But were the staggering costs always there? Is today’s medicine better than it was 50 or even 60 years ago? After reading our archival pieces below, we think you’ll be surprised by the similarities in past U.S. healthcare debates and our present-day healthcare concerns.

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

Fixing Our Healthcare System

(Frederick Allen, September/October 2012)

We spend more money per patient than any other country, yet we are less healthy by far. How did our healthcare system become such a wreck? And what is to be done?

The out-patient Department of New York's Presbyterian Hospital in 1949.

Do You Really Want Socialized Medicine?

(Steven Spencer, May 28, 1949)

This article examines the proposed Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, which sparked the first big debates that captured headlines for almost a decade … sound familiar?

The Doctor Glares at State Medicine

(Frederic Nelson, December 9, 1944)

A witty reflection of doctors’ views on socialized medicine and healthcare reform in the postwar era.

Queen of Angels Hospital, Los Angeles, 1958.

Part I: Health Insurance in 1958

(Milton Silverman, June 7, 1958)

Health insurance’s original aim was to protect the public against the financial shock of illness, but it also intended to halt state medicine.

The 1953 murder investigation of Thomas Lewis led the police on a trail of embezzlement.

Part II: Health Insurance in 1958

(Milton Silverman, June 14, 1958)

The 1953 murder of Thomas Lewis, president of a New York janitors’ union, led to the discovery that he was embezzling health-insurance funds from his union members. What happens to good people when the system gets hoodwinked?

In 1958, G.E. introduced the first comprehensive healthcare plan.

Part III: Health Insurance in 1958

(Milton Silverman, June 21, 1958)

When it was first proposed to the health insurance industry, comprehensive health insurance was greeted with predictions of doom.

Post Perspective on Healthcare The Saturday Evening Post

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

Just about every American can cite a personal example of the staggering benefits—and equally staggering costs—of today’s medicine. Here’s mine: My older brother Stephen was diagnosed more than 40 years ago with Crohn’s disease, a devastating chronic abdominal illness that had no cure and no good treatment. He was a teenager then, and he led an adult life of constant pain. He finally died of colon cancer at the age of 44 in 1996. Six years later, in 2002, I too was diagnosed with Crohn’s after worsening abdominal pain and bleeding left me bedridden. I had to be hospitalized for two weeks, but in the hospital I began treatment with a new cutting-edge biological drug called Remicade that had been introduced after Stephen died. Within months my symptoms were virtually gone, and I have been in robust health ever since. I was saved, miraculously, in a way my brother never could be.

Here’s the catch: There’s still no cure. I need a Remicade treatment every eight weeks. I learned when I left the hospital that it was going to cost more than $3,000 for the drug and $800 for the doctor’s services every time. Since then the price has risen to where the hospital at which I get treated puts in a claim for $22,000 and my insurer usually settles for around $11,000, or about $70,000 a year. To my immense good luck, I have a generous employer with a great insurance plan that makes it all affordable. But I only go through with it because it is truly a matter of life and death, and I have lived in fear of not having a job and being unable to buy insurance to cover such an absolute necessity, all because of some not-yet-understood flaw in my DNA.

A century ago, medicine was both very primitive and very inexpensive by today’s standards. When people became very ill, little could usually be done. They either got better or they didn’t; they lived or they died. We all have grandparents who succumbed quickly to heart disease or cancer or other illnesses but today would likely be kept alive and returned to health at very great expense—to go on to incur further high expenses the next time something goes wrong. Last month my father had bypass surgery at the age of 89. That would have been unimaginable a generation ago. A friend of mine just had a hip replacement at the age of 95.

American-style health insurance, which covers too few people too expensively, began as a strange byproduct of World War II economic sanctions, of all things. During the war the government froze the wages paid by employers, but it didn’t freeze fringe benefits. Companies that wanted to compete for employees did what they could to offer them something special—they began giving them health insurance. And so the system we all know, employer-backed insurance policies handled by private, profit-seeking insurance companies, arose, not from a plan but as an odd spin-off of wartime price controls.

