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  Franklin Delano Roosevelt
 
Section from Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural speech, from January 20, 1937, unedited.
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A striking feature of the years after World War II was the vastly expanded role of the federal government in American life. That expansion had begun early in the century and accelerated in the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt mobilized the government to fight the Great Depression. It accelerated again during World War II. That it continued into the postwar era was a result of, among other things, a striking rise in popular expectations of what the federal government should do, coupled with the emergence of several areas in which the public had by 1945 come to expect the government to assume responsibility.

If production were regulated, the economy would prosper.
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One of these new expectations was that the government now had a responsibility to maintain prosperity, to protect the health of the economy. Another belief, less widely shared than the others but nevertheless powerful, was that the government had a responsibility to address important social problems, to alleviate poverty, disease, and ignorance—to help what Franklin Roosevelt had called the "one-third of a nation [that remained] ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-nourished."

 
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Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural speech
 
  Section from Franklin Roosevelt's second inaugural speech, from January 20, 1937, unedited. Poor sound quality is due to rain drops on the microphone.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.... that picture for you.... and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. 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 too little.

If I know aught of the spirit and purpose of our Nation, we will not listen to Comfort, Opportunism, and Timidity. We will carry on.

 
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If production were regulated, the economy would prosper.
 
  These goals were widely, and correctly, acknowledged to be a legacy of the New Deal. Before the 1930s very few Americans had believed that the federal government had any role to play in either of these areas. Most of those who believed in the New Deal, who believed in the idea of an active, affirmative government—of course, not every American shared that belief—agreed that these were the proper purposes for the nation to pursue in the postwar era. But how was the federal government supposed to do these things?

Liberals, at least, believed that they had an answer. How could government ensure economic stability and growth? During much of the first half of the twentieth century, many Americans who had tried to answer that question believed that the way to make the economy work productively and efficiently was for the government to regulate or restructure the capitalist economy in some way, break up big combinations through the antitrust laws, supervise corporate behavior through regulatory agencies, and establish broad directives for investment and production through various planning mechanisms. A few believed that the government should itself assume ownership of the means of production: socialism. Many believed that the federal government should engage in some combination of those measures, and of course the government did and still does engage in a combination of them.

All these strategies reflected the long-standing assumption that what determines the performance of the economy is the structure and behavior of producers—of industrialists, businessmen, merchants, farmers. If production could somehow be regulated to serve the public interest, then the economy would prosper.


Content excerpted from America Since 1945: The Post-New Deal Order, with Alan Brinkley.