Second Bill of Rights

The Second Bill of Rights is a list of rights that was proposed by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944. In his address, Roosevelt suggested that the nation had come to recognize and should now implement, a second "bill of rights." Roosevelt's argument was that the "political rights" guaranteed by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness." His remedy was to declare an "economic bill of rights" to guarantee eight specific rights:

Roosevelt stated that having such rights would guarantee American security, and that the U.S.'s place in the world depended upon how far the rights had been carried into practice.

In the runup to the Second World War, the United States had suffered through the Great Depression, following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Roosevelt's election at the end of 1932 was based on a commitment to reform the economy and society through a "New Deal" program. The first indication of a commitment to government guarantees of social and economic rights came in an Address to the Commonwealth Club on 23 September 1932, during his campaign. The speech was written with AA Berle, a professor of corporate law at Columbia University. A key passage read:

As I see it, the task of government in its relation to business is to assist the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order. This is the common task of statesman and business man. It is the minimum requirement of a more permanently safe order of things.

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