People without medical insurance wait in long lines around the block to see doctors at a free medical clinic at the Sports Arena in Los Angeles in 2011.

By the 1960s, many working Americans had sufficient insurance through their employers, but the poor and the aged did not. That was why in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the bill that created Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare was designed to cover the elderly and the disabled; Medicaid insured the poor. With them in place, most Americans had health insurance at last.

But the unending, growing stream of new technologies and new pharmaceuticals was setting the cost of medicine on an inexorable upward path. Health insurers, wanting to keep their costs down and profits up, started charging people different amounts for coverage, according to how risky they appeared to be, and avoiding the riskiest customers completely. That meant that the people who need insurance most have the hardest time getting it, and when people don’t have insurance they wind up going to emergency rooms more and incurring even higher costs. And, let’s be clear about this, these higher costs get shared among all the rest of us. Congress passed the HMO Act of 1973 to promote health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that could negotiate with doctors and hospitals to set lower prices. But HMOs had every reason to simply minimize treatment, and many of their customers came to feel they were being forced to accept second-rate care. The failed Clinton health reform plan of 1993 tried to fix that, but it was hopelessly complicated, devised in secret, and never even reached a vote in Congress. The next attempted solution was PPOs, or preferred provider organizations. They have generally meant more generous coverage for employees but even higher costs for employers, who have responded by raising their premiums and deductibles or even dropping insurance altogether. And so everyone’s costs have kept going up, and more Americans have become uninsured.

Source: Kaiser/HRET Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits, 1999-2000

With costs going up everywhere, why do we in the U.S. pay more and get less than anyone in any other advanced nation? Because our accidental, improvised system pits doctors against insurers against patients. It is broken. Doctors earn the most when they do whatever costs the most, regardless of results. Insurance companies wage constant battles against doctors and hospitals to pay as little as possible of those unrestrained costs. And patients have little way of understanding what treatments they really need, what anything will cost, or what they can do about costs once they hit.

Ultimately the cause of this chaos is our belief that a free market is the best way to organize and regulate the system. We believe that if we can figure out how to create a smoothly working market for healthcare, just as we have for food and housing and automobiles, our problems will take care of themselves. But as was first explained in 1963 by Kenneth J. Arrow, a Stanford University economist who would later go on to win a Nobel Prize, that’s simply not possible.

Fixing Our Healthcare System The Saturday Evening Post

Photo by The Obama-Biden Transition Project, via Wikimedia Commons

We’ll try not to make too much about it, but the basic fact is undeniable:

A 1958 article from The Saturday Evening Post is responsible for President Barack Obama’s father coming to the United States. If it hadn’t been for this article, Obama’s father might never have come to this country; he certainly wouldn’t have met his American wife; and his son—our president—would never have been born.

What was so special about this magazine article?

Not so much on the face of it. It was a travel story about Hawaii. It began as just another assignment for Frank J. Taylor—one of 82 articles he wrote for the Post. His idea was to cover the 50th anniversary of the University of Hawaii, and get some vacation time in his beloved Hawaii.

As David Maraniss points out in his book Barack Obama: The Story (Simon and Schuster, 2012), Editor Ben Hibbs approved the story. “I think it will make a rather unusual education piece for us,” he told Taylor.

These coeds represented only a few of the Islands

Betty Mooney, who ran the library, read the article and passed it along to a Kenyan student, Barack Obama, the father of the man who would become the future president. She knew Obama was interested in studying in America, but was worried about racial unrest in the states. The University of Hawaii, as described by Taylor, seemed an ideal alternative.

From his first paragraph, Taylor emphasized the multicultural atmosphere the University nurtured. Following is an excerpt:

The physical setting itself is picturesque enough, but what really sets the University of Hawaii apart is the multi-racial make-up of its student body.

Physicist Walter Steiger lectures in an aloha shirt.

