Episode 213 – The Four Freedoms with Harvey J. Kaye

Historian Harvey J. Kaye joins Steve to talk about the complicated legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Kaye acknowledges many points in our criticism of FDR but goes on to discuss what Roosevelt was up against, and why he should be respected.    

“Because Gramsci, I think it was, said, when you judge the past, don’t forget, you too shall be judged. I’m paraphrasing … When socialists start winning elections, then they can start telling me about how inadequate FDR was.” 

Them’s fighting words!  But speaking of socialists – or rather, social democrats – and elections, the episode also includes discussion of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns, and the lessons Bernie could have taken from FDR. After all, they both faced serious opposition within the Democratic Party. 

At a time when the American capitalist class were enamored of Mussolini, Harvey lays out FDR’s achievements and maintains that those policies prevented a revolution. Listen to the episode and see whether you agree.  

Harvey J. Kaye is a Professor Emeritus of Democracy and Justice at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and an award-winning writer who has authored and edited 18 books, including Thomas Paine and The Promise of America, Take Hold of Our History, FDR on Democracy, The Fight for the Four Freedoms, and The British Marxist Historians. 

@harveyjkaye on Twitter 

Macro N Cheese – Episode 213
The Four Freedoms with Harvey J. Kaye
February 25, 2023

[00:00:00] Harvey Kaye [intro/music]: ​Progressives, socialists, radicals, whatever the terms we use, they all have their own ideas about how we’re gonna go forward, screws us over and over again. If we can’t at least rally around an idea of social democracy, we’re never gonna move forward, period.

It dawned on FDR that if you’re gonna struggle politically, you’ve gotta struggle over memory. You can’t let the conservatives and reactionaries control the American memory. And he said they wrapped themselves in the flag and they claim ownership of all the progressive developments in American history.

[00:01:40] Geoff Ginter [intro/music]: Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:48] Steve Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese folks. I have been taking you through history because I think history is as important as the present to inform us of where we’ve been, what we’ve tried, what failed, what succeeded. What we forgot that succeeded, and why we keep repeating all the failures that we’ve seen in this neoliberal era.

This interview for me is very important as a socialist, as an individual trying to get his history correct, to understand how to bring about radical change. As a guy who supported Bernie through part one and part two of his unsuccessful bids to get the nomination within the Democratic party. A lot of things I’ve learned have made me feel devoted to digging out the truth and to pulling history into an analysis that informs us of how we can build a better tomorrow.

And I know FDR within Socialists and other circles has a mixed reception, shall we say. And so for me, I wanted to talk to great historian Harvey Kaye, who focuses heavily on the four freedoms. In fact, he wrote a book called The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great. And so now he’s here to discuss not just the book, but some of my questions surrounding that.

So let me introduce Harvey properly. Dr. Harvey J. Kaye is a professor emeritus of Democracy and Justice at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. An award-winning writer who has authored and edited 18 books, including Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, The Fight for the Four Freedoms, Take Hold of Our History and FDR On Democracy.

On top of all that he is a labor unionist and historical and political commentator, and a frequent guest on shows in every medium, including this medium where he joined me with Alan Minsky some time ago talking about the 21st Century Bill of Rights. And without further ado, let me say hello to my guest, Harvey Kaye..

Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:03:55] Harvey Kaye: Thank you. It’s good to see you again, Steve. I’ve been looking forward to this, and the timing is perfect in many ways. Most especially because I’ve been struggling the last several weeks to write a 2,500 word piece where I get to the essence of FDR’s political thought and where it emanated from and where it took America in the course of the 1930s into the 1940s.

And the other thing is in the wake of the State of the Union address where I have to admit, I was impressed by the vigor of Biden’s presentation. I always seem to fall back on, well, what would FDR have done? And Biden doesn’t stack up too well, I’ll just say this for the sake of the audience. It’s always striking to me.

A couple years ago when he was running for president, it was three years ago, he was running for president. And by the way, I was a Bernie supporter ever since the 1980s when he was up in Vermont. And I always thought, wow, it’d be great to be able to vote for somebody like that. And I got to do it in a couple of primaries here in Wisconsin.

Having said that, three years ago, people said to me, well, forget everything else. Is Biden physically up to the job of the presidency? Now, it was Bernie, of course, who had the heart attack during the campaign, but Bernie came back even stronger than he was before. In Biden’s case, I say, well, I don’t know if he’s got the strength or not, but I can tell you this: if he can find the strength that he had for 40 years trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare and turn that in a progressive direction, a social democratic direction, we’ll be okay.

Well, he didn’t, his first two years as president. I don’t care about the claim he was the best friend to labor since FDR. That’s all fine. But there was very little vigor. If there had been vigor, we would’ve seen a $15 an hour minimum wage, cuz he would’ve called in the two democratic senators from Delaware and a host of others and said, what the hell are you guys doing blocking $15 an hour minimum wage?

He would’ve made sure that whatever else he did, that he increased the budget of the National Labor Relations Board. So it was not a terribly vigorous first two years, however much liberals or even progressives, even on the so-called progressive caucus, tell us about all the successes. Ha ha ha. So here we now had a State of the Union message where he sounded vigorous.

He actually came out against the oil companies against this and against that, like I couldn’t help but imagine that was a guilty conscience for having screwed the railway workers. Having said all that, the point is that FDR is always in my brain on this stuff, and just so everyone knows, Thomas Paine is my hero.

FDR is my presidential hero. And having said that, I also want to add, cuz I do not want to hear from people, but what about the way in which he failed to lift the immigration quotas? What about the fact that they didn’t directly go after Jim Crow in segregation in the South? Well, what about one of the worst crimes, or at least one of the worst mistakes in American civil liberties history, the internment of the Japanese Americans?

So lemme just say, first of all, he did bring in more Jewish refugees than is often allowed, but he failed to purge his own state department of the anti-Semites. Congress was not eager to raise the quotas that also stood in his way. But I will also add that his own chief of staff Samuel Rosenman, was Jewish.

He was no anti-Semite, FDR. Make that clear. Regarding attack on segregation and Jim Crow. I can only say that African Americans in the South, as much as they may have been often left out of key provisions of the New Deal, it wasn’t FDRs doing that left them out. It was the southern white supremacist Democrats in Congress who left them out. Cuz quite often to get things through as these were federal programs,

they became federal programs managed at the state level. But I’ll let the African American voices of the thirties speak. They loved FDR. He was their hero. To them, they showed their affection to him. They had as many pictures on the wall of him as probably Jesus and I will add white textile workers too, had those pictures on their walls.

And regarding the internment of the Japanese Americans, that is a tragic mistake, made all the more tragic by the fact that he allowed the military and the property owners of California to push him into it. And he didn’t stand his ground despite the urgings of Eleanor and others. And on top of that, the fact is that though there were those who said they would not serve the overwhelming majority of Japanese American young men, when given the opportunity to serve by way of a draft or enlistment, did so during this very same war.

And finally sounds like a terrible thing. You must imagine, hey, my best friend is whatever. But my best friend for many years was actually a Japanese American who was born in one of those camps whose father at the same time was serving in the military. So I’ve gone through this over and over again. FDR was no saint.

But if you find a saint in politics, let me know who that is.

[00:09:07] Grumbine: I think we all had a momentary belief that maybe Bernie might fit that role. I think it really stirred a lot of people’s emotions and it brought FDR really out of the closet and back into the mainstream. Bernie Sanders single-handedly was able to elevate that call to the American people, and you saw the people take to the streets.

