The Evolution of Roosevelt's Rhetorical Legacy: Presidential Rhetoric about Rights in Domestic and Foreign Affairs, 1933‐2011

In a series of major addresses and communications between 1932 and 1944--the 1932 Commonwealth Club Address (Roosevelt 1932), the 1941 "Four Freedoms" Speech (Roosevelt 1941) and "Atlantic Charter" agreement (Roosevelt and Churchill 1941), and the "Second Bill of Rights" Address of 1944 (Roosevelt 1944)--Franklin Roosevelt called for the recognition of a new suite of "rights" and "freedoms" that would update both the U.S. Constitution and the international order for the modern world, a world characterized by corporate-style industrial capitalism and threatened by fascism and international disorder (Sunstein 2004). In the domestic realm, though Roosevelt acknowledged the continuing importance of the traditional rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, he argued that changing economic and social conditions required the recognition of new rights--in particular, Economic Rights guaranteeing citizens the right to secure remunerative employment, form unions, bargain collectively, acquire earnings adequate to provide a "decent living," and more generally to achieve "freedom from want"; and Social Welfare Rights guaranteeing citizens protection from the vicissitudes of capitalism through adequate medical care, a satisfactory education, access to unemployment and accident insurance, and a secure retirement (Milkis 1993, 38-43; Milkis 1999, 80-84). In short, the major programs of the New Deal sought to advance the principle "that all Americans had rights to decent work and livelihoods, social provision, and a measure of economic democracy, including rights on the part of wage-earning Americans to organize and bargain collectively with employers" (Forbath 2001, 166). Turning to a consideration of world affairs, Roosevelt looked forward to a transformed international order grounded in Human Rights--or, as he put it, a "world founded upon ... essential human freedoms" (1941). Central to Roosevelt's vision of Human Rights were the "Four Freedoms" to be enjoyed "everywhere in the world": freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion; "freedom from want," meaning "economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants"; and "freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor" (1941). In effect, this vision entailed internationalizing central features of the United States' Bill of Rights as well as the new Economic Rights and Social Welfare Rights Roosevelt advocated (Borgwardt 2005). More generally, the Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter were intended to plot the course, through pragmatic international institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Bank, to a world in which the Four Freedoms were universally recognized, and interstate conflicts were managed through negotiation, compromise, and adjudication, with the most powerful nations--especially the United States--providing leadership and stability (see also Ikenberry 2009; Johnson 1987; Shulman 2009). This expanded conception of rights had far-reaching implications for the development of domestic and international commitments. To be sure, Roosevelt's sweeping vision of Economic Rights and Social Welfare Rights was never fully enacted; but his understanding of rights animated the flurry of revolutionary economic and social welfare policy reforms in domestic affairs during the New Deal (Landy and Milkis 2000, chap. 6), and inspired subsequent Democratic leaders to further expand economic regulations and social welfare protections in subsequent decades by dealing with problems left unresolved in the New Deal era such as health care and aid to education and addressing new challenges such as environmental degradation, consumer protection, and urban redevelopment (Milkis 2005; Skowronek 1997, chap. …