Because the undergraduates come from so many different racial strains, new students were for some years asked on the entrance blank to indicate their ethnic background—Polynesian (Hawaiian or otherwise), Caucasian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Filipino.

Every so often, however, a card would turn up on which a student had checked not one, but perhaps four or five of the races named. At first the registrar suspected undergraduate levity, but upon making cautious inquiry, he discovered it was nothing of the kind. Some students were indeed a blend of several races.

The university rose to the occasion. It added a new race, Cosmopolitan, and stopped keeping records of racial background.

Beach party at Waikiki. The hula is basic training for island-raised girls, and many of the coeds are experts.

The students, however, found the idea of a seventh race much too good to pass up, and the Cosmopolitan category is perpetuated in an annual … beauty contest staged by the editors of the student yearbook.

As the happy Hawaiians see it, only a campus insensible to the finer things of life would settle for a single beauty queen when there’s a perfectly good excuse to have seven of them in a row.

Accordingly, the … contest elects a separate queen for each of the seven different racial groups.

These campus-queen contests … on what is known locally as the Rainbow Campus, help point up the fact that the university’s 6,700 day students, plus 7,000 adults in night classes, in effect, bridge the Pacific racially.

The University had also been successful in building a diverse faculty.

Caption from 1958: "Few other campuses offer such exotic extracurricular activities as sailing off Diamond Head in February."

These latter students proved to be intent on their studies.

Students in the Sinclair library.

Indeed, the university’s students are such dedicated scholars that the faculty worries about them and conspires to divert them from book learning now and then.”In mainland colleges, you’re always putting the brakes on student exuberance,” explained Susan Daniels, the lively New Englander who supervises student activities. “Out here it’s just the opposite. It is such a cherished privilege to have an education that these young people have to be prodded into having fun.”

Obama, Sr., was duly impressed. A magazine article had pointed to a unique educational opportunity. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii in 1959. In 1960, he met Stanley Ann Dunham. They married in 1961. Their son, Barack Obama II, was born in Honolulu in 1961 and, 47 years later, was sworn in as the 44th president.

We’re all aware that the Post is an influential magazine. But sometimes the magnitude of its influence stuns even those of us who work here!

The Post Produces a President The Saturday Evening Post

It’s only fitting, then, that when it comes to selecting art that both reflects our nation’s values and presidents’ personal tastes, the highly revered paintings from The Saturday Evening Post are an appropriate fit, with images that speak to the everyday American spirit.

From his governor’s office in Texas, former President George W. Bush brought to the Oval Office a favorite painting of his: a Western scene called A Charge to Keep by W.H.D Koerner. The illustration first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916 to depict a short story called “The Slipper Tongue.”

From his governor’s office in Texas, former President George W. Bush brought to the Oval Office a favorite painting of his: a Western scene called A Charge to Keep by W.H.D Koerner. The illustration first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916 to depict a short story called “The Slipper Tongue.”

With A Charge to Keep back home in Texas, the Obamas, along with their appointed interior designer Michael Smith, gave the Oval Office a subtle makeover, replacing the cowboyesque décor (with the exception of artist Frederic Remington’s sculpture The Bronco Buster) with a more traditional touch, while embracing such classics as the Norman Rockwell painting, the iconic Working on the Statue of Liberty, which appeared on the cover of the Post in July 1946.

Seen here as a Post cover, Working on the Statue of Liberty, Norman Rockwell, July 6, 1946, now hangs only feet away from President Obama's desk in the Oval Office.

The original work of art was previously owned by famed film director Steven Spielberg—an avid Rockwell collector. In 1994 Spielberg donated the painting to the White House where it has proudly hung for Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, according to Jeremy Clowe, manager of media services for the Norman Rockwell Museum. “An additional series of Rockwell works—appropriately titled So You Want to See The President (The Saturday Evening Post story illustration, November 13, 1943)—are also on loan to the White House, and on view in the building’s West Wing,” says Clowe.