It’s a shame Bernie didn’t hold their feet to the fire the way Republicans do. It’s a shame he didn’t have that commitment to fight to the end. And we were at the Philadelphia Convention and many of the delegates were ready to stage a large disruptive act on the floor.

[00:09:44] Kaye: Is this in 2016 or 2020?

[00:09:48] Grumbine: 2016.

[00:09:49] Kaye: Yeah, 2016. It would’ve been a smart thing then.

[00:09:54] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:09:55] Kaye: Not in 2020, however.

[00:09:57] Grumbine: Well, he was ashamed because a friend of mine videotaped the speech Bernie gave the delegates while we were sitting there behind the scenes, since we weren’t able to physically be in the room with her. She snuck in and she was videotaping it. And Bernie basically told them: don’t do it. Just accept it.

We don’t want Trump. I don’t want to be blamed for Trump. And he had Ralph Nader syndrome, terrified they were gonna blame him for the next Al Gore. And I think that defining moment clipped what could have been, and it’s informed me how hard it is to make progress in a duopoly party system.

[00:10:35] Kaye: Just so you know, I have little difficulty understanding why Bernie did what he did. Here’s a guy whose family essentially survived or escaped the Holocaust. He’s Jewish. He knew better than all the rest of us that if Trump was reelected, the Nazis were gonna definitely be part of the crew. And by the way, it’s not that Trump himself would’ve had the strategy to pursue it, but he revealed his own authoritarian streak on January 6th in 2021, and I think Bernie didn’t wanna be responsible for all of that happening.

My criticism of Bernie is actually that probably he should have come out as a social Democrat, not a Democratic socialist. But in any case, what I really found upsetting was, and I won’t go into all the stories they’re piled up in my head, I’ll give you the best example I can, and I’ll use the example of a good socialist Eugene Debbs as my model.

When Eugene Debbs was accused of Sedition in 1918, I guess it was, and appeared in the courtroom, he defended himself. I don’t know if it was in the original trial or in the day of his sentencing. He defended himself by standing up in the court and calling into the room, or at least rhetorically called into the room, major figures of American history who had also dissented and were known as patriots. Thomas Payne, I think he might have called Patrick Henry, and he called Abraham Lincoln.

He called them all in to stand alongside of him, and he challenged the powers that be to deny that they were not necessarily patriots because they had dissented in American history. Bernie, when he appeared on the stage in the debates, this is true in 2016, but all the more upsetting to me in 2020 when he appeared in the debates alongside that crew from Bloomberg to Buttigieg. And when one or more of them would accuse him of wanting to bankrupt the country with Medicare for all.

He should have stopped. And he said, well, wait a minute, you’re Democrats. I just caucus with the Democrats, but I seem to be the one who understands the greatest president the Democrats have ever produced one of the two greatest presidents in American history. Let me bring into the room Franklin Roosevelt, and then pointed out that in 1935 when FDR had commissioned Francis Perkins as Secretary of Labor to head up the commission that would create Social Security, that FDR wanted national healthcare as part of Social Security.

And the only reason he couldn’t take that risk of including it is that the American Medical Association was vehemently against it and a whole host of other very conservative groups who generally he was more than happy to smack around. But nevertheless, he knew that if he could get Social Security through then, it would be in short order, they could probably get themselves to pursue national healthcare.

So even without national healthcare, universal healthcare, in ’35, they came under assault. And basically were saved because the Supreme Court switched its view of the New Deal. It was called the Stitch in Time or something like that. The point is, and fortunately for fdr, he got to literally appoint a whole new Supreme Court because of deaths and retirements and so on.

But the point is he could have called FDR into the room and said, please tell FDR, we shouldn’t have had Social Security. Now you can tell me we shouldn’t have Medicare for all. I can think. Why not? And I’ll also tell you, and this is the case that for what it’s worth, I did a podcast, Hear The Bern podcast with Briahna Joy Gray.

 And I was more enthused than ever about Bernie, cuz it looked like he was going to take the FDR route. They were having me in the podcast for a start to talk about FDR and Bernie. He literally announced the possibility of an economic bill of rights. And over and over again it looked like he was gonna take the FDR route.

But as soon as he got on TV, it was like he forgot FDR altogether. How can we explain that?

[00:14:49] Grumbine: Brutal,

[00:14:50] Kaye: It’s impossible. And that last and final debate with Biden, when Biden lied right there on stage. Lied! You could tell Bernie was trying to think to himself, do I call him out as a liar and enable Trump to do the same if he wins this thing?

So I love Bernie. I’d vote for like that again, unreservedly. I’ve never met him, just for what it’s worth. Though I’ve had indirect communication, though he’s never responded to me. And by the way, David Sirota some of the speeches he did, which really infused FDR into Bernie’s rhetoric. It’s great.

[00:15:28] Grumbine: We don’t really understand history through a proper lens. We’ve been trained to believe a lot of things from reasons we get into wars to why we’re in recessions to the failures or successes of various presidents and social movements. But ultimately, the jury from the socialist world is out on FDR, and many of them have a very negative opinion of him based on the things you’ve already debunked to some degree.

My question to you is this: going back to the World War I era, where you had Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a representative as opposed to a president,

[00:16:09] Kaye: Actually, he was the assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I.

[00:16:13] Grumbine: He was not a president.

[00:16:14] Kaye: Right? No, he was not.

[00:16:17] Grumbine: During that time period Wilson put forward the Federal Reserve and deeply involved in World War I and then the thing that shook the world, and that was the Bolshevik revolution. Churchill revered Mussolini, the whole capitalist society clutching their pearls. And recently Clara Mattei, who is an author and professor out of the new school, wrote a book called The Capital Order, describing how in that moment there was a chance for real change to see the world differently, and the capitalist order came together with this austerity narrative to discipline labor and put everybody back under the screws.

It was in that period that you had the crash, the Great Depression.

[00:17:04] Kaye: You’re jumping ahead, just so people understand. So let me make it clear. In 1920, FDR got on the Democratic ticket as the vice presidential nominee. And they got smashed. And why did they get smashed? Well, in part because in the late 19th century into the early 20th century, this was the Gilded Age, political and economic order.

But by the time of the turn of the century, you had serious, progressive left socialist kinds of movements calling for change. You had the populists, you had the socialists, and you had the progressives. Sure, there was a distinction among them, but of course not unusual to the American story of the left is the fact they just didn’t get together.

Socialists and progressives often cooperated on city councils. That’s how you got sewer socialism so effectively instituted around a many an American city, but on a national level, they just didn’t get it together, period. Now, FDR himself asked a number of times in the twenties, which I’m gonna get to in a moment, he asked, how is it possible that conservatives can always rally together?

And those of us on the left, progressives and socialists and radicals, we just all go our separate ways. And he said, because conservatives know what they want, they want no more democracy. The democracy that exist, we can live with it if we have to. We just don’t want any more of it. However, progressives, socialists, radicals, whatever the terms we use, they all have their own ideas about how we’re gonna go forward, screws us over and over again. If we can’t at least rally around an idea of social democracy, we’re never gonna move forward, period. So he becomes a state senator in the 19 teens, Franklin Roosevelt, and he is a progressive. He’s not an ardent progressive, but he is a progressive cuz he really hated the Gilded age, political and economic order into which he was born.

