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The Good Neighbor
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power
By Mary E. Stuckey Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013 Mary E. Stuckey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-099-3
CHAPTER 1
A Neighborhood of Shared Values
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A democracy, the right kind of democracy, is bound together by the ties of neighborliness.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, "Address Before the National Conference of Catholic Charities," October 4, 1933
The metaphor of the "good neighbor" structured Franklin D. Roosevelt's understanding of a properly functioning polity, which he understood as a community in which citizens were unified by their allegiance to a specific set of values. Those values included the primacy of transcendent goods above material goods, the moral value of work, and a commitment to social justice. Roosevelt is perhaps best understood as employing a "rhetoric of militant decency" that "revolved around the appropriate use of power, his concern for social order, the importance of work, the need for individuals and nations to exert social responsibility, and the importance of character for both individuals and nations." He argued that "decency" would most properly flow within a community of people who did not have to be equals materially, but who did have to have a reasonably equal commitment to the values animating that community. While some scholars argue that New Deal policies did little to solve the nation's economic ills, and even that those policies did lasting harm to the national economy, Roosevelt's administration was powerfully inclusive, bringing many previously marginalized citizens into the nation's mainstream and legitimating their presence in the national neighborhood.
Roosevelt's conception of political community as a neighborhood was based on an interpretation of politics as an extension of national values, which he articulated through constant references to Judeo-Christian teachings. Religion was the glue that held the nation together and served as one of Roosevelt's most prominent inventional and political resources. He defined his audience as national neighbors who, like more geographically proximate neighbors, shared key values. This definition of a national political community united by shared values authorized action by a strong federal government supervised by a single chief executive. Because these values were understood as universal, and because the United States was the exemplary case of their enactment, this conception of politics also authorized the establishment of a global neighborhood patterned after the American example.
Shared Values
Roosevelt was not the first president to rest his articulation of policy on the foundation of shared values, which is an element in much presidential speech. Even his most immediate predecessor, Herbert Hoover, believed in the viability of a united American community and depended on the spirit of voluntarism he associated with it. Roosevelt's vision of that political community differed from Hoover's however, not least because his rhetoric, from his first inaugural through the rest of the 1930s, had a "jagged edge" that portended class conflict and offered a specific understanding of praise and blame. At least during his first two terms Roosevelt did not mince many words when it came to assigning responsibility for the national economic calamity. He blamed bankers and capitalists; he denounced opponents of his policies, sometimes in the harshest of terms; and he excoriated the previous administration for its unwillingness to address the crisis. That inaction, he argued, led to national disorder. His governance, he claimed, was grounded in different principles and would lead the nation back to peace, prosperity, and order. His administration, and under its leadership the entire nation, was now dedicated to "building up, not a class, but a whole community." Republicans had governed in the interest of the few. Democrats, according to Roosevelt, would lead with the interests of the many in mind. He argued that the nation was characterized by its commitment to specific values, that these values undergirded the national economy but transcended mere economics, and that they were so universal as to be available as the basis for a globalized neighborhood. He used these values, especially those connected with the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, as both an inventional and a political resource.
Roosevelt was very clear about the extent of the problems facing the nation when he took office. According to him, the Depression did not threaten a few sectors of the national economy or even the nation as a whole; the conditions that created the Depression "came very close to destroying what we call modern civilization." By relying on hyperbole, he made the case that those conditions were widespread and their consequences applied to all Americans. As the threat was universal, so to were the solutions. "The problems which we all face—the problems of so-called economics, the problems that are called monetary problems, the problems of unemployment, the problems of industry and agriculture—we shall not succeed in solving unless the people of this country hold the spiritual values of the country just as high as they do the economic values." For Roosevelt, a properly functioning economic system was rooted in practices aligned with the tenets of spiritual values. If the nation would follow those tenets, Roosevelt argued, economic prosperity would result. For him, neighborliness was thus both an end in itself in that it meant living according to Judeo-Christian precepts, and a means to an end, in that living according to those precepts would lead to widely shared economic prosperity. FDR was offering something of a jeremiad in these early years, castigating the nation for its failures to live up to its values and holding out the promise of renewed prosperity should the nation return to its religious roots. Such rhetoric may have provided some comfort to citizens seeking both causes of and solutions to the Depression and may have helped legitimate FDR's political authority.
