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  • Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Visionary
  • James T. Kloppenberg (bio)
Elizabeth Borgwardt. A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 437 pp. Notes, bibliography, illustrations, and index. $35.00.
Cass R. Sunstein. The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever. New York: Basic Books, 2004. vii + 294 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Visitors to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington D.C. find themselves face to face with FDR's boldest challenge to the American people. Carved in the granite walls of the Memorial are the Four Freedoms that FDR proclaimed in January 1941. Joined to the Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Worship guaranteed by the original Bill of Rights are two new freedoms to be secured by Americans then confronting new dangers, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The two books under review address the history and significance of those latter freedoms, which remain as elusive in 2006 as they were sixty-five years ago. Most Americans today, lulled into smug contentment with their role as consumers rather than citizens, and provoked by endless harangues into demonizing a shadowy and little understood enemy, seem as determined not to confront the reasons behind the problems of want and fear as FDR was determined to force the nation to face them. FDR's urgent calls for greater equality at home and for a multilateral approach to global affairs may seem as quaint as the cape he wears in sculptor Neil Estern's powerful portrayal of the president at the Memorial.

Cass Sunstein's and Elizabeth Borgwardt's books are particularly valuable now, when the distance separating American politics from the principles of FDR has rarely seemed greater. These books matter in part because they demonstrate so clearly something that has been in doubt for several decades now. As I've tried to signal with the title of this review, Sunstein and Borgwardt both show that Franklin Roosevelt did indeed have ideals both for domestic politics and foreign policy. Countless historians have shown that FDR was a deft politician, shrewd in maneuvering friends and foes, but awareness of that skill should not distract us from the evidence of his guiding principles [End Page 509] so forcefully presented by Sunstein and Borgwardt. No less an authority than Harry Hopkins testified that the Four Freedoms speech showed "the real Roosevelt," and these books confirm that judgment. At least from the mid-1930s until the end of his life, FDR was animated by ideals that provided the criteria by which he wanted the members of his administration to evaluate the success or failure of the multiple experiments he prodded them to try. Those principles were effective freedom and more equal opportunity at home and greater security achieved through international cooperation abroad. The first could not be achieved without sustained government intervention to prevent the unregulated market from rewarding some while shutting out others; the second required the United States to relinquish its cherished unilateralism and join other nations to prevent war and spread prosperity.

In The Second Bill of Rights, Sunstein characterizes FDR's January 11, 1944, State of the Union Address as "the greatest speech of the twentieth century" and laments that it is not better known today. At that moment, with the Allied invasion of Italy bogged down and great naval victories in the Pacific still months away, FDR was already thinking about America after the war and its place in the world. He reported on the recent negotiations with Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China that had set the allied powers on course toward international cooperation both during and after the war. He excoriated those Americans "'with selfish and partisan interests'" who had tried to profit from the war and those who had sought to avoid the "'prodigious sacrifices'" it required. "'If there was ever a time to subordinate individual or group selfishness to the national good,'" FDR proclaimed, "'that time is now.'" Looking forward, he envisioned an America in which the fruits of economic growth would be more widely shared. "'We cannot be content...

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