The extremes of poverty and riches were gross, to put it plain. The ever intensifying concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the capitalist class and their Republican and Democratic allies was literally crushing people. Their ideology was individualist, free markets, competition, survival of the fittest ethos that Social Darwinism, laissez fair government.

FDR didn’t wanna have anything to do with it. FDR’s fundamental commitment over the course of his life was to the promise made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And what was that promise? A right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and a government of we, the people. To him, his whole political belief system and ideals and aspirations are rooted in there, again for all of the sins that he would commit,

that’s where it begins. And he never actually, to my recollection, scorned radicals or socialists, but he was a progressive in the teens. In the 1920s when the Republicans came back, I mean, talk about reaction with the Red Scare right after World War I. Why was there a Red Scare? Well, in part because you had the Bolshevik Revolution, but also capitalists knew you had a lot of immigrants in America. If they came from Italy,

they were anarchists. If they came from Eastern Europe, they were probably Jewish socialists. They feared those folks. So let’s remember, they imposed an immigration quota act and a Red Scare prevails in America. My grandfather, who was finishing law school around that time, family name was Kaminesky, and I can’t help but imagine he changed the name to Kaye because it sounded Bolshevik, Kaminesky. He loses in 1920 because the Republicans accused the Democrats of being, I’m paraphrasing, un-American. Why? Because they want the United States to enter the League of Nations. And FDR, it dawned at him that if you’re gonna struggle politically, you’ve gotta struggle over memory. You can’t let the conservatives and reactionaries control the American memory.

And he said they wrapped themselves in the flag and they claim ownership of all the progressive developments in American history, the right wingers do. And in the 1920s, well, in addition to suffering polio as he did, which at least compelled him to hang around the house more perhaps, he wanted to write a history of the United States.

He sat down to write because he wanted to be president of the United States someday. And he knew that both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom were progressives, capital P, one a Republican, one a Democrat. He knew that they had written histories and that that sort of propelled them into a new kind of sphere of influence.

But after one paragraph or one chapter, he gave up, he’d realized he wasn’t a writing man. But he did realize that, I can’t tell you he sat down and swore an oath to do it, that whenever he spoke he was going to shape the American narrative and American memory. And he was gonna do it, and he wouldn’t have used the term himself necessarily, in a radical fashion.

So in the 1920s, you have a very conservative Republican corporate dominated decade. Republicans ruled through three presidencies 12 years, but he is developing what he called liberalism. But his liberalism in its own way is approaching social democracy. Eleanor Roosevelt, who because of FDR’S polio, is liberated to get out more.

She joins a host of progressive groups, one of which is the Women’s Trade Union League, and she makes it a point of introducing FDR, who by the way, already had experience with labor unions as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in World War I. Cuz it was his job to run the entire machine, to create the armaments and deal with the unions and all that.

She introduces him to immigrant Jewish socialist women labor organizers. He becomes all the more aware, not only of the idea labor unions, but of the struggles of working people. And everyone thinks of the 1920s as the roaring twenties. This is basically bullshit. Productivity was up, the capitalists were getting even richer.

But if you look at household income, which looked like it was going up, it actually only could go up because you had both members of the household working. Farmers never recovered from the recession after World War I. So inequality was growing, and when they couldn’t convince workers that labor unions were bad, they would create company unions to control them.

And if worse came to worse, they hired thugs or used local militia and governments to knock heads together, basically. This was utterly alien to FDR. Because he believed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And he understood that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should not be read in 18th century terms.

Conditions change. In 1912 when he gave a speech, he said: look, (he exaggerated) we’ve accomplished the struggle for individual liberty. Now we have a new struggle underway. And he had in mind populist progressives and socialists. And this new struggle is the struggle for liberty of the community. A very awkward phrase, but it was his way of getting at the idea that we can do better than individual competition.

We need cooperation. Because he didn’t wanna use the term socialism, cuz if he had, he was finished politically. So in the course of the twenties, he’s developing this new liberalism and in 1928 he runs for governor of New York. And if you read his speeches as governor, he’s already developing even before the depression hit, is already developing a sign of social democratic imagination.

And then when he gets inaugurated in January of 1929, the crash occurs in October. By the next spring, the depression is really taking hold of American life and strangling it. Economically speaking, it’s the worst economic and social catastrophe in American history. And so FDR May 12th, 1930, I really got these dates down.

[00:25:05] Grumbine: Yes, you do.

[00:25:06] Kaye: He writes a letter to John Kingsbury, a good friend of his who is the leading authority in the United States on questions of social welfare. And he is already mulling over a run for the presidency. But most important thing is he says in this letter, “I think it’s time to make America fairly radical for at least a generation”.

And then he says, and this is where people think he’s really a conservative, but he says he’s got fascist Italy in his head. And the elite of America at that time was calling for a Mussolini. And he says, countries that can develop a radical moment, can avoid revolution. He isn’t talking about a revolution that you and I might enjoy.

He’s talking about a revolution in which the fascist march on Washington

[00:25:52] Grumbine: Brown shirts. Yeah.

[00:25:54] Kaye: So he’s already decided we’re gonna go radical. And in 32, Hoover accuses him of being a dangerous radical who wants to literally destroy the foundations of, in quotes, the American system of life. Well, Hoover was right.

FDR decided this was the moment, and he’d already for 20 years as a political liberal first and progressive, they wanted to reform capitalism. They wanted to regulate capital, protect workers, especially women and children. In the ’20s he decided, no, that’s not enough. We have to also consider the fact that government should also assure Americans, especially in the face of the crisis, like the depression,

a decent life. So now he’s becoming a decidedly social democratic in orientation. But he also has already made it clear as governor of New York, his respect and his determination to protect the rights of workers and his speeches while he is running imply that imperative. Now, he had to be pushed quite often to sign like the National Labor Relations Act, but he wanted to be pushed.

That was his whole politics, make me do it. And it didn’t mean make me do it cuz I don’t wanna do it, it’s make me do it so we can together give a finger to the powers that be who might try to stop it. Let’s not forget, a lot of my friends, academic historians on the left say, well, it was easy for FDR. He had control of Congress.

The control of Congress included southern white supremacists. And by the way, southern white supremacists didn’t give a shit if you were white or black, as long as they could block the unions. The other thing about that is that they didn’t really want the new deal. They just wanted the money coming into their states.

Cuz the south was so poor. It was like an old feudal region of the country. FDR had to put up with these white supremacist, anti-labor folks in Congress. We would’ve had national health possibly in 1935. But no, God forbid you should get national health insurance because then guess what? You’d have to integrate the hospitals.

This is all part of the scheme. So he pushes. He pushes, and when he becomes president, one of his first major bills that he signs into law is the National Industrial Recovery Act, which includes the rite of workers to organize and bargain collectively. But capitalists, the corporate bosses found their way around it, which then leads in 1935 to the National Labor Relations Act.

Similarly, Social Security, you look at it, this guy is radicalizing, he’s mobilized Americans to do something that they hadn’t done probably since Lincoln, that has harnessed the powers of Democratic government and carry out a peaceful revolution in America. So those socialists who wanna scorn in the past, they don’t know their history.

We all have a tendency to project onto the past, the antagonisms we might feel in the present. Now, why do we forget this? Well, conservatives don’t want anyone to remember. Let’s assume that liberals for years celebrated FDR basically as the welfare state Democrat. They didn’t celebrate him as the guy who aligned with labor followed Wagner’s urgings and signed the National Labor Relations Act.

