Franklin D. Roosevelt on Privileged Enterprise

Wealth Gap Series

Acceptance Speech for the Re-nomination for the Presidency, Excerpts

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15314

27 Jun 1936

The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization. Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

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. It became privileged enterprise, not free enterprise. The political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives.

Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for.