Roosevelt depoliticized welfare discourse amid violent suppression of labor organizing.

Evidence

The same year he made his Detroit speech, local police and security personnel from the Ford Motor Company opened fire with machine-guns on a ‘hunger march’ of unemployed workers. The workers were bound for Ford’s River Rouge Plant to present a list of demands, which included not only the rehiring of the unemployed and fuel to tide them over through winter, but also an end to racial discrimination and the right to unionise. In this climate of radical political agitation and violence (the attack on the march had killed five and injured more than twenty others), Roosevelt sought to depoliticise economic welfare. ‘I am afraid that some of you people today in Detroit have been talking politics’, he told his audience. ‘Well, I am not going to. I want to talk to you about Government. That is a very different thing.’ — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Roosevelt’s separation of ‘government’ from ‘politics’ prefigures the technocratic, depoliticized discourse of human rights and economic governance central to the reader’s research.