Commencement address by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to the graduating class of Roosevelt University, May 21, 1995
I am greatly pleased to have the opportunity to assist in the launching of this splendid ship, Roosevelt University's class of 1995. And it is a particular honor to be invited to speak on the 50th anniversary of this fine institution - the 50th anniversary too of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for whom this university was named, named also for his noble wife and devoted partner in his services to the republic.
Across the land, commencement speakers are materializing this week to convey worldly wisdom to the young. I do not come before you, I must confess, with great confidence in the immortality of the words uttered on these occasions. The commencement address is not one of the more notable American art forms. Actually one of the charms of this ceremony is that no one can remember in later years what a commencement speaker has said or, indeed, even who the speaker was. Ask your teachers what eminent figure dispensed wisdom to them at their commencements, and I will be much surprised if they can conjure up the vaguest recollections out of the dark caverns of memory. I certainly cannot tell you who spoke at my commencement fifty-seven years ago.
The fact that no one remembers what commencement speakers say gives us a certain license to say anything, so I might as well take advantage of the opportunity you are so kindly offering me and speak my mind. Still I will do my best to detain you no longer than necessary, representing, as I do, the last obstacle between you and your diplomas.
Confident in the immunity enjoyed by commencement speakers. I have decided to undertake one of the most daring things imaginable these days - far riskier than a defense of pornography, or a defense of prostitution, or a defense of polygamy. I propose to submit a defense of government and, more particularly, of the national government.
Roosevelt University would seem an appropriate place to offer such a defense. For all famous Roosevelts, not only the Democrats Franklin and Eleanor but the Republican Theodore, have championed what is now fashionably stigmatized as 'big government.' The Roosevelts saw the national government, not as a menace to be denounced and feared, but as an instrument of greater democracy and as a vital means of helping people to help themselves. I must by the way, salute your University's initiative in establishing a Center for the Study of the New Deal - an innovation bound to stimulate inquiry into the bold social experimentation that rescued the democratic way sixty years ago.
For my generation of Americans, those who were born during the First World War, grew up in the Great Depression and served in the Second World War, the Rooseveltian belief in the national government as the instrument of the people seemed abundantly justified. It was after all the national government under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt that brought us through economic collapse, beat the Nazis and the Japanese and preserved American democracy against domestic failure and foreign war.
In popular perception, FDR has now soared above partisanship. Even those who regard his New Deal as the start of the decline and fall of the American republic celebrate FDR himself. Speaker Gingrich, whose imitation Hundred Days was designed to obliterate the spirit of FDR's Hundred Days, nevertheless pronounces FDR "the greatest president of the 20th century." Senator Dole praises FDR as "an energetic and inspiring leader during the dark days of the Depression; a tough, single-minded Commander in Chief during World War II; and a statesman."
Roosevelt's immediate successors - Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy - sustained this belief in the national government. Polls taken during the Kennedy administration a third of a century ago showed that more than 75 percent of Americans thought that the national government was working in their interests and telling them the truth. But today only about 20 percent trust government to serve their interests and to level with them.
Why this remarkable reversal? For one thing, presidents after Kennedy let the people down. Johnson deceived them about Vietnam. Nixon deceived them about Watergate. Reagan deceived them about Irangate. In addition, there were problems the national government seemed unable to solve: racial tensions; the decay of our schools; crime and violence. And the availability of public funds under lax supervision opened the door to graft and rip-off, whether by Pentagon suppliers or Medicare doctors or savings-and-loan bankers or welfare cheats.
In the 1980s President Reagan led an all-out attack on government. "Government is not the solution to our problem," as he put it in his first inaugural address. "Government is the problem." Politicians trashing each other in television sound bites further undermined public confidence in the profession to which they all belong. The media, transgressing older rules of restraint, made cynicism a national industry. And today, stirred up by the furious flow of Speaker Gingrich's unending words, many regard the national government not just as the problem but as the enemy.
This demonization of government is having consequences far beyond anything that initial critics like Reagan and Gingrich intended. The anti-government rhetoric has activated what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid strain" in American politics. The Reverend Pat Robertson delights American historians by resurrecting the old hysteria about the sinister and enduring influence of Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati of 18th century Bavaria. On the wilder shores of unreason where those whom Theodore Roosevelt called the "lunatic fringe" dwell, the national government is seen as a diabolical conspiracy to take away guns, stop school prayer, put homosexuals into the armed forces and kill fetuses, all to enable the United Nations to destroy American liberty and enslave Americans in a despotic New World Order.
Violent words may move on to violent deeds. Private militias arise, armed with assault weapons and bombs. Federal officials, even those from such benevolent and nature-loving agencies as the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, become targets of crazed gunmen and must now travel in pairs in unmarked cars and maintain constant radio contact with their offices. A fanatic, Mr. Dooley reminds us, "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts in th' case." Fanaticism reached its unspeakable climax in Oklahoma City.