The history of the Post is deeply rooted in American culture and will not only continue to find a home in the heart of America, but in the hearts of Americans. Today’s Post readers turn to the magazine for a dose of artistic nostalgia, an update on current cultural trends, and a forecast for medical breakthroughs and emerging technology of days to come, as the Post continues to “Celebrate America—Past, Present, and Future.”

View Gallery.

Obama’s Rockwell The Saturday Evening Post

The committee chose President Obama from 205 candidates (172 individuals, 33 organizations) whose names had been submitted as part of the committee’s annual process.

The choice of Obama surprised most Americans, as well as the international reporters in Oslo, Norway, where the announcement was made.

Obama took office in January, only two weeks before the deadline for submitting nominees. In the short time that followed, it appears, the Nobel committee was impressed with his efforts to improve diplomacy and eliminate nuclear arsenals. They must have considered his efforts to build understanding between America and the Muslim world in a Cairo speech, and his United Nations speech urging greater global unity. They also would have known that this peace candidate was waging war in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The committee did not have to name a winner. Between 1901 and the present, the committee has refused the prize in 19 years.

President Theodore Roosevelt won the Peace Prize in 1906 for brokering a peace between Russia and Japan, which was threatening to destabilize Asia and possibly the Russian government.

Woodrow Wilson won the prize in 1919 for his efforts to end World War I and build a global League of Nations, which he believed would prohibit future wars.

In 2002 the committee gave its award to ex-president Jimmy Carter for his efforts, both in and out of office, to support peace and help struggling nations. And in 2007, former vice president Al Gore was the recipient for his international efforts on behalf of the environment.

The list of past winners is long and includes many now-obscure names. Many, though, should be familiar to us: Albert Schweitzer, George C. Marshall, Dag Hammarskjöld, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King Jr., the International Red Cross, Anwar Al-Sadat, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela.

But the Peace Prize doesn’t always come with a supply of peace. The choices in the past have been controversial. Many were angered when the committee gave the award to Henry Kissinger in 1973, and even more were disappointed that it was never given to Mahatma Ghandi.

What are your thoughts on the Peace Prize?

Who would you have nominated for the award this year?

Obama Wins Nobel for Peace The Saturday Evening Post

President Obama will be in New York on July 16 speaking to a crowd of 10,000 people. While he has addressed much larger groups, rarely has he spoken on such a significant occasion: America’s first black president will be giving the keynote speech at the 100th birthday celebration of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The NAACP was formed in 1909 to address a rising opposition to civil rights. Racism in America was discarding its subtlety, coming out in the open, and making a new bid for power. Southern legislators had enacted new laws that made it difficult, if not impossible, for black Americans to vote. Racial tensions ignited race riots, and more were coming.

Dr. W.E.B. DuBois edited the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, and helped frame the association’s goal:

“To promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for the impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the court, education for the children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.”

The early years were daunting and Washington extended little sympathy for the cause. The NAACP addressed the need to end official segregation, promote black men to officers in the military, and oppose the rising enrollment in the Ku Klux Klan. The effort met consistent opposition from southern legislators who blocked federal legislation against lynching.

Halfway through its first century, the NAACP was confronting racism as virulent as ever. Black Americans were achieving some of their goals, but they were also being accused of seeking their rights too aggressively.

"Negroes Are NOT Moving Too Fast"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nov. 7, 1964

In the November 7, 1964, Post, Dr. Martin Luther King addressed this issue directly in his article, “Negroes Are Not Moving Too Fast.”

“Among many white Americans who have recently achieved middle-class status or regard themselves close to it, there is a prevailing belief that Negroes are moving too fast and that their speed imperils the security of whites. Those who feel this way refer to their own experience and conclude that while they waited long for their chance, the Negro is expecting special advantages from the government. It is true that many white Americans struggled to attain security. It is also a hard fact that none had the experience of Negroes. No one else endured chattel slavery on American soil. No one else suffered discrimination so intensely or so long as the Negroes. In one or two generations the conditions of life for white Americans altered radically. For Negroes, after three centuries, wretchedness and misery still afflict the majority.

