Why FDR’s 1936 Labor Day speech is still relevant today
On September 6, 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt celebrated Labor Day with a "Fireside Chat" speech that described the link between democracy and the United States' economic wellbeing.
The conservative website The Bulwark, on Labor Day 2023, published excerpts from the speech in article form and offered some thoughts on why it remains relevant 87 years later.
The Bulwark notes that when FDR gave that address, his economic program, the New Deal, "had seen some policy successes, including the passage in 1935 of the Social Security Act" — yet the Great Depression "was still far from over, the unemployment rate remained above 20 percent, and millions of Americans were suffering."
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FDR warned, "There are those who fail to read both the signs of the times and American history. They would try to refuse the worker any effective power to bargain collectively, to earn a decent livelihood and to acquire security. It is those shortsighted ones, not labor, who threaten this country with that class dissension which, in other countries, has led to dictatorship and the establishment of fear and hatred as the dominant emotions in human life."
Find The Bulwark's Franklin Delano Roosevelt excerpt at this link.
