Where might they look? They could do no better than the nation’s most important leader in both peace and war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and, particularly, his most magnificent speech, in which he took threats to national security as the basis for proposing a second Bill of Rights. Roosevelt’s proposal, long confined to the dustbin of history, was intended as a kind of 20th century analogue to the Declaration of Independence. The Democratic Party should reclaim it as such, and the convention in Boston would be a perfect time to do it.

(While the current White House seems oblivious to the issues that gave rise to FDR’s second Bill of Rights, Iraqi government officials, surprisingly, have included parts of it in Iraq’s interim Constitution.)

On Jan. 11, 1944, the war against fascism was going well, and the real question was the nature of the peace. At noon, Roosevelt delivered his State of the Union address to Congress. The speech wasn’t elegant. It was messy, sprawling, unruly, a bit of a pastiche and not at all literary. It was the opposite of President Lincoln’s tight, poetic Gettysburg Address. But because of what it said, this forgotten address has a strong claim to being the most important speech of the 20th century — and to defining the deepest aspirations of the Democratic Party.

Roosevelt began by pointedly emphasizing that the war was a shared endeavor in which the United States was simply one participant: “This Nation in the past two years has become an active partner in the world’s greatest war against human slavery.” And as a result of that partnership, the war was being won. He continued, “But I do not think that any of us Americans can be content with mere survival … The one supreme objective for the future … can be summed up in one word: Security.” Roosevelt argued that security “means not only physical security which provides safety from attacks by aggressors” but “also economic security, social security, moral security.” Roosevelt insisted that “essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.”

Directly linking international concerns to domestic affairs, Roosevelt emphasized the need for a “realistic tax law — which will tax all unreasonable profits, both individual and corporate, and reduce the ultimate cost of the war to our sons and daughters.” He stressed that the nation “cannot be content, no matter how high the general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people — whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth — is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”

At this point Roosevelt became stunningly bold and ambitious. He looked back, not entirely approvingly, to the framing of the U.S. Constitution. At its inception, he said, the nation had grown “under the protection of certain inalienable political rights — among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.” But over time, these rights had proved inadequate: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence … In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.”

Then he listed the bill’s eight rights:

Roosevelt added that these “rights spell ‘security’” — the “one word” that captured the overriding objective for the future. Recognizing that the second Bill of Rights was continuous with the war effort, he said, “After this war is won, we must be prepared to move forward in the implementation of these rights … America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

FDR emphasized “the great dangers of ‘rightist reaction’ in this Nation” and concluded that government should promote security instead of paying heed “to the whining demands of selfish pressure groups who seek to feather their nests while young Americans are dying.”

What made it possible for Roosevelt to propose the second Bill of Rights? Part of the answer lies in the recent memory of the Great Depression; part of it lies in the effort to confront the dual threats of fascism and communism with a broader vision of a democratic society. But part of the answer lies in a simple idea, one now lost but pervasive in American culture in Roosevelt’s time — that markets and wealth depend on government intervention. Without government creating and protecting property rights, property itself cannot exist. Even the people who most loudly denounce government interference depend on it every day.

Political scientist Lester Ward vividly expressed the point in 1885: “Those who denounce state intervention are the ones who most frequently and successfully invoke it. The cry of laissez faire mainly goes up from the ones who, if really ‘let alone,’ would instantly lose their wealth-absorbing power.” Think, for example, of the owner of a radio station, a house in the suburbs, an expensive automobile, or a large bank account. Each such owner depends on the protection provided by a coercive and well-funded state — equipped with a police force, judges, prosecutors, and an extensive body of criminal and civil law.

From the beginning, Roosevelt’s White House understood all this quite well. In accepting the Democratic nomination in 1932, Roosevelt insisted that we “must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.” Or consider Roosevelt’s address to the Commonwealth Club in the same year, where he emphasized “that the exercise of … property rights might so interfere with the rights of the individual that the government, without whose assistance the property rights could not exist, must intervene, not to destroy individualism but to protect it.”

Thus, against the backdrop of the Depression and the threats from fascism and communism, Roosevelt was entirely prepared to insist that government should protect individualism not only by protecting property rights but also by ensuring decent opportunities and minimal security for all. In fact, this was the defining theme of his presidency. When campaigning against Herbert Hoover in 1932, Roosevelt called for “the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” that would recognize that every person has “a right to make a comfortable living.”

Extending this theme to the international arena in his State of the Union address in 1941, Roosevelt endorsed the “four freedoms” — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear — that, he said, must be enjoyed “everywhere in the world.” As the Allied victory loomed on the horizon, Roosevelt offered details about “freedom from want” in his speech proposing a second Bill of Rights.

Roosevelt died within 15 months of delivering this great speech, and he was unable to take serious steps toward implementing the second bill. But his proposal, despite being mostly unknown in the United States, has had an extraordinary influence internationally. It played a major role in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, finalized in 1948 under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt and publicly endorsed by the leaders of many nations, including the United States, at the time. The declaration proclaims that everyone has a “right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” The declaration also proclaims a right to education.