“Anatole France once said, ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids all men to sleep under bridges—the rich as well as the poor.’ There could scarcely be a better statement of the dilemma of the Negro today. After a decade of bitter struggle, multiple laws have been enacted proclaiming his equality. He should feel exhilaration as his goal comes into sight. But the ordinary black man knows that Anatole France’s sardonic jest expresses a very bitter truth. Despite new laws, little has changed in his life in the ghettos. …

“Charges that Negroes are going ‘too fast’ are both cruel and dangerous. The Negro is not going nearly fast enough, and claims to the contrary only play into the hands of those who believe that violence is the only means by which the Negro will get anywhere. …

“A section of the white population, perceiving Negro pressure for change, misconstrues it as a demand for privileges rather than as a desperate quest for existence. The ensuing white backlash intimidates government officials who are already too timorous, and, when the crisis demands vigorous measures, a paralysis ensues. …

“Our nation has absorbed many minorities from all nations of the world. In the beginning of this century, in a single decade, almost nine million immigrants were drawn into our society. Many reforms were necessary—labor laws and social-welfare measures— to achieve this result. We accomplished these changes in the past because there was a will to do it, and because the nation became greater and stronger in the process. Our country has the need and capacity for further growth, and today there are enough Americans, Negro and white, with faith in the future, with compassion, and will to repeat the bright experience of our past.”

The NAACP has no reason to close operations this year. There is, alas, still more work ahead. However, we hope they, and the country, savor the moment when President Obama shares the podium with America’s first black secretary of state, Colin Powell, and our first black attorney general, Eric Holder. America should be very proud of this organization and the long dedication of its generations of members.

President Obama to Speak at NAACP The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s what he once said: “If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.”

And what would Franklin say about the evolution of contentious political parties in our nation?

Here’s what he said: “It is true that in some of our states there are parties, and discords; but let us look back and ask if we were ever without them? Such [parties] will exist wherever there is liberty; and perhaps they help to preserve it. By the collision of different sentiments, sparks of truth are struck out, and political light is obtained. The different factions which at present divide us, aim all at the public good; the differences are only about the various modes of promoting it. Things, actions, measure and objects of all kinds, present themselves to the minds of men in such a variety of lights, that it is not possible we should all think alike at the same time on every subject, when hardly the same man retains at all times the same idea of it. Parties are therefore the common lot of humanity, and ours are by no means more mischievous or less beneficial than those of other countries, nations, and ages, enjoying in the same degree the great blessing of political liberty.”

Obama’s Economic Stimulus The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s what Ben Franklin would say: “Been thither, done that.”

During the winter of 1755-56, Ben Franklin, a civilian like Obama, raised and commanded the largest militia in British North America.

Raids by Native Americans on towns in western Pennsylvania stimulated the action. The Shawnee, distressed by incursion into their territory by Europeans, responded as one would expect. Tales of massacres soon reached Philadelphia where pacifist Quakers, reluctant to engage in combat themselves, gave financial support to Franklin’s call to establish a militia, which would march westward to aid settlers with fort construction (and warfare with the natives if necessary).

Franklin suggested that the militia’s soldiers elect their own officers. As he put it: “It seems likely that the people will engage more readily in the service, and face danger with more intrepidity, when they are commanded by a man they know and esteem, and on whose prudence and courage, as well as goodwill and integrity, they can have reliance, than they would under a man they either did not know, or did not like.”

Needless to say, the men elected Franklin to lead them. He was, after all, Pennsylvania’s most prominent citizen. Ben Franklin declined the term “general” for his position, accepting “colonel” instead. Nevertheless, when Franklin and his brigade visited the Moravians en route west, the locals addressed him as “General Franklin.”

