Economic Bill of Rights

In his State of the Union message of January 11, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a “second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all. . . .” This new “Economic Bill of Rights,” as it came to be called, included the rights to a useful and remunerative job, to income enough for adequate food, clothing, and recreation, to a decent home, to a good education, to adequate medical care, and to economic protection against old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment. Roosevelt again called for an economic bill of rights at the end of his campaign in the election of 1944. Although it remained rhetoric more than concrete policy prescriptions, the economic bill of rights indicated the direction that many liberals wanted government policy to take after World War II.

Roosevelt’s January 1944 declaration of the new bill of rights came as a surprise, because he made it two weeks after a much-heralded press conference in December 1943 in which he had suggested that “old Dr. New Deal” with his internal medicine had largely completed his job and was giving way to “Dr. Win-the-War.” Most listeners understood this to be a signal that the president would not pursue further liberal reform during the war. Yet at that same press conference Roosevelt also talked about a “new program” that would “result in more security, in more employment, in more recreation, in more education, in more health, in better housing for all of our citizens.”

In fact, Roosevelt had been hearing and thinking about such an economic bill of rights for some time. The idea had been discussed by the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) as early as 1939 and communicated several times to the president. The NRPB’s important 1943 report, Po. st-War Plan and Program, included such goals as adequate and decent jobs, good wages, housing, health care, education, and other aspects of a good and secure life in what it called a “new bill of rights” as part of its far-reaching liberal postwar program.

But while Roosevelt and many liberals talked in such expansive terms, they had little chance of implementing the economic bill of rights. The NRPB reports fell on indifferent public ears and hostile congressional ones, and Congress terminated the agency in 1943. Nor did Roosevelt’s January 1944 State of the Union message have much impact, and though FDR again advocated the economic bill of rights in his reelection campaign, the political context of the mid-1940s was not conducive to major new reform measures. Even the Full Employment Bill of 1945, which addressed the widespread public concern about postwar jobs and called for fisCAL policy to ensure the right to a job for everyone willing and able to work, became the watered-down Employment Act of 1946. The

Economic Bill of Rights did, however, provide an agenda for liberalism in the postwar era.

Further reading: John W. Jeffries, “The ‘New’ New Deal: FDR and American Liberalism, 1937-1945,” Political Science Quarterly 105 (Fall 1990): 397-418.