They don’t talk about that. Here’s a good one for you. 1934, 35, there is a strike underway. And by the way, it’s FDR who encourages this by signing that first National Industrial Recovery Act into law. Unionists are mobilizing workers on an unprecedented scale in this country is truly a labor revolution underway.

There’s a company down near Sheboygan. It’s in Kohler, Wisconsin. The name of the company. It’s a company town, a very right wing family, had absolutely no intention of ever allowing a labor union into their factories. To this day, they’re anti-union, though there was a strike in ’35 and then there was a strike in ’55, and I understand some of the scabs in ’35 became union activists later.

That’s how bad this company was. Well, in ’35, the strike is underway in Kohler, which is 60 miles south of Green Bay, Wisconsin. FDR comes to Green Bay the strike had begun in the summer of ’34, August of ’34 I guess it was. And he gives a speech where he talks about the struggles that working people go through in order to secure their rights.

And he talks about the New Deal as a movement. Basically he says, there are those folks who just will have nothing to do with. He’s 60 miles away, and he is literally endorsing the strikers who are taking beatings from the cops. Probably lost some lives in the process. And this is FDR. What more can you ask for at that kind of moment in time?

That’s why it just drives me crazy. Some of the smartest people just wanna write that off. Well, it shows you how little they know. We are in an age where we have been so literally marginalized, so truly marginalized that we don’t even know how to advance. We only know how to tear down. That’s the problem. Name an American hero. They’ll tear ’em down. I understand the antagonism to the fact that there were signers and leaders in the early years of the American Republic who were slaveholders. But it remains the case that George Washington led a revolutionary army. It remains the case that thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence.

You don’t wanna make idols of them, fine, let’s not make idols of anyone. But how’s this? Even Frederick Douglass, even Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the radicalism of the words that were authored by Thomas Jefferson. You don’t have to love the man to grab hold of the promise. And FDR in the thirties was literally creating a narrative for working people, a narrative that working people held onto all the way into the 1960s and ’70s, even if their leaders didn’t necessarily do so. It’s that generation that he encouraged In the thirties, these were 15 to 30 year olds in the thirties who went off to fight and came back from a war against fascism at the age of 25, say.

And by the way, the labor unions just exploded once again after the war in 1953, ’55, 1 of every 3 workers, at least in the private sector, were in a labor union. And public unionism was taking off. In the 1960s, let’s say take ’65, let’s say they were 20 years old in 1935, and then there say 30 years old in 1945.

And actually they were younger. They’re only middle-aged when you hit the sixties. And my generation, how old are you, Steve?

[00:32:51] Grumbine: I’m 53.

[00:32:53] Kaye: You’re a good generation younger than I am. My generation loves to claim the sixties belonged to us, and it did in many ways, at least in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and a lot of political movements.

But it’s also the case that most of us couldn’t vote yet, but that same generation as much as they were divided between southern racists and northern liberals. The fact is that generation elected an incredibly liberal/progressive Congress in the sixties that enacted Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights, voting rights, environmental protections, workplace protections, immigration reform, massively improved schooling at both elementary-high school and higher education level and expanded it.

We’re talking about a revolution that occurred in the thirties that FDR said, let’s make America radical for at least a generation. They made it radical, he and the folks that he encouraged for far more than one generation. So when socialists start giving me this thing, well, my credentials on the left are pretty good.

You left out the first book I ever wrote, by the way,

[00:33:56] Grumbine: Oh, what’s that?

[00:33:58] Kaye: The British Marxist Historians

[00:34:01] Grumbine: I’m getting that. That was on my list of things to get.

[00:34:03] Kaye: It just came out in a new edition.

[00:34:06] Grumbine: Then I’m picking it up. I had actually saw you do an interview on this not too long ago.

[00:34:12] Kaye: Yeah, I did it with a few places. Left Reckoning, or how about The Zero Hour?

[00:34:18] Grumbine: That’s where it was.

[00:34:19] Kaye: I think my leftism is fairly coherent, but one thing I learned is that we know chauvinism is a bad thing. Chauvinism is a gender problem. Chauvinism as a nationalism problem. How about chauvinism as a historical problem? As Gramsci I think it was said; when you judge the past, don’t forget, you too shall be judged. I’m paraphrasing.

[00:34:43] Grumbine: Sure.

[00:34:44] Kaye: When socialists start winning elections, then they can start telling me about how inadequate FDR was.

[00:35:02] Intermission: You are listening to Macro and Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT, or Modern Monetary theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon; like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on Periscope, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:35:53] Grumbine: I’m glad you brought that up. You see how hard it is. You’re on Twitter, you’re in social media. You get to do these interviews. We have a huge wall between us and the mainstream, the elite media, and the average person gets to hear the elite media that is propaganda largely.

[00:36:14] Kaye: And propaganda takes various forms. One is just the bullshit of propaganda. Two is what you leave out of the story. I gave up watching cable news a long time ago. I can’t even listen quite often to public radio. Everyone worships public radio, so if you want good news, one thing to do is always to check out what foreign news services are saying.

Just as a check on your imagination. They too have their massive problems, but there’s no such thing as a singular truth. Do that. The other thing is that there are news outlets. I love David Sirota’s The Lever, there are those really great outlets and. You have to read the Times and the Post with that extra edge.

[00:36:55] Grumbine: Yes, being able to see through some of the stuff, it’s a challenge and I would imagine that the group of people in this country that actually has the time and the energy and the willingness to be more critical in their reading and listening and viewing is very small comparatively. And so

[00:37:17] Kaye: Yeah.

[00:37:18] Grumbine: up against a huge wall.

Of ignorance and a lack of imagination based on a lack of understanding. And so I think people are very frustrated in general.

[00:37:31] Kaye: Yeah. 30 years ago, I don’t remember the author, but 30 years ago there was this book, a British writer, political scientist, sociologist, remember this nice little book, and he said, we academics and intellectuals, those of us who spend our time reading, writing, thinking, debating blah, blah, blah. We don’t realize how for so many people, life tends to be a drudgery.

The long hours before I became an academic, the jobs that I had after eight hours changing tires or working on an assembly line, I used to say, oh, I’ll go home and read a book bullshit. I went up to a bowling alley just to get my body moving and my brain focused a little bit. So he argued that the biggest problem for the left is the drudgery that working people experienced.

Now, I don’t know if it was true or not, but then think about the last 30 years, how many people lost their better paying jobs and ended up working over time or working more than one job? The lives people live, literally, it’s its own form of censorship because what are they gonna do? How are they gonna gain access?

[00:38:34] Grumbine: Very, very profound.

[00:38:35] Kaye: And I wanna tell you, here’s where history can be helpful. The British Marxist historians that I became the historyographer of, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, the whole crew. And fortunately lucky for me, I became good friends with a few of them, really good friends, and I remember being really impressed that in Britain they were very slow to develop a massive higher education system.

 back, say to the ’30s, when you had these elite British universities that only let in elite kids, or scholarship boys, the ones who stood out in their high school years and just literally got recruited with the idea, well bring them into the ruling class as fresh blood. Well, E.P. Thompson, for example, who came from not a wealthy family but sort of family of missionaries and academics. He, after he finished his degree even, this was after World War II, he had served in the tank core in Italy, in World War II.