Roosevelt made it plain that the true strength of the nation lay not in its material goods but in its faith. FDR first separated the nation's material and moral essences, and then associated the nation's strength with the latter rather than the former. For him, the nation was thus united through identification with spiritual values. The problems the nation faced were common to all, and they did not concern that which he considered most central to the nation's health: "They concern, thank God, only material things." The nation was wounded materially, he argued, but remained spiritually strong. Because of that spiritual strength, there was no doubt that the nation would find its way back to economic strength. Such was Roosevelt's faith. Such was the faith he imbued in the nation, rhetorically constituted as a faith-based neighborhood.
The national spiritual strength was evidenced by a national commitment to employment rather than pressure to extend the dole. FDR argued that there was moral value in work, and he opposed relief that was not associated with employment as morally destructive. He connected work to Christian virtue. Advocating unemployment relief early in his first term, he said, "More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work. The overwhelming majority of unemployed Americans, who are now walking the streets and receiving private or public relief, would infinitely prefer to work.... We can eliminate to some extent at least the threat that enforced idleness brings to spiritual and moral stability." For Roosevelt, the victims of the Depression were not lazy; idleness was "enforced" upon them. They were passive; the Depression was active. That passivity was morally destructive, for Americans would seek activity, even if it was spiritually unstable activity. Work would provide the stability and moral grounding that came naturally to Americans and that were essential to the health of the neighborhood. By providing work, FDR would thus return the nation to prosperity by stimulating the economy. At the same time, he would promise to prevent the disorder associated with massive unemployment by providing occupation for those who roamed the streets during his first term. The "army" of the unemployed threatening national stability would be turned, through work provided by the national government, into a force for national cohesion and peace. The national neighborhood would therefore be both healthy and orderly.
Work was an important element of the New Deal values, because through work Americans could restore their material and social wellbeing. Consistent with his hierarchical understanding of national politics, FDR did not advocate a major redistribution of national wealth, nor was he promoting a corporatist state, despite the allegations to the contrary. But his emphasis on work facilitated his argument for what he called social justice, by which he meant "some elementary standards of right and wrong." Because of his emphasis on work, he could claim he was not seeking to change the structures of the American economy. He was not advocating a "free ride" for the indigent, nor was he hoping to achieve a massive redistribution of the nation's wealth. He was offering a helping hand to temporarily needy neighbors in exchange for work that would benefit the entire community.
Roosevelt conceived of relief as a temporary measure, which was intended to provide stability in the face of crisis, not to function as a permanent corrective for the natural workings of the market. His programs were "no insurance against errors of judgment. That is the function of no Government." But he did want to regulate the economy so that the national welfare could be protected from predatory practices. For Roosevelt, commonsense standards of right and wrong as they applied to individuals applied also to the larger system. Standards of neighborliness were as appropriate to the overall nation as to its constituent parts.
This rhetoric is particularly interesting because the values upon which it depends were not only premised on a specifically Judeo-Christian worldview but, because of this premise, were also treated as universal. "Men everywhere," he said, "throughout Europe—your ancestors and mine—had suffered through the imperfect and often unjust Governments of their home land, and they were driven by a deep desire to find not alone security, but also enlarged opportunity for themselves and their children." All humans, whatever their national origin or cultural background, wanted the same things—security in the present and hope for the future. The American Dream, understood here as security and the hope for more opportunities than could be found elsewhere, was, for Roosevelt, universal. The promise of American ideology was international, and because it was grounded in the same values that Roosevelt understood as animating Western civilization, could be appropriately generalized to the entirety of the Western world. As Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca note, the persuasive appeal of these kinds of universal values lies in their generality, which depends upon a high level of abstraction. "Their role is accordingly to justify choices on which there is not unanimous agreement by inserting these choices into a sort of empty frame with respect to which a wider agreement exists." That passage could have been written with Roosevelt's deployment of national values in mind, for it is very clear that he wielded this language with the intent of claiming a national and even an international consensus.
