FDR's unfinished revolution

No matter who wins in November, author Cass Sunstein says, the country has moved far from Roosevelt's vision of a second Bill of Rights -- and a brand of liberalism that is no longer in fashion.

By Tim Grieve

Jun 25, 2004 | Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address was "messy, sprawling, unruly, a bit of a pastiche and not at all literary." It wasn't even delivered in the conventional sense. Too ill to appear before Congress, Roosevelt sent copies of the speech to Capitol Hill, then read it aloud over the radio from inside the White House.

No one much remembers the speech today, and the country hasn't come close to living up to the ideals Roosevelt set forth in it. But if University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has his way, Americans someday will come to think of the address as the greatest of the 20th century and -- like the Declaration of Independence -- a model for a more perfect union.

In the 1944 speech, Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights. Unlike the original, which contained mostly "negative" rights -- the right to be free of government restriction on speech, the establishment of religion, searches without warrants and convictions without trials -- Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights promised "positive" guarantees for all Americans.

In his new book, "The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More than Ever," Sunstein argues that the nation should embrace Roosevelt's rights -- just as many in the international community have -- and strive to become a country that provides not just "equal opportunities" but a guaranteed minimum standard of living for all citizens.

The country has strayed far from Roosevelt's aspirations, Sunstein says. The Supreme Court inched close to adopting Roosevelt's vision in the 1960s, but Richard Nixon's slim victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968 -- and the four Supreme Court appointments that came with it -- ended that progress. With another election approaching, and a slew of Supreme Court appointments likely awaiting the victor, Sunstein says, it is time for the country to take another look at Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights -- and at itself. Salon recently spoke to Sunstein about his book and Roosevelt's vision.

As much as Roosevelt wanted to see his "Second Bill of Rights" take effect, he didn't want to amend the Constitution to include these rights, did he?

No, he really loved Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. And at crucial moments, when he was doing something very important, that was his model. The Declaration of Independence doesn't have any legal status, it's not in the Constitution, but it sets out the nation's major aspirations. There was a big cultural effect. Roosevelt wanted [the Second Bill of Rights] to be a catalog of what the nation itself was deeply committed to -- and something the people could hold their elected representatives responsible for -- without thinking that the Constitution should be changed.

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