Write a three-page paper, which explains, illuminates, challenges or confirms the ideas and claims made by President Franklin Roosevelt in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention made on June 27, 1936. Use material taken from Jason Scott Smith's A Concise History of the New Deal, from Nelson Lichtenstein's State of the Union, from some of the essays in the course reader, as well as the lectures and films to explicate these historical developments, New Deal policies, and political and ideological conflicts referenced in FDR's short speech.
Like any politician making a speech, the President uses short-hand phrases, brief references, and pejorative naming to make his larger political and ideological points.
So what is the meaning of the "economic royalists" to which FDR refers? What is the "new despotism wrapped in the robes of legal sanction?" What does FDR mean by "Necessitous men are not free men?" Why does he compare 1936 to 1776?
And there are many other ideas and phrases you might discuss in FDR's speech. Don't try to do everything: a good argument is better than a catalogue. Although listeners and voters in 1936 might well have been familiar with his allusive comments, 21st century men and women need your help to explain his meaning.
If you quote or paraphrase material from either the book or the lecture, please footnote the material. Do not use social science notation.
Here are a couple of sample footnotes:
As Jason Scott Smith makes clear, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was designed to stabilize and democratize American capitalism. President Roosevelt called the NIRA "the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress."
In his 1936 speech accepting his party's nomination, FDR would call the bankers and industrialists of those years "economic royalists" who falsely claim that "we seek to overthrow the institutions of America.
What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." Later FDR says that the New Deal is essentially a conservative movement rooted in an older conception of politics: "We are fighting to preserve a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world."