A haunting by Santayana‘s Ghost, on Social Security, unemployment insurance, job training, job creation and budget deficits:
[Editor’s note, 2016: Rats! that almost-perfect speech excerpt has disappeared from YouTube. Here’s a shorter excerpt.]
Our friend SBH pointed us to the text of the speech. FDR addressed the New York State Democratic Convention, in Syracuse, on September 29, 1936 (Can you imagine — does any state have such thing still — state party conventions so late in the year, today?). He found it at UC-Santa Barbara‘s American Presidency Project website. Here’s the text of the excerpt above, plus a little:
In New York and in Washington, Government which has rendered more than lip service to our Constitutional Democracy has done a work for the protection and preservation of our institutions that could not have been accomplished by repression and force.
Let me warn you and let me warn the Nation against the smooth evasion which says, “Of course we believe all these things; we believe in social security; we believe in work for the unemployed; we believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die, we believe in all these things; but we do not like the way the present Administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them — we will do more of them, we will do them better; and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything.”
But, my friends, these evaders are banking too heavily on the shortness of our memories. No one will forget that they had their golden opportunity—twelve long years of it.
Remember, too, that the first essential of doing a job well is to want to see the job done. Make no mistake about this: the Republican leadership today is not against the way we have done the job. The Republican leadership is against the job’s being done.
Read more at the American Presidency Project: Franklin D. Roosevelt: Address at the Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15142&st=Roosevelt&st1#ixzz1T2VHx1tx
More:
- Are You Better Off: Obama vs. FDR (esquire.com)
- FDR Accepts The Nomination – 1932 Democratic Convention – Past Daily Reference Room (pastdaily.com)
- Celebrate Social Security “birthday,” August 14, 2012 at FDR Library (timpanogos.wordpress.com)
This is mostly an encore post.
[…] this is mostly an encore post. Fighting ignorance requires […]
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[…] crude political dysfunction and disinformation from people who don’t know U.S. history, and won’t defend American principles. Am I being […]
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[…] crude political dysfunction and disinformation from people who don’t know U.S. history, and won’t defend American principles. Am I being […]
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Child, if you want to claim the GOP isn’t the party of racism now then you’re going to have a fun time explaining this one:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/09/gop-congressman-appears-white-nationalist-radio-show
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Oh and by the way, What, its your precious Republicans that are following Karl Marx’s predictions to a T.
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ANd once again What proves that Republicans have no damn idea what communism or socialism actually is.
He’s just going to spout off the stupid bulldrek that he’s been spoonfed by the likes of Rushbo and Glenn Beck
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Does reality ever knock at your door? I’d love to see the citations for any of your claims. Got any? Or are they just opium dreams?
Democrats used to be the party of racism — they got educated, thought better of it, renounced racism and campaigned for civil rights. Dick Nixon actively courted racists after that, and so did Ronald Reagan. Having turned around from a racist past is a point of honor with Democrats, a point of honor Republicans do not know and cannot claim — they left Lincoln behind in the scramble for a “Southern Strategy.”
Do I think the GOP wanted to bring unemployment down in the 1930s? Not so much as they wanted tax cuts for the rich (which they got), tariffs to protect profits, but not expand markets or jobs, and some way to hold down labor costs. Andrew Mellon, Harding’s and Coolidge’s and Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury, promised good times were “just around the corner,” and the Great Depression was just a minor dip in the business cycle, to be expected, and not to be corrected. That’s why people came out of Hoover Hotels in Hoovervilles, pushed in their Hoover flags and voted Hoover out.
And again I wonder, have you ever studied history? Where, in Albania?
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FDR carping about “hypocrisy”? that;s rich. He sold out his country to a pack of Jewish communists. FDR is perhaps the biggest hypocrite the Democrat Party has ever produced, and that is saying something given that deep bench of hypocrites the Democrats have produced over the years, goodness, he maintains power by sucking up to a bunch of southern racists and then harrangs them at the same time about race (the GOP was the party of the Black; the Democrats the party of the southern racists political machines, and the Blacks in the south knew it). Talk about hypocrisy. FDR is a black mark on American history–as is the New Deal. They looted the country. They want to do it again.
FDR and his mob did all they could to up-end our “Constitutional Democracy” and were in the main successful–including outrageous voter fraud during his terms. He had to pack the SCOTUS with a bunch of Marxists to do it. It is absurd for him to claim that he was protecting it against the GOP. It is equally absurd to conflate social security with the Constitution or “democracy”. He is also putting words in the GOP’s collective mouth.
FDR engages in the same sort of fallacious rhetoric that you do: Straw men and ad hominen assault. Democrat constantly project their vileness on the GOP and lie, lie lie.
He is without honor; so are you.
Do you seriously believe that the GOP in FDR’s time did not want to get unemployment down? What they wanted was to preserve the American system. Given the decadence and decline we are in today they where quite right. The New Deal has been a moral, political and economic disaster for this nation, and we are finally facing the consequences of it.
The comic thing is that you think that useful idiots like yourself will prosper in the new order. You will be the first to go should the Democrats succed in turning the nation into a communist state.
Actually, I have more faith in the people. They will reject the “transformation” that the Left wants for us, but it will well might meen civil war and the dissolution of America.
Better to just give them the boot this year. The Republic cannot be restored until the Democrats are shown the door–and this time made to pay for their treason.
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