Certainly, he had no difficulty generalizing it to the entire nation. This stress on values rather than economics undergirded FDR's claim to a national neighborhood of shared values. He argued that "spiritual values count in the long run more than material values," and in his second annual message declared, "Without regard to party, the overwhelming majority of our people seek a greater opportunity for humanity to prosper and find happiness. They recognize that human welfare has not increased and does not increase through more materialism and luxury, but that it does progress through integrity, unselfishness, responsibility and justice." That is, the nation's economic travails could be used to strengthen its moral virtue. And "human welfare" ultimately depended more upon that morality than upon mere economics. Roosevelt's nation was united as much by its shared commitment to human welfare as it was joined by the imperatives of the national economic system. Shared ideology underpinned the healthy workings of a shared economy.
Economics were thus inextricably tied to human relations. Social justice for FDR was simple: "People want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where they can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this man-made world of ours." Moral strength was a foundation for the national neighborhood, but that neighborhood also had a material component that could not be ignored. Liberal capitalism provided the basis for that material component, and it was, for FDR, the most viable basis, although it had its problems. Acknowledging these problems, he did not seek to replace the system of liberal capitalism; he sought to protect its most vulnerable citizens against the worst of that system's vagaries. Capitalism needed to be saved because it was the system most in line with social justice and human values. If that connection should be severed, capitalism, FDR argued, would fail—and without that connection, it should fail. He understood his task as that of saving capitalism and protecting its connection to human aspirations.
Social justice for FDR meant obedience to Christian values within a system structured by the U.S. Constitution and organized along principles of liberal capitalism: "Washington and Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson sought and worked for a consolidated Nation. You and I have it in our power to attain that great ideal within our lifetime. We can do this by following the peaceful methods prescribed under the broad and resilient provisions of the Constitution of the United States." Here, of course, Roosevelt used arguments from history (and an interesting interpretation of national history to boot, conflating very different presidents into one seemingly coherent whole) to buttress his political preferences. Such arguments rely on retrospective probability, defining what did happen in terms of what might have happened, and conflating cause and effect. For FDR, the nation's ultimate goal was the "ideal" of social justice, grounded in Christian ideals. That goal would be reached by following the plan laid out by the founders in the Constitution. He endowed the founders, and other American saints such as Jackson, Lincoln, and the first Roosevelt, with spiritual meaning if not divine inspiration. Through their example, the nation would find its spiritual strength. If their examples were not followed, if the nation continued to deviate from its constitutive principles, he argued, the result would be continued spiritual degradation and continued economic devastation. Relying on the idea of divine inspiration, of course, takes arguments based on transcendent and generalizable values to the highest level of abstraction possible.
Roosevelt grounded his arguments for the spiritual strength of the nation as exemplified in its dedication to work and in its commitment to social justice in a specifically religious context authorized by a narrative of national history embedded in spiritual texts. He thus created a nation out of local communities. He said, "Perhaps I can best illustrate the change that I am talking about by putting it this way—that we have been extending to our national life the old principle of the local community, the principle that no individual, man, woman or child, has a right to do things that hurt his neighbors." By first locating the Golden Rule in local communal life and then extending it to national political life, Roosevelt connected his administration to local values in ways that authorized the assumption of policy making by the federal government and his direction of that policy making. He spoke for national values. He could thus speak for the nation from a position of secular and sacred authority. It is significant that these arguments appeared as narratives, for persuasion can easily be linked to plausible and captivating storytelling. Roosevelt's stories were nothing if not dedicated to connecting morality, narrative, and public values.
In 1936 he said, "The good neighbor is not just the man who lives next door to you. The objective includes the relationship not between you and him alone, but it includes the relationship between your family and his; it extends to all the people who live on the same block; it spreads to all the people who live in the same city and the same county and the same State; and most important for all for the future of our Nation, it must and shall extend to all your neighbors, to your fellow citizens in all the States and in all the regions that make up the Nation." Under Roosevelt, and through his rhetoric, the nation had become a neighborhood, and the neighborhood had become the nation. Everyone was connected by spiritual bonds, which legitimated and animated national economic bonds. Under FDR, the United States was a nation as much as it was a national economy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Good Neighbor by Mary E. Stuckey. Copyright © 2013 Mary E. Stuckey. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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