FDR lives past WWII=2nd Bill of Rights?

FDR spoke of a second bill of rights which was to include:

  • The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
  • The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
  • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
  • The right of every family to a decent home;
  • The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
  • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
  • The right to a good education
.

Would America allow such a thing? If they do how does America evolve with such rights in place?
 
Short answer? No way. FDR only accomplished what he did due to economic hardship during the Depression. The New Deal would have been a non-starter without the Depression. But with the state of the US following WW2, and given that America's major competitor was the communist Soviet Union, the Republicans and conservative Democrats would have easily defeated any such thing.
 
FDR spoke of a second bill of rights which was to include:

  • The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
  • The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
  • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
  • The right of every family to a decent home;
  • The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
  • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
  • The right to a good education
Would America allow such a thing? If they do how does America evolve with such rights in place?


Perhaps a better question would be, which, if any of these proposals would be passed by both houses of Congress?
 
No way. In any case, FDR's plan was to resign shortly after the war ended: he'd die in office before the 1948 election, guaranteed. Congress would not pass any of those things: the SoDems/GOP had the numbers post-1938 to kill every single piece of legislation proposed in the Second Bill of Rights.
 
I think it'd be too much to say that the public would rebuke those (FDR was the man who held our hand as everything fell apart, after all, and people loved him), but the GOP had made a resurgence enough to stand in the way, and the Southern Dems would join in that unholy alliance as stated before.

You could maybe get bits and pieces through, and neutered versions (like how Social Security in 1935 avoided any mention of care for the aged or poor or universal care so it could pass), but not the whole.
 
I'm not even sure that FDR's handpicked SCOTUS would uphold most of that. Without being too political, most of those proposals are pretty far outside the scope of federal power under the Constitution, even by today's standards.

In any case, I think that any attempt like this would guarantee two terms of Dewey. If a Dem won in 1956, they would simply run smack dab into Nixon in 1960 (1956 would be too early for JFK). If a Dem did not win in 1956, that would probably open the door for JFK in 1960, but Nixon would still strongly contend.
 
Although one could argue that there is sort of a version of the third with farm subsidies, even today, the whole package, and even many of its individual components would be seen as too socialist to be accepted by the public, as we've all seen with the mess over health-care reform. Back in the 1940s, with the beginning of the Cold War..... Furthermore most of these proposals would be likely beyond the scope of the enumerated powers of the federal government without a constitutional amendment. Even today, they'd be problematic as they'd most likely rely on really stretching the commerce clause, something SCOTUS hasn't looked too favorably upon the last 10-15 years.

Although the unfair competition one could be said to be the goals of anti-trust laws, that's often political in its enforcement- around 1946 OTL, the Justice Department had enough evidence that the way GM bought out and killed off urban streetcar lines so that they could be replaced with buses and private cars was a violation of anti-trust laws, and the anti-trust section was about to begin legal proceedings, the whole thing was quashed from the top levels of the Justice Department- apparently at the orders of the AG after consulting with Truman and several important members of Congress.

It's true that a version of some of those proposals could be carried out constitutionally by basically throwing money at the issues, but again, those are the sort of welfare and entitlement programs that are very controversial and could very well (depending on who you listen to on budgetary/deficit issues) cause a budgetary implosion in the next 20 or so years.
 
No way. In any case, FDR's plan was to resign shortly after the war ended: he'd die in office before the 1948 election, guaranteed. Congress would not pass any of those things: the SoDems/GOP had the numbers post-1938 to kill every single piece of legislation proposed in the Second Bill of Rights.

I've heard this before, but oddly enough I haven't seen a source for that particular claim. Not that I distrust you RogueBeaver, I just assume there's some biography I have yet to read.

Actually, that idea in and of itself could make for an interesting scenario, but that's probably an issue for another day. Though it too has plausibility issues, I'm not sure if its even plausible for FDR to live to about October 1945. (In such a scenario I'm giving him about a month of life following his early September resignation.)
 
If we're talking about a Second Bill of Rights as a Constitutional Amendment then its likely impossible. But it was certainly possible to increase the government's role in public welfare. FDR had the kind of clout no one could imagine today, and no other contemporary politician could push it through Congress with him dead.

This was a time when America was handing over 10 billion to rebuild Europe, spent money on progressive programs like the GI Bill. Spending more money as part of the peace dividend is well within the real of the possible with FDR alive.
 
As Constitutional Amendments? No. Even as just plain laws, somebody would sue and it would eventually end up in the Supreme Court. Society in general was far more conservative back then, and if you think what Obama is doing is Socialistic.....
 