[00:39:32] Kaye: He got his first job based on his degree working in what we would call sort of working class education, adult education. They had these programs all across the country sponsored either by the local county council or a labor union or labor council. The idea was to give working class people who would never have gotten into university a chance to read literature and discuss it, to learn about history in a more formal way.

And we’ve become so used to the idea though, that will come to an end if it powers to be have their way. We’ve gotten so used to the idea that you go to high school, you go to college, cuz that’s gonna be your path. Well, maybe we have to come up with new venues for left education. There used to be back a hundred years ago, socialist Sunday schools.

Hmm. This was not only in England, even in the United States Socialist Sunday schools. Socialists learned how to write children’s books that encouraged an understanding of American history in its best radical form. Thomas Paine all the way through to the likes of Eugene Debs. We’re gonna have to start regaining our historical imaginations, I think.

[00:40:37] Grumbine: I think that’s important because in order to make change, you have to have an informed society and you need numbers. And back to FDR, in his time you made mention that things were very right wing at the time. I remember seeing images of KKK rallies in New York City at Madison Square Garden, black and white videos of Nazis marching down the walkway.

[00:41:00] Kaye: And when they did that, they had up on the auditorium stage, a giant picture of George Washington. They were gonna lay claim to the American story. Now again, I know he was a slave holder, by the way, in the ’30s, the communists were very smart in saying, we’re not gonna put up with this kind of rendition of history.

They started to promote the American historical radical story. They laid claim to Washington, Jefferson, and others, and that included black communists as well. The fact is that it’s a struggle for memory and that’s what FDR understood.

[00:41:37] Grumbine: When I talk to my African American friends, they say the new deal was no deal for me. And you mentioned that in the beginning of this.

[00:41:44] Kaye: Well, actually, I do want to say that’s not true. It may not have been as much of a new deal for African Americans, but it was, African Americans were recruited into the Civil Works Administration. They had jobs at the TVA, maybe not the most advanced engineering job. There were very few black engineers cause of the Racism that prevailed in southern schools. Read Adolph Reed’s work.

He literally rejects this presumption that the New Deal was not good for blacks. And read the fight for the four freedoms, as I point out, it happened and African Americans, not to the extent perhaps that the white working class benefited, but they did benefit, absolutely did benefit.

[00:42:27] Grumbine: It’s hard looking back in history with today’s eyes, like what you said with Gramsci, we had the great depression and the fight with the banks, one of the most brutal takedowns of the banking industry. Right before FDR, some of the most insane things ever to happen in this country were being figured out during that time period.

And I think that it’s kind of an interesting thing to see. It seems like FDR was the first centrist of sorts in the sense that looking back at that time, things were so volatile and people were literally dying in large numbers.

[00:43:09] Kaye: I’ll just have to intervene.

[00:43:11] Grumbine: Sure.

[00:43:12] Kaye: He was not a centrist. You’re missing the whole story. He moved the center significantly to the left.

[00:43:20] Grumbine: That’s what I’m saying. It was so imbalanced to the right. I’m trying to make the case that he was the real center of the pulse of America.

[00:43:29] Kaye: Here’s the guy who had polio.

[00:43:31] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:43:32] Kaye: He couldn’t stand up or walk without assistance. He wore heavy braces so he could move in a way that mimicked walking. There were occasions where he would ascend to a podium and fall on the way up hoping that people wouldn’t be able to see him because the crowd was so large, and then he becomes the most dynamic and vibrant political figure of the 20th century.

[00:43:54] Grumbine: Clearly.

[00:43:56] Kaye: I’m not making him out to be a saint. What I’m trying to get across is that we scorn badly. We’re fucking idiots a lot of the time. I don’t expect people to love FDR, but I think we waste our time failing to understand that there are lessons to be drawn.

[00:44:15] Grumbine: yes, I’m with you. I’m looking at a left audience that I know will be seeing FDR, wondering whether or not I tow the line. I’m trying to be fair. I know what their concerns are.

[00:44:28] Kaye: Believe me, Steve . I know all of the concerns. The first video I did with Jacobin was on Thomas Payne

[00:44:37] Grumbine: Okay.

[00:44:38] Kaye: And they titled it something like the Left Wing of the American Revolution. And I thought there was no left and right at the time. Okay, fine, we’d had a great conversation. Bhaskar, myself and Cale, who was the producer, he actually said to me, we gotta have you do some more stuff.

So how would you like to do one on the question of was FDR a socialist? And so, and I remember having to explain, make it clear that he would never have called himself a socialist. He didn’t call himself a social democrat. But the fact is that what he did was decidedly social democracy. In the American form and in a very American way.

He was a radical.

[00:45:18] Grumbine: Absolutely.

[00:45:19] Kaye: He was a radical.

[00:45:21] Grumbine: So tell me about his selection of Henry Wallace. Help me understand the role of Henry Wallace.

[00:45:27] Kaye: Henry Wallace during the thirties, his vice presidential running mate was Nance Garner from Texas. He had to balance off because everyone knew he was a progressive. They knew he was a progressive. The new deal that he laid out couldn’t get closer to social democracy than Edward Bernstein in Germany could have gotten.

It literally included the makings for social security. He was gonna launch massive public works to improve the infrastructure and the environment. He said, we’re gonna protect workers’ rights, which by the way, as soon as you talk about that kind of thing, it means, my God, he is gonna support labor unionism even if he wasn’t ready to automatically do what Wagner wanted him to do. By the way, tell me the last time you ever heard a president talk about redistributing wealth. When he ran, he said, we have a maldistribution of wealth in this country. We’re gonna lift up farmers and workers’ incomes. We’re gonna enable them to buy things. Then in ’34, he gave a couple of speeches where he basically said, this distribution of wealth and income is unAmerican.

We’re gonna have to redistribute. And then he said, we’re gonna tax the rich. That’s who he was taxing. They hated him for doing that. In fact, a number of very rich people thought he’d be a great president. Why? Because he was going to bring an end to prohibition so you could tax beer sales and you wouldn’t have to tax the rich.

That’s true.

[00:46:53] Grumbine: Oh my. Okay.

[00:46:54] Kaye: But then when he not only ended prohibition and made himself a hero with working people, he then proceeded to call for taxes on the rich . And then he actually went before Congress and he said, have to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations. We need to set a cap on wealth accumulation.

He wanted to cap wealth.

[00:47:15] Grumbine: Nice.

[00:47:16] Kaye: You tell me when you ever heard somebody talk about capping wealth.

[00:47:21] Grumbine: But I like it

[00:47:23] Kaye: Next time a pseudo socialist says to you, whatever they say, you say, wait. How do you feel about capping wealth? Oh, great idea. Well, that was FDR’s idea.

[00:47:32] Grumbine: Right. So take me back to Wallace cuz I wanna understand his role.

[00:47:37] Kaye: So it’s 1940

[00:47:38] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:47:40] Kaye: and there had never been a third term president and he knew that everybody, tires of a politician. And he was a bit concerned cuz in 36 he won the biggest victory ever scored in an election. He had Wallace in his cabinet from the beginning. He was the Secretary of Agriculture and he really did want someone of Wallace’s commitment to the New Deal itself.

And he brings him on to the ticket. A lot of people didn’t want Wallace on the ticket. First, you need to understand that a lot of the Democratic party establishment thought of Wallace as a flake,

[00:48:19] Grumbine: Like they thought of Bernie, right?

[00:48:21] Kaye: No worse, far worse. No, not because of his commitment to the New Deal. It wasn’t his politics. He had a spiritual advisor.

