control” by new corporations. “[A]ll undreamed of by the fathers — the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.”
These “new economic dynasties,” he explained, “created a new despotism” over working people. “And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.” He wasn’t going to let the Republican Right own the flag and Declaration of Independence, but claim it for the New Deal.
Economic opportunity is democratic freedom
Here’s the key tie he made between an economy that works for everyone and preserving our democratic system that’s every bit as relevant right now:
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 … For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
No, “protecting democracy” isn’t just an ideal that’s irrelevant to people’s quality of life, he said. “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 marketplace.”
Then as now, reactionary Republican voices like those we see today, make their claims about “Marxism” and “Socialism.” FDR wasn’t having it.
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. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
He candidly acknowledged that government is far from perfect — after all, not everything in the rush of New Deal programs in the first term may have yet succeeded — but it strives to make a difference in people’s lives. “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes,” he said. “But the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.”
To be sure, earlier this year President Biden went to Montgomery County near Valley Forge to associate the campaign against Trump and Trumpism’s election denial with the spirit of 1776 fight for freedom and democracy. But unlike FDR at the end of his enormously productive first term, he didn’t tie that patriotic history with the need to defend and expand his own vast economic program against the forces of reaction and retrenchment.
Even after the famous “rendezvous with destiny” line, FDR made one final pitch connecting public investment in economic opportunity for every American with the existential fight for democratic freedom in the face of rising authoritarianism at home and around the world:
[H]ere in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.
Vice President Harris must, of course, find her own voice and way of expressing these ideas that remain as relevant today as they were in 1936 — and despite an American economy today that, unlike the Depression, continues to grow and deliver low unemployment.
Of course, as we saw in the first rollicking Harris-Walz rally at Temple’s Liacouras Center, the “vibes” of this hard-fought campaign will be about whether most Americans are finally tired enough of the childish, insulting, fact-free, often racist, sexist and vulgar voice and views [and in Trump’s unique case, actual criminality] that this MAGA GOP ticket has brought to our public life – to turn to something far more affirmative, hopeful and future-facing rather than angry and backward-looking.
But given what we know about what ultimately drives most American voters, the importance of linking the defense of democracy itself to both economic opportunity and personal freedom is what this campaign is ultimately all about.
David M. Stone, a former Executive Vice President for Communications and Senior Adviser to the President at Columbia University, previously served as communications director for U.S. Senator Harris Wofford and deputy chief of staff for Governor Bob Casey. He wrote a lot of speeches.
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