By virtue of its effect on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the second Bill of Rights has been a leading American export — influencing the constitutions of dozens of nations. The most stunning example is the interim Iraqi Constitution, written with American help and celebrated by the Bush administration. In Article XIV, it proclaims: “The individual has the right to security, education, health care, and social security,” adding that the nation and its government “shall strive to provide prosperity and employment opportunities to the people.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court embarked on a path of giving constitutional recognition to some of the rights that Roosevelt listed. In Rooseveltian fashion, the court suggested that there might be some kind of right to an education; it ruled that people could not be deprived of welfare benefits without a hearing; it said that citizens from one state could not be subject to “waiting periods” that deprived them of financial and medical help in another state. And in its most dramatic statement, the court said: “Welfare, by meeting the basic demands of subsistence, can help bring within the reach of the poor the same opportunities that are available to others to participate meaningfully in the life of the community. [Public] assistance, then, is not mere charity, but a means to ‘promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.’”

By the late 1960s, respected constitutional experts thought the court might be on the verge of recognizing a right to be free from desperate conditions — a right that captures many of the rights that Roosevelt attempted to implement. But all this was undone as a result of the election of Richard Nixon as president. Nixon promptly appointed four Supreme Court justices — Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, Lewis Powell and Harry Blackmun — who showed no interest in the second Bill of Rights. In a series of decisions, the new justices, joined by one or two others, rejected the claim that the Constitution protected the rights that Roosevelt listed (a vivid reminder of how much the interpretation of the Constitution depends on the outcome of presidential elections).

Roosevelt himself did not argue for constitutional change. He wanted the second bill to be part of the nation’s deepest commitments, to be recognized and vindicated by the public, not by federal judges, whom he distrusted. He thought it should be seen in the same way as the Declaration of Independence — as a statement of America’s most fundamental aspirations.

The United States continues to live, at least some of the time, according Roosevelt’s vision. A national consensus exists in favor of the right to education, the right to social security, the right to be free from monopoly, possibly even the right to a job. But under the influence of powerful private groups — the “rightist reaction” against which Roosevelt specifically warned — many of Roosevelt’s hopes remain unfulfilled. In recent years, many Americans have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism that endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but distrusts government intervention and believes that people must largely fend for themselves.

Democrats so far have not adequately responded to this approach through words or deeds. They have failed to show, as Roosevelt did, that this form of so-called individualism is incoherent. As Roosevelt well knew, no one is really against government intervention, whatever they say. The wealthy, at least as much as the poor, receive help from government and from the benefits that it bestows.

It is especially unfortunate that Democrats have failed to respond to the rebirth of this confusion under the current administration. While proposing a sensible system of federal tax credits to increase health insurance coverage, for example, Bush found it necessary to make the senseless suggestion that what he had proposed was “not a government program.” Time and again, conservatives claim that American culture is antagonistic to “positive rights,” even though property rights themselves require “positive” action.

The result? Both at home and abroad, we have seen the rise of a false and utterly ahistorical picture of American culture and history. That picture is far from innocuous. America’s self-image — our sense of ourselves — has a significant impact on what we actually do. We should not look at ourselves through a distorted mirror, lest we remold ourselves in its image.

Amid the war on terrorism, the problem goes even deeper. The nation could have taken the attacks of 9/11 as the basis for a new recognition of human vulnerability and of collective responsibilities to those who need help. It was the threat from abroad, after all, that led Roosevelt to a renewed emphasis on the importance of security — with the understanding that this term included not merely protection against bullets and bombs but also against hunger, disease, illiteracy and desperate poverty. Hence Roosevelt supported a strongly progressive income tax aimed at “unreasonable profits” and offering help for those at the bottom. President Bush, on the other hand, has supported tax cuts that give disproportionate help to those at the top. Most important, Roosevelt saw the external threats as a reason to broaden the class of rights enjoyed by those at home. Bush, to say the least, has failed to do the same.

President Bush, like America as a whole, has been celebrating what is called the “Greatest Generation,” the victors in World War II. But that celebration has been far too sentimental; it has betrayed the pragmatic and forward-looking character of that generation. Meeting in Boston, the birthplace of the American Revolution, the Democratic Party has a unique opportunity to reclaim Roosevelt’s legacy — to remind itself, and the nation, that the leader of the Greatest Generation had a project, one he believed to be radically incomplete. Affirming the second Bill of Rights would be an excellent place to start.

Here’s what Woodward reports: In late July 2002, Gen. Tommy Franks informed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that to make the Iraq war feasible, at least two steps had to be taken in Kuwait. First, air bases there had to be made suitable for aircraft use, parking and munitions storage. Second, a new fuel distribution capability had to be created, enabling fuel to be moved from Kuwaiti refineries to the Iraqi border so as to support the coming invasion. Bush told Woodward that these activities were done covertly and at significant expense — leading, in fact, to 30 projects that the president expressly approved by the end of July.

But how would they be funded? In Woodward’s words, “Some of the funding would come from the supplemental appropriation bill being worked out in Congress for the Afghanistan war and the general war on terrorism. The rest would come from old appropriations.”