[00:48:29] Grumbine: Uh, okay.

[00:48:31] Kaye: It sort of unsettled them that he might not be really a Christian, something like that.

[00:48:35] Grumbine: Ah.

[00:48:36] Kaye: But Wallace joins the ticket. They win. During those years of his vice presidential status, he gave great speeches like we’re entering the age of the common man.

He was an outstanding vice president and he really was a champion of the New Deal and also a champion of combating racism, of enhancing the new deal and all the things you’d want in a vice president like FDR. But he gave that speech in contrast to Henry Luce . Henry Luce had written a piece in one of his magazines titled The American Century, and he basically talks about America’s now poised to be the dominant power in the world, and these are the kinds of things we should do.

Well, Henry Wallace replied, he said, no, this should be the century of the common man. And the narrative he offered was that he talked about the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. So he was such a good speaker that everyone embraces this. This is all part of the moment.

Russians, the Soviets, are our allies. But this came back to haunt him. So some thought of him as a flake. Others thought of him as soft on Russia, and others said, didn’t he call some elements of the capitalist class fascists? And so did FDR for what it’s worth. But Wallace was the target. So in 44, in that year of the election, the democratic capitalist establishment came to FDR and said, we don’t want him.

We want somebody else. Now, FDR didn’t wanna drop him, but most Americans didn’t know that FDR’s Health was not good. He was hiding the fact that he was not in good health. He wasn’t that old. He was maybe 63 years old, 62 years old, but his health wasn’t good. So he basically said, let’s leave it up to the convention.

And at the convention there were shenanigans. And it was literally as a consequence of the shenanigans that Wallace was not acclaimed the vice presidential candidate, but that Truman was named the candidate. Now Truman was a good new dealer. He supported the New Deal, but he had come outta machine politics in Kansas City and he just didn’t have the experience and the political stamina to stand up to the kinds of things that somebody with greater cabinet experience,

and having worked with FDR would have. Truman in his first year actually did seek to make something of the economic Bill of Rights idea. But he just wasn’t up to the job of President and he was able to be pushed around all too often. It wasn’t only until 48 when he realized, when basically he had pushed Wallace out of the cabinet.

Wallace made a big mistake, however, and by the way, my friend John Nichols wrote a really good book about this, the Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. And he tells the whole story of Wallace in a really smart way. But I think I would add to that story, the fact that Wallace made a mistake. When he was basically driven outta the cabinet,

he left the party. He ends up running in 48 on what’s called the Progressive ticket. And this is heart of the Cold War, and the Progressive ticket was reasonable enough, but the communists played a major role in the campaign. They were just too easily targeted. And Truman moved left again back to where he started his presidency after Roosevelt’s death.

And he lambasted at capital. He sounded like FDR at his best, and he barely won, but he won the presidency to everyone’s surprise on his own at this time. But Wallace had so marginalized himself, his political career was finished. He should have stayed in the party if he could have, and really demanded and pushed for progressivism.

Now the irony is, is that Bernie stayed within the realm of the party that many years later, but he should have joined the party. Now, why do I say that? After 2016 when Hillary made a real mess up of her campaign, it was terrible

[00:52:35] Grumbine: Abysmal.

[00:52:36] Kaye: When she lost, then, the first thing Bernie should have done on December 1st, or January 1st of the next year is said, I’m joining the Democratic Party.

And then said, we are going to make this the progressive FDR Democratic Party once again. And then all those folks have said, well, you’re not even a Democrat. Would’ve had to shut their mouths.

[00:52:58] Grumbine: Yep. Take me through the war years. From what I’ve heard from my parents and my grandparents. The radio, the fireside chats.

[00:53:09] Kaye: The fireside chats began early in the presidency.

[00:53:12] Grumbine: Yes. All the stuff that he did to involve communities and bring people into the fold.

[00:53:19] Kaye: I read the letters. People said they felt either that FDR was in the living room with them, or they were in the living room with FDR at the White House.

[00:53:29] Grumbine: Wow.

[00:53:30] Kaye: Now, the other thing is, is that not everyone even owned a radio. A lot of poor whites and blacks in the south didn’t own radios. If the radio cord was long enough, if they had electricity, to be placed on the window, talk about community, they would gather and listen to FDR. So, it mattered. And he would talk to them as elitist a figure as he was growing up, somehow, even in spite of his accent, people heard him as if they were friends. And even during the war, they didn’t stop transforming America.

During the war, the labor movement grew. They had an arrangement with government. They would not stage formal strikes during the war, but they, then, had what was called a maintenance of membership agreement. And the defense industry just expanded. So, the rules were if workers came into a plant, they were automatically signed up in the union and they had two weeks where they could withdraw from the union.

But why withdraw from the union? The union was gonna protect your ass against the bosses. So, the labor movement just expanded. The civil rights movement went from 50,000 formally organized members to nearly 500,000 organized members. In mid thirties, you had the first National Housewives movement, which spread from New York City with blacks, Jews, and Italians, who were very much a part of the CIO union movement whose husbands were in the unions, maybe they themselves, too, spread out to the Midwest to all the way up into the Dakotas, out to the west coast. The Nation Magazine wrote an article about it, the first housewives movement. Well, during the war, that same housewives movement mobilized in order to keep an eye on businesses and the prices they were charging. Women were organized by the Office of Price Controls to go check up on business and report them if they were breaking the law. So, you had these mobilizations, even the American Legion Auxiliary, the women got involved in this anti-corporate activity.

Black workers, women workers were all of a sudden making living wages.

[00:55:36] Grumbine: Amazing.

[00:55:37] Kaye: They actually reduced inequality between the late thirties and the 1950s is important. It began in 37, 38, thereabouts, based on the New Deal efforts, all the way through to 1973. Even though the rich got richer, inequality, not just poverty, inequality was reduced.

That is working people’s incomes were rising. Poverty actually was being addressed so that, yeah, the rich are getting richer, but at the same time, working people were moving closer too. That was called the great compression. An economist dubbed it the great compression, and people were asking the economists well, why was there a great compression?

Well, for a start, you had labor unions. After the Roosevelt presidency, corporate bosses knew not to be grossly greedy. They knew it. It was the ethos of the time. Well, that disappeared when, in the seventies, they decided they were going to start breaking unions. They were going to start trying to improve their profits.

They had to compete with Japan and Germany for industrial profits. The period of mid thirties, right through to 1973 inequality in America was reduced. Starting with the new deal, continuing through the war effort, and, then, especially when you had all of these labor unions. Keep in mind that companies that were not organized by labor had to compete with those kinds of wages.

Here in Green Bay, Wisconsin, this is a paper making valley from Oshkosh and down to Fond du Lac all the way up here to Green Bay. Paper Mills. When I arrived in Green Bay in 78, there was only one mill that was not organized, and that was Fort Howard Paper Company. It might ring a bell with some people. If you go into the men’s room at a bar, there might be a paper towel dispenser.

It might be painted over, but if look closely, it might say Fort Howard Paper. It’s no longer a Fort Howard paper. They’re part of a much larger enterprise. It might be Georgia Pacific or something like that. Well, when they merged, one factory was organized and the other was not. But Fort Howard was known for paying great wages.

Why? Because they wanted to keep the union out. Power in the workplace, it was worth spending the extra money.

[00:57:57] Grumbine: You cover in your book Lyndon Johnson,

[00:58:00] Kaye: Oh yeah.