After successfully constructing forts in three Pennsylvania locations, Franklin and his army returned to Philadelphia. Soon thereafter, on March 16, 1756, Colonel Franklin marched part of his militia past Pennsylvania’s Royal Governor—a man who viewed Franklin with suspicion. (Franklin wanted the Pennsylvania family—owners of much Pennsylvania land—to pay their fair share of the militia’s cost, something they refused to do.) This show of strength did not go unnoticed by the governor.

The next day, when Franklin left Philadelphia to attend a meeting in Virginia, his troops gave him a military send-off, accompanying him to the ferry terminal with swords drawn — an inappropriate gesture, according to proper military etiquette. When Franklin found this out, he decided that he had had enough of martial displays. As he wrote about the incident: “For tho’ a great number met me at my return, they did not ride with drawn swords, having been told the ceremony was improper. … I who am totally ignorant of military ceremonies, and above all things averse to making show and parade, or doing any useless thing that can serve only to excite envy or provoke malice, suffered at the time much more pain than I enjoy’d pleasure, and have never since given an opportunity for anything of the sort.”

I wonder if President Obama was thinking the same as he reviewed the troops, knowing that in less than 72 hours he’d be asking generals to prepare a plan to withdraw soldiers from Iraq and redeploy them into Afghanistan.

President Obama’s Inaugural Parade The Saturday Evening Post

Here’s what he’d say: “I told you so!” Franklin, after all, both created the job of president and promoted the abolition of slavery, so Barack Obama’s inauguration represents the final conjunction of two of Franklin’s most significant contributions to life in America.

Franklin first proposed a central government for British North America during the Albany Congress in 1754, fully 27 years before the U.S. Constitution incorporated his ideas in our founding document. The head of this central government would be a president-general, appointed by the British monarch. In this way, Franklin hoped the constant feuding between the 13 colonies would end, easing trade.

Regarding slavery, as a young Philadelphia businessman, Franklin owned a slave couple, which he later sold because they were too costly to maintain. Moreover, his Pennsylvania Gazette frequently advertised slaves for sale. The justification for slavery in North America revolved around the status of Africans as either “beasts” or infidels — heathens who didn’t know Christian teachings and hadn’t been baptized. This stance led to heated debates about what happened when Africans became Christianized.

Gradually the notion took hold among certain sects that blacks who converted to Christianity should be freed from bondage. Quakers were among the first to insist on this principle, excommunicating meeting house members who held Christianized slaves. This, in turn, fueled missionary zeal among those who saw slavery as ungodly. They set up schools to teach blacks the reading skills needed to study and absorb the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In 1758, a school for Negroes was opened in Philadelphia. Many slave owners disparaged such schools, claiming that Africans were incapable of learning to read or write. Franklin, however, came to the opposite conclusion. In 1763 he visited one such school and wrote about the experience to a British friend, saying that he had “visited the Negro School … and had the Children thoroughly examin’d.” Franklin reported, “They appear’d all to have made considerable Progress in Reading for the Time they had respectively been in the School, and most of them answer’d readily and well the Questions of the Catechism; they behav’d very orderly, show’d a proper Respect and ready Obedience to the Mistress, and seem’d very attentive.” Franklin concluded, “From what I then saw, [I] have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children.”

Franklin, during the 1787 U.S. Constitutional Convention, was effectively governor of Pennsylvania and head of his state’s delegation to that assemblage. Shortly after the convention ended, however, Franklin returned to private life, at least for a while, retiring from Pennsylvania’s presidency on November 5, 1788. By then, Franklin was already president of an organization started 10 years earlier by righteous-minded Quakers called The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage and for Improving the Condition of the African Race. The group’s stated objective was “to use such means as are in their power, to extend the blessings of freedom to every part of the human race.”

As soon as his government duties ended, Franklin got down to the business of abolishing slavery. He used his considerable energy, skill, and prestige to make things happen. He thus became the leader of the abolitionist movement.

Franklin approached the antislavery project with a level of commitment equaling his dedication to civic achievement during his earlier tradesman days. In November 1789, Franklin issued “An Address to the Public” in which he called slavery “such an atrocious debasement of human nature” that eliminating it without proper preparation could “open a source of serious evil.”