Typo

Banned
If we're talking about a Second Bill of Rights as a Constitutional Amendment then its likely impossible. But it was certainly possible to increase the government's role in public welfare. FDR had the kind of clout no one could imagine today, and no other contemporary politician could push it through Congress with him dead.

This was a time when America was handing over 10 billion to rebuild Europe, spent money on progressive programs like the GI Bill. Spending more money as part of the peace dividend is well within the real of the possible with FDR alive.

True, but he would also be in very poor health and probably not up to the kind of fight it would have taken.
 
FDR spoke of a second bill of rights which was to include:

  • The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
  • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
  • The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
  • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
  • The right of every family to a decent home;
  • The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
  • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
  • The right to a good education
.

Would America allow such a thing? If they do how does America evolve with such rights in place?

Well, to begin with, we have to understand that FDR didn't actually envision the Second Bill of Rights as a literal addition to the Constitution. Rather, in his speech he argued that "In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights." In other words, he was arguing that the American people had already accepted the idea that certain things should be available to all citizens, and that what was necessary was that "we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being." In other words, that the Second Bill of Rights should be an ideal that drove U.S public policy.

And if you look at the list, you can see what he's getting at:
* Right to Adequate Protection - that's the Social Security system; he's arguing that Americans have accepted Social Security as a permanent part of American government.
* Right to Farm - that's the AAA farm subsidy program; again, he's arguing that this is something that everyone has accepted as permanent.
* Right of Free Trade - as people have pointed out, this is just saying we should actually enforce anti-trust policies.
* Right to a Living Wage - well, this would have been just the expansion and increase of the minimum wage established in 1938.

However, there was an effort during WWII to enact the missing elements of this. For example, the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill first introduced in 1943 would have made the Social Security system entirely Federally-run, established a national Employment Service, and provided single-payer health insurance. The Full Employment Bill of 1945-6 would have established the government's responsibility to ensure full employment through Keynesian policies and the right to a job with the government as "employer of last resort." Truman would as part of the Fair Deal quote the Second Bill of Rights in full, and his proposal for the construction of 1-1.5 million houses a year through a mix of subsidies to private contractors and the expansion of public housing was aimed at establishing the Right to a Home.

But for a PoD, I think you'd need to go earlier than WWII. By that point in time, the Dixiecrat/Republican alliance is too powerful, and most of the legislation described above either dies in Congress or gets watered down immensely.

You'd probably have to go back to 1936-7, and have a PoD that makes FDR avoid the mistakes he made in his second term that created the Dixiecrat/Republican alliance and caused a lot of Congressional liberals to lose their seats in 1938, 1940, and 1942. If, for example, FDR hadn't tried to pack the Court, but had done something like ask for a Congressional censure of the Supreme Court, and if FDR hadn't listened to Morgenthau and tried to balance the budget in 1937, causing a recession, but had instead accelerated the WPA and brought unemployment down further, and if FDR had either not tried to purge the Dixiecrats in the southern Democratic primaries in 1938 or had done so successfully, things look better.

With a Congress that looks more like the Congress of 1935 or 36, where you have enough liberal Northern Democrats to get the South to play along rather than try to kill legislation (they'd still try to carve out exceptions so that programs are run locally or exclude job categories that are predominantly African-American), and with an FDR who still has the political capital that he squandered in OTL, the original Full Employment Bill passes (keeping in mind that in OTL there was enough support behind it that the conservative coalition had to water it down rather than defeat it) and the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill does too. The Housing Act probably looks more like Truman's proposal than the eventual Housing Act of 1949, but still runs into the same problems of OTL.

The outcome? The U.S becomes more social-democratic than it does OTL. You probably still get a conservative turn in the 1950s as America tires of 20 years of solid Democratic rule, but Eisenhower would probably do something similar to what he did with Social Security OTL - recognize that it would be political suicide to try to abolish universal benefits that are beloved by the American people, and focus on balanced budgets and moderation rather than repeal. Interestingly, this means that there's a lot less to do for liberals in the 1960s - a lot of the work of the New Frontier/Great Society would already have been done (no need for Medicare/Medicaid). You'd probably see more of a focus on education, civil rights, and housing than you did OTL, and ironically you probably would have seen a more "moderate" Civil Rights Movement (in the sense that the left edge of the Civil Rights Movement that focused on "jobs and freedom" and the economic inequalities of the ghetto would have had less to deal with in a world in which African-Americans have the right to a job and universal health care).
 
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