[00:58:01] Grumbine: But you also talk about Obama and how he gave up public option and other things.

[00:58:06] Kaye: It’s called neoliberalism.

[00:58:08] Grumbine: That’s right.

I know Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, the Powell memo. I know all the stuff from the right wing side. What was it that influenced the left? What influenced the Democrats to go that direction?

[00:58:22] Kaye: The two names from the seventies that I hold accountable. Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter.

[00:58:30] Grumbine: Hmm.

[00:58:30] Kaye: Gary Hart. He was significant in the McGovern campaign. We could talk about that Another.

[00:58:35] Grumbine: Let’s do it another time.

[00:58:37] Kaye: Well, let’s talk about Carter in particular. Carter was the father of neoliberalism. He’s, like, the guy who literally spawned Democratic party neoliberalism. His family were southern peanut farmers. Southern capitalists did not like FDR, and it wasn’t necessarily only race.

It all had to do with the fact they just did not want to see labor move into the south, and FDR did. So, his family hated FDR. That’s in contrast to Martin Luther King’s family, African Americans, who actually adored FDR, both from Georgia. So, Carter runs for president and pretends to be a liberal. He was a member of the Trilateral Commission that was created in 1973 right in there by John D. Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. This was this vast coalition of West European, Japanese, and American business people and political leaders. But you were not an office holder when you were in the Trilateral Commission. Carter, I guess, was out of the governorship. George H. W. Bush was a member of it, and they brought out a report in 1975 titled, The Crisis of Democracy. And In The Crisis of Democracy, this was not unlike the Powell Memorandum.

This is all part of that same stuff. The Trilateral report said that democracy is out of hand. We have a crisis of democracy, not because something wrong with democracy itself, but because too many people are putting pressure on it. I remember the term, they said, we have an excess of democracy , and they named their villains. They named poor people, women, students, academics, journalists, this whole cohort of folks who were making demands on democracy. They said they had to temper democracy, they had to reduce the pressure. Basically, what they’re saying is, we gotta turn around on democracy. We’ve gotta diffuse democracy. They’re better words they had than I’m probably using.

Carter was part of that. And let me remind you, when he ran for president in 76, who do you think was his biggest backer? John D. Rockefeller.

[01:00:57] Grumbine: Yes.

[01:00:58] Kaye: Who was the guy he brought into his cabinet? Brzezinski. Brzezinski created the Trilateral Commission on behalf of John D. Rockefeller. And, by the way, there’s a whole book that came out all about the evil word austerity.

Who is the guy who first introduced austerity as a term into the discourse?

[01:01:20] Grumbine: Tell me.

[01:01:21] Kaye: In 1978, Carter starts giving speeches. He puts on his sweater, he turns on the fireplace, and he says, we gotta lower the heat. We have to lower our expectations. We have to say nice things about America. We have to face a period of austerity.

[01:01:38] Grumbine: Oh.

[01:01:38] Kaye: That’s Carter’s term. And then he said, I’m paraphrasing. We have to liberate capital, liberate business. And then he signed orders deregulating transportation, deregulating finance. He begins the whole march towards neoliberalism. He says, government can’t solve all our problems, blah, blah, blah. Well, Reagan turned around and said, government is the problem.

But Reagan rode in on the coattails of Jimmy Carter.

[01:02:03] Grumbine: He sure did.

[01:02:05] Kaye: Who was the guy who appointed Volker?

[01:02:08] Grumbine: Jimmy Carter.

[01:02:09] Kaye: Jimmy Carter. They, basically, fucked the working class.

[01:02:15] Grumbine: Absolutely, yes.

[01:02:17] Kaye: So, how could Reagan win? Because I believe millions and millions of workers said, I’m not gonna vote for either one of them. They stayed home.

[01:02:26] Grumbine: Wasn’t that about the same time with the hostage crisis that Reagan came in on a white steed?

[01:02:32] Kaye: That mattered but Carter just blew everything, basically. I have fun debates over dinner with fellow lefties arguing, who’s the worst? Carter, Clinton, Obama? Who’s the worst of the three? Now, in many ways, Clinton, and, by the way, I won’t go into the McGovern story. That’s another whole story.

[01:02:57] Grumbine: Each one of them in their own way has gotten progressively less FDR.

[01:03:02] Kaye: Yeah.

[01:03:02] Grumbine: And Carter, his happy go-lucky after presidency, Habitat for Humanity has clouded what he is in real life.

[01:03:13] Kaye: Oh yeah. And everybody loves Jimmy Carter, but I don’t.

[01:03:17] Grumbine: But it’s interesting because Bill Clinton, I remember reading about him, basically, flying out to an execution to prove his conservative chops.

[01:03:26] Kaye: Yes, right, he did. A man who was essentially incapable of rational decision making. Who do you think provided the Arkansas airstrips to support the Contras?

[01:03:40] Grumbine: Would that be Bill Clinton?

[01:03:42] Kaye: Yeah. Robert Reich learned his lesson when he went into the cabinet and, basically, said, I was locked in the cabinet. Something like that.

[01:03:53] Grumbine: Alright, Harvey, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a blast and I hope we can do this again. I enjoy your stories so much and, for me, history is really important. So, having someone that enjoys it and is able to put that out there in such a way that it ties loose ends together is a real big value and I appreciate your time.

It’s been a pleasure. Tell us what else you’re working on and where we might find more of your work.

[01:04:18] Kaye: We’re finishing up this chapter for a big book on American political fight. It’s not my book, I’m just doing the FDR chapter. I’m doing a lot of work with people whose names I can’t give you on political advice, because they all want to become like FDR. Soon enough, you’ll know. I’m not actually writing another book right now, but I’m working as much as I can with Alan Minsky, who you had on with me.

[01:04:40] Grumbine: Yeah.

[01:04:40] Kaye: Because we really do want to advance the idea of a 21st century economic bill of rights modeled, but even more progressive and social democratic than FDRs of 1944, though, I take nothing away from the 1944 rendition of it. I’m sure people might be entertained to know that I am teaching a class for Stephanie Kelton.

[01:05:01] Grumbine: Whoa.

[01:05:02] Kaye: Not on FDR, on Thomas Paine.

[01:05:05] Grumbine: Interesting.

[01:05:05] Kaye: It’s a course called Ideologies of Capitalism, and she asked me, how about Thomas Paine?

Did he have anything to say about this? I said, you bet. He has something to say about this. Thomas Paine was the godfather of Social Security.

[01:05:18] Grumbine: No kidding.

[01:05:19] Kaye: Yeah. He wrote a pamphlet, Rights of Man and, then, Agrarian Justice, and he lays out the ideas that become the basis for later social democracy, specifically in Agrarian Justice, he called for what we know today of as Social Security. Not only for the elderly or older workers, but, also, he wanted to give every young person, man and woman, that is boy and girl, when they reach the age of maturity, a certain amount of money, so they would be able to get educated, buy some land. They wanted to prevent poverty to begin with rather than have to combat it later.

[01:05:58] Grumbine: Very good. Harvey, thank you so much for joining me.

[01:06:01] Kaye: If If anybody listens, I’m on Twitter @harveyjkaye. Don’t ask me to give you a dissertation in reply to anything you send me, but pick up the book, Fight for the Four Freedoms.

[01:06:13] Grumbine: And it is a good book, and I appreciate your time, sir. And with that, my name’s Steve Grumbine, the host of Macro N Cheese. Please check out our podcast. Please become a donor and check out every one of Harvey Kaye’s books out there. And we are out of here.