Franklin’s antislavery campaign ultimately led to America’s Civil War. Our nation’s new constitution put off for 20 years any laws limiting slavery. This would allow congressmen to set the matter aside and deal with more pressing questions, such as how to pay off national debts and whether to maintain a standing army during peacetime.

However, Benjamin Franklin, the nation’s patriarch, sent a petition to the First Continental Congress soon after it convened. This document, from Franklin’s pen, raised religious and moral issues to condemn slavery.

Franklin’s petition reminded Congress that they had been given power for “promoting the Welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the People of the United States” and declared “that these blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of Color, to all descriptions of People.” The document asked Congress for “the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men, who alone in this land of Freedom are degraded into perpetual Bondage … groaning in servile Subjection.” Franklin’s signature at the bottom of the petition, seemingly larger than usual, insured open debate on the subject. And debate they did: The discourse laid out the issues that continued to come up with increasing animosity for the next 70 years.

Indeed, Franklin opened a can of worms that Congress could not close. At the time, however, the balance between free and slave states shackled progress towards emancipation. The debate in our nation’s capital over the contentious issue of slavery, however, eventually split the country in two.

Abraham Lincoln was, in effect, carrying out Benjamin Franklin’s objective when he emancipated slaves in the conquered regions of the South.

If Ben Franklin came back to life today, he’d burst with pride over the outcomes of two of his favorite projects: the abolition of slavery and the formation of a national American government. However, he’d wonder why it took more than 230 years for these two objectives to coalesce in the election of a black president of the United States of America.

America’s First Black President Barack Obama The Saturday Evening Post

States the editorial “Stumbling into Socialism” from the July 20, 1935 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Not surprisingly, twenty-first century Americans still have a negative outlook when we are faced with economic crisis. No matter what steps the President takes to ensure the betterment of human lives, people view the fixes with skepticism.

An example of this lies with President Barack Obama. In a recent speech, Obama said “only government” could provide the short-term boost necessary to lift the country out of the current recession.

Americans disagree.

When polled through a Fox News Poll, the majority of Americans believed the only effective way to help the economy recover from the recession was spending by individuals and businesses, not the government.

Many Americans fear socialism, believing that they are advocating for governmental ownership where the means of production would be owned and controlled by the state.

“In America, the average man has not yet the faintest idea of what socialism means. It is therefore, conceivable that the logic of facts may drive him into it before he can shrink back in terror,” reads 1935 Post article.

Stumbling Into Socialism The Saturday Evening Post

The discussion was quoted in the editorial The Spenders from the August 8, 1936 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Americans wanted to know the facts about the government’s expenditures but where could they obtain such information? Many believed since ¼ of every dollar they made was being turned into the government they had earned the right to know about the government’s spending.

In comparison, Americans today still want to know the answers to those same questions. Although the wave of the New Deal happened over 70 years ago, President Barack Obama is strongly being compared to the New Deal creator, FDR.

“Obama’s plea for a massive government spending program is based on his belief that Roosevelt’s New Deal helped lift the country out of the 1930s depression,” states the article “Amid echoes of FDR, debate rekindles over New Deal” in the January 15, 2009 edition of The Boston Globe.

Regardless of your opinion of the new deal, Obama is clearly eager to tread foot on the foundation built by presidents before him. “Obama is a serious student of the period and is trying to apply its lessons, both in terms of economic theory and inspirational message. The President [Elect], however, cautioned in a recent television interview that he wouldn’t simply copy the New Deal because ‘no period is exactly the same,’” states the Boston Globe article.

POST script, May 24, 2012:

The Spenders The Saturday Evening Post

Rockwell spent six months painting The Four Freedoms, which were published in a series of Saturday Evening Post issues in 1943, accompanied by short essays from four distinguished writers. The U.S. Government subsequently issued posters of Rockwell’s paintings in a highly successful war bond campaign that raised more than $132 million for the war effort. Rockwell’s homey depictions of Roosevelt’s abstract concepts were widely popular across America, yet not everyone was completely in tune with the ideas elaborated in Roosevelt’s speech.

