"Workingman’s Constitution" By WILLIAM E. FORBATH at NY Times

Workingman’s Constitution

By WILLIAM E. FORBATH at NY Times

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/workingmans-constitution/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120706

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In the wake of industrialization, turn of the century reformers declared the need for a “new economic constitutional order” to secure the old promises of individual freedom and opportunity. America was becoming a corporate oligarchy, making working people wage slaves, impoverished and ill-equipped for democratic citizenship.

The New Deal brought this progressive vision to partial fruition. In the preindustrial past, Roosevelt explained in countless speeches, the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights “in acquiring and possessing property” joined with the ballot and the freedom to live by one’s “own lights” to ensure the Constitution’s promise of “liberty and equality.”

But the “turn of the tide” came with the closing of the frontier and the rise of great “industrial combinations.” New conditions demanded new readings. “Every man,” he said, has a “right to make a comfortable living.” Alongside education, “training and retraining,” decent work and decent pay, his Second Bill of Rights set out rights to social insurance, including health care.

The distributive tradition has evolved, but its gist is simple and durable: you can’t have a republican government, and certainly not a constitutional democracy, amid gross material inequality.


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