the commonwealth club address · franklin d. roosevelt

Franklin Roosevelt's campaign speech in San Francisco in September 1932 restated the social contract for an industrial age: the frontier was closed, the task was no longer producing wealth but administering it, and government must guarantee an 'economic declaration of rights'. It is the intellectual charter of the New Deal, and Hoover's reply and the 1933 Inaugural show what was at stake.

Read with Coolidge's speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration (1926), Hoover's speech on the consequences of the proposed New Deal (1932) and Roosevelt's First Inaugural (1933) in the Roots of American Order summer seminar, June 2026.