America's Dream of Security for All, 1934

From the Editorial Page of the Burlington Daily Times-News, Monday, July 2, 1934

America’s Old Dream, Security for All

Just how far the fall congressional election will turn into a national referendum on Mr. Roosevelt’s new program for social security is a matter for the political wiseacres to forecast.

At this distance, however, two things seem more or less evident.

First, the argument is likely to be over the way of reaching this goal, rather than over the wisdom of trying to reach it at all.

Second, the tentatively outlined program looks very much like a simple extension of the oldest and most tenaciously held dream in American life.

Security for the individual in America, as Mr. Roosevelt sees it, seems to call for three things: Productive employment, protection against misfortune, and proper housing.

Over the details of this program there is room for vast argument; over the way of putting it into effect there is even more. The most conservative of capitalists and the readiest of radicals could endorse these general aims in complete accord, but they’d be apt to have a fine row trying to settle on the best way of attaining them.

Nevertheless, it is a fine thing to have this very general goal set up as an objective.

This kind of security is exactly the sort of thing that led most of our ancestors to come to the new world in the first place. They were under economic pressure in Europe; they felt themselves to be at the mercy of forces that they could never control; over there, in a new land, they hoped that they could construct a society in which human beings could have less fear of hardship of poverty, and of hunger.

The belief in that dream has been responsible for most of the optimism which is so typical of the American spirit. We have felt, for more than a century, that we were somehow building a society here in which the common man would get a better break than he ever got elsewhere.

Seeking to protect the common man against unemployment, against accidents, and against the traditional penury of old age, and trying to guarantee that he shall have a decent home to live in – what is this but an effort to make the old American dream come true?

For the next decade, at least, we shall be arguing about the best way of doing this. Maybe we’ll try Mr. Roosevelt’s way and maybe we’ll try somebody else’s.

But there can be little doubt that in one way or another we shall do our utmost to make the dream come true.