[01:06:35] End credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.

Harvey J. Kaye (born October 9, 1949) is an American historian and sociologist. 

Kaye is an author of several political books including “Thomas Paine and the Promise of America”, and “The Fight for the Four Freedoms”.[1] He has appeared as an expert on several political news shows and podcasts including “Bill Moyers Journal” and “That’s Jacqueline”. He is a regular guest on The David Feldman Show. 

Kaye is a Professor Emeritus of Democracy & Justice Studies and the Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.  – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

BACKGROUND

Franklin Delano Roosevelt  

Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term as governor of New York when he was elected as the nation’s 32nd president in 1932. With the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt immediately acted to restore public confidence, proclaiming a bank holiday and speaking directly to the public in a series of radio broadcasts or “fireside chats.” His ambitious slate of New Deal programs and reforms redefined the role of the federal government in the lives of Americans.  

https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/franklin-d-roosevelt 

The New Deal 

The New Deal was a series of programs and projects instituted during the Great Depression by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. When Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. 

https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/new-deal 

The Four Freedoms 

As America entered the war these “four freedoms” – the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from wants, and the freedom from fear – symbolized America’s war aims and gave hope in the following years to a war-wearied people because they knew they were fighting for freedom. 

https://www.fdrlibrary.org/four-freedoms

20th Century Bill of Rights  

President Franklin Roosevelt used calm and inspiring communication with American citizens through fireside chats and his State of the Union addresses. His communication style established firebreaks in the panic that followed in the wake of the Great Depression and harnessed the needed courage to respond to the 1941 military attack against Pearl Harbor. Three years into the war, Roosevelt chose to reassert the necessity of winning the economic war on poverty at home just as fascism had to be conquered in Europe. To accomplish this, the president wielded the political clout and trust he had developed with Americans to propose a Second Bill of Rights in his 1944 State of the Union address. 

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/activities/franklin-roosevelt-second-bill-of-rights-1944 

https://jan.ucc.nau.edu/cgg/Second%20Bill%20of%20Rights%20FDR%201944.pdf 

PEOPLE MENTIONED

Thomas Paine 

(born January 29, 1737, Thetford, Norfolk, England—died June 8, 1809, New York, New York, U.S.), English-American writer and political pamphleteer whose Common Sense pamphlet and Crisis papers were important influences on the American Revolution. 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Paine

Henry Wallace  

(October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was an American politician, journalist, farmer, and businessman who served as the 33rd vice president of the United States, the 11th U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, and the 10th U.S. Secretary of Commerce. He was the nominee of the new Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential election. -from wikipedia 

https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/essays/wallace-1941-vicepresident

Eugene Debs 

(born November 5, 1855, Terre Haute, Indiana, U.S.—died October 20, 1926, Elmhurst, Illinois), labour organizer and Socialist Party candidate for U.S. president five times between 1900 and 1920. 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eugene-V-Debs

Henry Luce 

(born April 3, 1898, Dengzhou, Shandong province, China—died February 28, 1967, Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.), American magazine publisher who built a publishing empire on Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, becoming one of the most powerful figures in the history of American journalism. 

 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Luce

Eleanor Roosevelt  

(October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s four terms in office, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States. 

https://www.fdrlibrary.org/er-biography

Harry Truman 

(May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 34th vice president from January to April 1945 under Franklin Roosevelt and as a United States Senator from Missouri 

from 1935 to January 1945. 

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/trivia/biographical-sketch-harry-truman

David Sirota-Lever News 

(born November 2, 1975) is an American journalist, columnist at The Guardian, editor for Jacobin, author, television writer, and screenwriter. He is also a political commentator and radio host based in Denver. He is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, political spokesperson, and blogger. In March 2019, he began working as the senior advisor and speechwriter on the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.[1] In 2022, he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for conceiving the story for Netflix‘s Don’t Look Up alongside co-writer and director Adam McKay. He is founder of The Lever news outlet. 

https://www.levernews.com/author/david-sirota/

Alan Minsky 

A lifelong activist, who has worked as a progressive journalist for the past two decades. Alan was the Program Director at KPFK Los Angeles from 2009-2018; and has coordinated Pacifica Radio’s national coverage of elections. Before that, Alan was one of the founders of LA Indymedia. He is the creator and producer of the political podcasts for The Nation and Jacobin Magazine, as well as a contributor to Commondreams and Truthdig.   

https://www.commondreams.org/author/alan-minsky 

BOOKS

Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party by John Nichols

Thomas Paine and the Promise of America by Harvey J. Kaye

The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great by Harvey J. Kaye

Take Hold of Our History: Make America Radical Again by Harvey J. Kaye

FDR On Democracy by Harvey J. Kaye

The Capital Order by Clara Mattei

Episode 178 – A 21st Century Bill of Rights with Harvey J. Kaye and Alan Minsky

CONCEPTS

Social Democracy 

https://www.annenbergclassroom.org/glossary_term/social-democracy/

Democratic Socialism 

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/1/17637028/bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-cynthia-nixon-democratic-socialism-jacobin-dsa

American Century 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Century

Century of the Common Man 

https://shafr.org/teaching/draft-classroom-documents/century-of-the-common-man 

21st Century Bill of Rights 

https://berniesanders.com/21st-century-economic-bill-of-rights/

Neoliberalism 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neoliberalism/

Duopoly 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system 

EVENTS

Gilded Age 

In United States history, the Gilded Age was an era extending roughly from 1877 to 1896, which was sandwiched between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era. It was a time of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern and Western United States. As American wages grew much higher than those in Europe, especially for skilled workers, and industrialization demanded an ever-increasing unskilled labor force, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants. – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

https://www.britannica.com/event/Gilded-Age 

Wagner Act 

The Wagner Bill proposed to create a new independent agency—the National Labor Relations Board, made up of three members appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate-to enforce employee rights rather than to mediate disputes. 

https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/who-we-are/our-history/1935-passage-of-the-wagner-act 

National Labor Relations Board 

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an independent agency of the federal government of the United States with responsibilities for enforcing U.S. labor law in relation to collective bargaining and unfair labor practices. – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

https://www.nlrb.gov

Japanese Internment 

Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin D. Roosevelt through his Executive Order 9066. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, would be incarcerated in isolated camps. Enacted in reaction to the Pearl Harbor attacks and the ensuing war, the incarceration of Japanese Americans is considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century. 

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/japanese-american-relocation 

https://densho.org

Great compression 

The Great Compression refers to “a decade of extraordinary wage compression” in the United States in the early 1940s. During that time, economic inequality as shown by wealth distribution and income distribution between the rich and poor became much smaller than it had been in preceding time periods. – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 

https://www.nber.org/papers/w3817 

Powell Memorandum  

Written in 1971 to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Lewis Powell Memo was a blueprint for corporate domination of American Democracy. 

https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/ 

https://realprogressives.org/2017-05-19-response-to-the-powell-memo-a-progressive-blueprint/ 

https://lpeproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Powell-Memo.pdf 

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/

Trilateral commission 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Trilateral-Commission

“Biden Lied, 2020 Debate” 

https://theintercept.com/2020/03/17/biden-fact-check-social-security-bankruptcy/

Railway Labor Action, 2022 

https://jacobin.com/2022/12/railway-labor-act-unions-strikes-history 

• Download Audio (mp3)