Our Deal: Fireside Chats Exploring The New Deal Today
Center for New Deal Studies

For an overwhelming number of Americans, the New Deal set about to describe the America they believed in - and desperately needed. Is it different for Americans in a new century? American values are much in the news - without much acknowledgement of their roots, or even coherent description.

The Center for New Deal Studies at Roosevelt University presents Our Deal: Fireside Chats Exploring The New Deal Today. This series will examine The New Deal as the foundation for our present values of security, liberty and civility - the principles that are basic to our national identity.

Social Security, civil rights, labor standards, environmental protection, cultural policy, international institutions, and a range of Constitutional understandings are among the programs pioneered by The New Deal that will be discussed. The premise: our present national life is founded on principles, policies, institutions, practices, guarantees and politics initiated by The New Deal. How shall we value this present understanding of what it means to be an American?

The program will begin with a Spring 2005 series of three Fireside Chats addressing Social Security, FDR’s Constitutional revolution, and environmental policy and programs. The series will continue with events in the Summer, Fall and Winter. For more information contact mung@roosevelt.edu.

Fireside Chats Spring Series
Roosevelt University
Congress Lounge, 2nd Floor
430 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago, IL

March 30, 2005 FDR's Real Vision for Social Security 4:30pm
James Roosevelt, Jr.
Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Tufts Health Plan and former Associate Commissioner for Retirement Policy of the Social Security Administration

The purpose and principles behind Social Security provide the basis for strengthening the program, the economy and responding to attempts to misuse FDR’s legacy to destroy it.

James Roosevelt, Jr., is Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Tufts Health Plan He is Vice Chairman of Tufts Health Care Institute and Past President of the American Health Lawyers Association. He served as Associate Commissioner for Retirement Policy of the Social Security Administration. He is a frequent lecturer and author on legal and public policy topics and he is Clinical Instructor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at Tufts University School of Medicine.

April 21,2005 FDR’s Unfinished Constitutional Revolution 4:30pm
Cass R. Sunstein
Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and the Department of Political Science

FDR’s leadership and vision of the nation and its laws is an integral part of American values and aspirations, based on the President’s articulation of “the clear realization that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Cass R. Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and Department of Political Science. He has authored numerous articles and books, including The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict and After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State. He is the most-cited law professor on any faculty in the United States.

May 2, 2005 A New Deal for the Environment 4:30pm
Henry L. Henderson
Partner, Policy Solutions Ltd., Lecturer in the Environmental Studies at the University of Chicago, and former Commissioner of Environment for the City of Chicago

FDR’s “environmental legacy” is a vision and practical achievement integrating the Human economy and the economy of Nature, pointing the way to a genuinely sustainable future.

Henry L. Henderson is partner in the environmental consulting firm Policy Solutions Ltd., and Lecturer in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Chicago. He served as the founding Commissioner of Environment for the City of Chicago and as Assistant Attorney General for the State of Illinois. He is co-editor of the recently published FDR and the Environment: Recovering the Environmental Legacy of the New Deal.

These are the first of many Fireside Chats in a program that will include future discussions of international institutions and national security, fair labor practices, the arts, financial institutions and security, political action, energy policies, and the protection of the public airwaves.