In an editorial published later in 1943 (reprinted below), Post editors addressed a controversy over the meaning of the freedoms, in a debate that still has relevance today. Perhaps not since FDR has a president faced challenges as daunting as those that await our new Commander in Chief, who like FDR promised significant “change” in a time of tremendous economic and global turmoil.

“It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun,” Barack Obama said during the campaign. “Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”

Is the dream still alive? As then, we are certainly permitted to hope and aspire to the same ideal.
The Four Freedoms Are an Ideal

For millions of people throughout the world the Four Freedoms have come to represent something which gives meaning and importance to the sacrifices which the human race is now making, but these freedoms are by no means universally accepted as worthy aims for nations at war. Indeed, a not inconsiderable number of people regard the Four Freedoms as actually evil, an effort to deceive people into imagining that they will never again have to take thought for the morrow, since government will provide everything for them.

Few people object to the first two freedoms mentioned by President Roosevelt in his message of January 6, 1941. Freedoms of Speech and Religion are familiar to Americans and are already guaranteed to them. Some people wondered whether the President’s phrase “everywhere in the world” meant that the United States would be called on to fight until such liberties as we enjoy became the right of millions in Asia, Russia, and Eastern Europe. But what the President said was that we “look forward to a world” in which these freedoms are taken for granted. In as much as we Americans have prided ourselves on looking forward to such a free world ever since we became free ourselves, it is difficult to see that Mr. Roosevelt said anything very alarming when he led the world to hope that Freedoms of Speech and Religion might someday be the possession of men everywhere.

The real controversy, of course, rages about the other two freedoms: Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The assumption by those who are alarmed at their inclusion in a body of doctrine is that they imply that men are to be guaranteed not merely against “want” in the literal sense, but against lacking anything they happen to desire at any given moment. Freedom from Fear, these critics affect to believe, implies that the Government is fraudulently promising to remove all the hazards of life which men have feared in the past.

If we believed that either Freedom from Want or Freedom from Fear meant that the New Deal was promising to pass a miracle which would end the necessity of individual work or foresight, reward the lazy and incompetent as richly as the able and conscientious, and set up a “welfare state,” we should be as dubious about the Four Freedoms as are some of our correspondents. Some New Dealers may misconstrue these freedoms, but there is little ground for such an interpretation. After all, “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants” are as nearly realizable as “the full dinner pail” or “a chicken in every pot”— phrases seldom associated with radical welfare schemes. In fact, such understandings have been the professed goal of American statesmen for many years.

As to Freedom from Fear, it seems to us to contain no meaning more revolutionary than that suggested by Norman Rockwell’s touching artistic interpretation, in the picture of the parents regarding the untroubled sleep of their children. Mr. Roosevelt expressed Freedom from Fear as translatable into “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point…that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.” Nothing about guarantees against fear of measles, graying hair or the consequences of laziness or incompetence.

If there is genuine confusion about the meaning of the Four Freedoms, some of it is doubtless explained by failure to note that Mr. Roosevelt, in listing these objectives, used the expression, “we look forward to a world.” Well, so do the rest of us look forward to a world in which men shall respect the right of others to their own opinions; a world in which better use shall be made of the machinery of production, so that lack of necessities which are so easily produced shall be the lot of nobody who can and will contribute his labor; a world organized politically, so that men need not fear the horrors of destruction by weapons of war.

Few of us expect such a world to be attained all at once, by fiat of the executive or by mere use of phrases. But all of us are permitted to hope, in the midst of an unprecedently cruel and destructive war, that the peoples of the world will eventually understand their problems sufficiently to solve some of them. Thus interpreted, the Four Freedoms represent pretty well what men have always hoped for—political liberty, a better standard of living and an end to war. We should think all Americans could get together on such an expression of human aspiration.

Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms The Saturday Evening Post