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On January 11, 1944, the United States was involved in its longest conflict since the Civil War. The effort was going well. In a remarkably short period, the tide had turned sharply in favor of the Allies. Ultimate victory was no longer in serious doubt. The real question was the nature of the peace.
At noon, America's optimistic, aging, self-assured, wheelchair- bound president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, delivered his State of the Union address to Congress. His speech wasn't elegant. It was messy, sprawling, unruly, a bit of a pastiche, and not at all literary. But because of what it said, this address, proposing a Second Bill of Rights, has a strong claim to being the greatest speech of the 20th century.
In the last few years, there has been a lot of discussion of World War II and the Greatest Generation. We've heard much about D- Day, foreign occupations, and presidential leadership amid threats to national security. But the real legacy of the leader of the Greatest Generation and the nation's most extraordinary president has been utterly lost. His Second Bill of Rights is largely forgotten, although, ironically, it has helped shape countless constitutions throughout the world -- including the interim Iraqi constitution. To some extent, it has guided our own deepest aspirations. And it helps us to straighten out some national confusions that were never more prominent, and more pernicious, than they are today.
It's past time to understand it.
Roosevelt began his speech by emphasizing that war was a shared endeavor in which the United States was simply one participant. Now that the war was in the process of being won, the main objective for the future could be "captured in one word: Security." Roosevelt argued that the term "means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors," but also "economic security, social security, moral security." He insisted that "essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want."
Moving to domestic affairs, Roosevelt emphasized the need to bring security to all American citizens. He argued for a "realistic tax law -- which will tax all unreasonable profits, both...