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Before a vast throng of more than 100,000 people, President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the Democratic nomination for president, June 27, 1936, in Philadelphia.
A first-term president is presiding over an improving economy, but still one with severe individual hardship. His opponent is bolstered by almost unilateral support from the business community, seeking to regain its position of untrammeled dominion over American life. The president decides to use the corporate tycoons’ stated preference to frame the election, taking every opportunity to remind voters of the wealthy and powerful forces arrayed against him.
The year is 1936, not 2024, and the president is Franklin Roosevelt. Throughout the year, polling between Roosevelt and Alf Landon was relatively close; one decidedly unscientific poll taken right before Election Day by The Literary Digest, which had nailed the previous five elections, predicted a Landon victory. In the end, it wasn’t close at all; in fact, one of the great landslides in U.S. politics.
FDR’s strategy to run hard against the malefactors of great wealth was sui generis, never really to be replicated before or since. While Democrats habitually become more populist around campaign season, politics has become such a money game that politicians have learned not to touch the third rail of inspiring a plutocrat riot. But if there ever was a moment to pay attention to Rooseveltian rhetoric, it’s now.
Wall Street donors who once rejected Donald Trump after January 6th have returned to his side. Silicon Valley bigwigs held a fundraiser for Trump in the heart of San Francisco last week. Trump asked oil barons for $1 billion in campaign funds in exchange for regulatory relief. A hedge fund manager pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump minutes after he was convicted of a felony; Miriam Adelson, heir to the casino fortune, pledged $100 million. Even FDR would blanch at the open rallying for the presumptive Republican nominee from those who need to use the word “billion” to describe their net worth.
Corporate America’s sentiment was summed up pretty well by Kathryn Wylde, who represents the Partnership for New York City, a business lobby, who has openly described Wall Street as New York’s Main Street in the past. “The threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump,” Wylde told Politico. She will bear any burden to pay a little less in taxes and regulatory compliance, in other words.
When people discuss how Roosevelt handled a similar mutiny by the rich, they tend to point to a speech given on the eve of the 1936 election at Madison Square Garden, the famed “I welcome their hatred” speech, where he openly sided against “the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.”
But there is another speech, far more detailed in its discussion of economic tyranny and the dangers of concentrated power, within and without the political realm. It was his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, given 88 years ago this month.
What Roosevelt is doing is defining what Americans lost when their government fell to the economic royalists.
This was the speech that brought into the political lexicon the term “economic royalists.” Roosevelt, in full teaching mode, defined them as the descendants of the British royalists of the Revolutionary era, who “governed without the consent of the governed” and “put the average man’s property and the average man’s life in pawn to the mercenaries of dynastic power.”
The end of political tyranny in 1776, however, in time gave way to a new dynasty, an economic tyranny “built upon concentration of control over material things.” The privileged class turned economic systems to their own benefit, and cut laborers, farmers, smaller merchants, and everybody else out of the deal.
And then FDR takes it a step further, and here he could be describing 2024: “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction … The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.”
The new despotism. How else would you describe Silicon Valley, Big Oil, and Wall Street coming together to back a transactional presidential candidate who promises them specific favors, after reducing their corporate taxes by 40 percent the last time he was president?
What Roosevelt is doing is defining what Americans lost when their government fell to the economic royalists: restrictions of business initiative and opportunity, crushing of wages, inequality of wealth and prosperity. The economy, thus controlled, imploded with the Great Depression, and the people sought another direction. But like the Stephen Schwarzmans and Bill Ackmans of today, the economic royalists were appalled that anyone elected by the people could act as if they had the authority to carry out the people’s will: “The royalists of the economic order,” Roosevelt says, “have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business.”
This, Roosevelt says, cannot stand. “If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”
You almost never hear this kind of bracing talk in politics today. An American president called out titans of industry as traitors to the ideals of democracy, as enemies of a free people, out only to feather their own nests and willing to take over the levers of government power to do it. He sides with the ordinary laborer and farmer, specifically highlighting their need for economic liberty, to pursue their talents without the boot of monopolists hanging over their heads.
Roosevelt had actually commissioned two different drafts for his speech: one, a conciliatory speech from the rightward-moving Raymond Moley, who had been close to Roosevelt during the first two years as president, and the hard-hitting one he opted to deliver, by longtime aide Sam Rosenman and rookie writer Stanley High, who coined the term “economic royalists.” Roosevelt loved the phrase and made it the centerpiece of his speech.
FDR went on to win the electoral vote 523-8, also carrying the Democrats to their greatest congressional majority in history.
That was obviously a different time. By actually trying to do something about the Great Depression—massive public-works and employment programs, creating Social Security and legalizing collective bargaining—Roosevelt earned his chance to keep at it. Rhetoric alone did not deliver the second term; tangible improvements did. But both FDR and Joe Biden style themselves as saviors of democracy, which after the economic collapse of 1929 was not fated to continue.
It turns out that Roosevelt delivered his DNC acceptance speech on June 27, 1936. June 27 is the same day that Joe Biden will debate Donald Trump on CNN. Though Trump is often described as a populist with a working-class voter base, the “economic royalist” sobriquet perfectly describes the cult of the wealthy that is determined to back him. With the nouveau royalists’ bet on Trump, a second Trump term is likely to upstage the first as a pay-to-play spectacle, where the chief executive can be bought to endorse candidates, bought to reverse his views on policy, and bought to grease the wheels for more tax cuts, less restriction on business, and generally whatever they ask for.
Trump’s occasional broadsides at big business in 2016 have really melted away in today’s speeches and rallies. He is all personal grievance, all the time. But that masks an agenda of favors to his billionaire backers, who are enraged by having their power diminished by the likes of Lina Khan or Gary Gensler or Rohit Chopra or Jennifer Abruzzo.
These royalists believe that worker rights, consumer protection, and open markets meddle dangerously with the established order of things, where regulation is historically set in the corporate boardroom, and everyone submits to their will. The anti-democratic, anti-patriotic, freedom-restricting spirit that animated the rich enemies of Roosevelt is more than present with the super-rich enemies of the Biden administration.
No road to 523 electoral votes is available today, not even for FDR himself. But I know how he would respond to this moment, as the forces of wealth and privilege unite against him. Biden’s choice lies in whether he will describe the situation as it is, and the struggle for power at the heart of it.