This, as noted, is not what Speaker Gingrich had in mind. But the same logic by which Speaker Gingrich blamed liberal Democrats for the unfortunate woman in South Carolina who murdered her two children surely indicts anti-government demagogues as unwitting accomplices in the Oklahoma City crime.
Oklahoma City has not discouraged the anti-government crowd from their passion for devolution and deregulation - that is, for dismantling the national government, transferring its functions to the states and repealing or weakening national laws that benefit the worker, the consumer, the investor, the minorities, the poor and dispossessed, education, the environment and the arts.
This assault on the national government is represented as returning power to the people. But the withdrawal of the national government does not transfer power to the people. It transfers power to the great rival of the national government, indeed the great cause of the rise of "big government' - the large corporation and the business community. As Theodore Roosevelt observed of the greedy trusts of his day, "If this irresponsible outside power is to be controlled in the interest of the general public, it can be controlled in only one way - by giving adequate power of control to...the National Government." The fight against government regulation of corporate wealth, TR added, "is chiefly done under cover; and especially under the cover of an appeal to state's rights."
Getting government off the back of business simply means putting business on the back of government. It is an illusion to say that, because local government is closest to the people, it is therefore most responsive to the people. Local government is the government of the locally powerful. Historically it is national government that has served as the protector of the powerless. It is the national government that affirmed the Bill of Rights against local vigilantism and preserved natural resources against local greed. The national government has civilized industry, secured the rights of labor organization, improved income for the farmer and provided a decent living for the old. Above all, the national government has vindicated racial justice against local bigotry. Had the state rights creed prevailed, we would still have slavery in the United States.
And historically the national government has been more honest and efficient than state and local government. How well today indeed are state and local governments doing with their own problems, problems that lie primarily within their own jurisdiction, such as our deteriorating schools and our escalating crime? It remains as generally true today as it was when Tocqueville visited America in 1832 that, in his words, "The business of the Union is incomparably better conducted than that of any individual state....It has more prudence and discretion, its projects are more durable and more skillfully combined, its measures are executed with more vigor and consistence." As for bureaucracy, duplication and waste, will there be more or less if a single federal agency is to be replaced by fifty separate state agencies?
And what will happen when states engage in a debasing competition to attract business by promising to cut labor costs through low wages, minimal working conditions, no unions and no benefits? Such a rise in meanness will not enhance the quality of American civilization. Before the devolutionists go too far in cutting down the national authority, Speaker Gingrich, that eminent historian, might read his assembled cohorts the 6th and 7th Federalist papers where Hamilton discusses the danger arising from dissension among the states. He might even remind them that the Constitutional Convention was called precisely to stop economic warfare within the Articles of Confederation.
As for the liberties allegedly destroyed by 'big government,' these have been, in the main, the freedom to deny black Americans their rights as citizens; the freedom to make old folk live out their lives in poverty; the freedom to work small children in mills and immigrants in sweatshops; the freedom to pay starvation wages, require inhuman working hours and maintain squalid working conditions; the freedom to lie in the sale of goods and medicines and stocks and bonds; the freedom to pollute the environment and loot natural resources - all freedoms, one supposes a civilized country can do without.
Democratic capitalism has not survived and prospered by loyalty to the gospel of laissez-faire and the creed of devil-take-the-hindmost. It was savage 19th century capitalism along those lines that produced the novels of Dickens, the manifestos of Marx and, in time, the Great Depression. Democratic capitalism has triumphed because of the long campaign mounted by reformers, Franklin Roosevelt foremost among them, to use the national government to humanize the industrial order, to cushion the operations of the economic system, to strengthen the bargaining position of workers and farmers and consumers, to regulate wages and hours, the quality of products and the sale of securities, to insure against recurrent depression by built-in economic stabilizers; above all, to combine individual opportunity with social responsibility - reforms, it must be added, that were fought at every step along the way by short- sighted men of wealth and privilege. It may truly be said of Franklin Roosevelt that he rescued capitalism from the capitalists.
But things have slipped back since FDR's time. Recent studies by the Twentieth Century Fund show that the inequality of wealth is increasing in our country at an alarming rate. The top one percent of families own more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth. The gap in America today between the very rich and the rest of us is greater than in any other industrial nation, and we are growing even more unequally faster than the rest. Great Britain is notorious as a class-ridden society, but the top one percent in Britain owns only about 18 percent of the nation's wealth. The current push in Congress to cut taxes for the rich and social programs for the poor will only deepen the inequalities that divide and demoralize the American people.
As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Roosevelt University and the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Franklin Roosevelt, let us recall FDR's mordant challenge in his second inaugural address:
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little."
Let us rededicate ourselves, our efforts and our politics to these glowing words. It is surely in this direction that the best hope lies for a decent and civilized society, for the salvation of American democracy and for a land of opportunity for the Class of '95 as it sets out on new adventures in the dawn of the 21st century.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.