What exactly does this mean? Begin with the “old appropriations.” The most likely candidate is the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, passed on Sept. 14, 2001, a direct response to the 9/11 attacks that appropriated $40 billion for five enumerated purposes:

1) providing federal, state and local preparedness for mitigating and responding to the 9/11 attacks.
2) providing support to counter, investigate or prosecute domestic and international terrorism.
3) providing increased transportation security.
4) repairing public facilities and transportation systems damaged by the attacks.
5) supporting national security.

Of these, 1, 3 and 4 could not possibly include preparations for war in Iraq — and 2 and 5 even seem a bit of a stretch. In fact, this emergency supplemental appropriation was universally understood as a complement to the very measure, enacted on the same day, that authorized the president to use force to respond to the 9/11 attack (and thus to wage war in Afghanistan).

The early draft of that authorization, proposed by the White House, would have given the president broad authority to “deter and prevent any related future acts of terrorism and aggression against the United States.” It was soon narrowed to permit the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11 or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

In these circumstances, the emergency appropriation was mostly designed for domestic action that would amount to disaster recovery and strengthening internal preparedness — an interpretation that finds support in a proviso saying that “not less than one half of the $40,000,000 shall be for disaster recovery activities and assistance related to the terrorist acts in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.”

Might anything in the Sept. 14 appropriation permit the president to devote many millions of dollars to war preparations for Iraq? It could be argued that the purpose of “promoting national security” or “providing support to counter, investigate or prosecute domestic or international terrorism” is broad enough to give the president this authority. But even this much is not entirely clear. With the words “promoting national security,” Congress cannot plausibly have meant to give the president a blank check to prepare for hostilities wherever he chooses.

But let’s suppose that these words are read very broadly. Even so, the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act clearly states that the “President shall consult with the chairmen and ranking minority members of the Committees on Appropriations prior to the transfer of these funds.”

Did President Bush consult with those leaders before committing millions of dollars to preparations for the war in Iraq? If so, there might be no problem. But at this stage it is far from clear that such consultation occurred. And if not, then the Sept. 14 appropriation appears not, in fact, to give the president the authority to use funds in the way that Woodward suggests that he did. In any case, the act also requires the director of the Office of Management and Budget to “provide quarterly reports to the Committees on Appropriations on the use of these funds, beginning not later than January 2, 2002.” Were such reports provided, and did they include the information that Woodward reports?

To some people, these problems might seem to be too technical and picky, maybe even a lawyer’s quibble. If the president of the United States is sincerely trying to protect national security, and if a congressional appropriation can be read to permit him to do so, is it really terrible if he fails to consult with some legislators? But no mere quibble is involved. Under the Constitution, funds are appropriated by Congress, not the president. Even when national security is threatened, the president is constitutionally obliged to follow congressional restrictions on the expenditure of federal funds.

But maybe the president had another source for the funding. According to Woodward, the war preparations were partly funded “from the supplemental appropriation bill being worked out in Congress for the Afghanistan war and the general war on terrorism.” This is apparently a reference to the appropriations act of Aug. 2, 2002 (which runs to well over 100 pages of dense text). But nothing in the Aug. 2 act unambiguously authorizes the $700 million expenditure. To be sure, one provision allows the secretary of defense to use up to $275 million “to meet other essential operational or readiness requirements of the military services.” But even if fully available, this provision accounted for well under half of the $700 million reported by Woodward; and to use the money for that purpose, the law requires the secretary to notify the congressional defense committees. Did he?

Another provision of the 2002 appropriation permits the secretary of defense to use taxpayer dollars for “military construction projects … that the Secretary of Defense determines are necessary to respond to or protect against acts or threatened acts of terrorism.” But could all of the activities in Kuwait be justified as “military construction projects”? Could all of them be defended as “necessary” responses to “threatened acts of terrorism”? Even if the answer to both questions is yes, the secretary of defense would be obliged to give notice to the appropriate committees of Congress. Was notification given? It is not clear that it was.

At this point, we know too little to conclude that the White House violated the law. Perhaps Woodward misreported the facts. Perhaps some source of law can be found to justify what might otherwise appear to be a misuse of $700 million. The Department of Defense has recently insisted that it spent only $178 million, not $700 million, before Congress authorized the Iraq war. Apparently brushing aside the August 2002 appropriation, it contends that the use of $178 million was consistent with the Sept. 14, 2001, emergency appropriation and that it involved “non-Iraq specific items.”

In testimony before Congress on Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz added that $63 million was taken from the 2002 appropriation for “operational requirements not directly tied to Iraq.”

These contentions, vague and conclusory as they seem, might ultimately be proved valid. But the underlying issues are extremely serious ones, and they deserve careful investigation. Perhaps the White House has a detailed explanation, on the facts and the law, that shows why any use of taxpayer funds was consistent with congressional enactments. But in the face of legitimate questions, such an explanation really needs to be offered. Its absence raises genuine problems both for democratic government and for the rule of law.