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The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

by Franklin D. Roosevelt · English · Gutenberg #5767 · 462,310 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Author: Franklin D. Roosevelt


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5767]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIRESIDE CHATS OF FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT ***




This etext was produced by Steve Bonner.


The Fireside Chats of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Radio addresses to the American people
broadcast between 1933 and 1944.



March 12, 1933.

I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United
States about banking--with the comparatively few who understand the
mechanics of banking but more particularly with the overwhelming
majority who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing
of checks.  I want to tell you what has been done in the last few
days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.  I
recognize that the many proclamations from state capitols and from
Washington, the legislation, the treasury regulations, etc.,
couched for the most part in banking and legal terms should be
explained for the benefit of the average citizen.  I owe this in
particular because of the fortitude and good temper with which
everybody has accepted the inconvenience and hardships of the
banking holiday.  I know that when you understand what we in
Washington have been about I shall continue to have your
cooperation as fully as I have had your sympathy and help during
the past week.

First of all let me state the simple fact that when you deposit
money in a bank the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit
vault.  It invests your money in many different forms of credit--
bonds, commercial paper, mortgages and many other kinds of loans.
In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels
of industry and of agriculture turning around.  A comparatively
small part of the money you put into the bank is kept in currency--
an amount which in normal times is wholly sufficient to cover the
cash needs of the average citizen.  In other words, the total amount
of all the currency in the country is only a small fraction of the
total deposits in all of the banks.

What, then, happened during the last few days of February and the
first few days of March?  Because of undermined confidence on the
part of the public, there was a general rush by a large portion of
our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold--a rush
so great that the soundest banks could not get enough currency to
meet the demand.  The reason for this was that on the spur of the
moment it was, of course, impossible to sell perfectly sound assets
of a bank and convert them into cash except at panic prices far
below their real value.

By the afternoon of March 3d scarcely a bank in the country was
open to do business.  Proclamations temporarily closing them in
whole or in part had been issued by the governors in almost all the
states.

It was then that I issued the proclamation providing for the
nation-wide bank holiday, and this was the first step in the
government's reconstruction of our financial and economic fabric.

The second step was the legislation promptly and patriotically
passed by the Congress confirming my proclamation and broadening my
powers so that it became possible in view of the requirement of
time to extend the holiday and lift the ban of that holiday
gradually.  This law also gave authority to develop a program of
rehabilitation of our banking facilities.  I want to tell our
citizens in every part of the nation that the national Congress--
Republicans and Democrats alike--showed by this action a devotion
to public welfare and a realization of the emergency and the
necessity for speed that it is difficult to match in our history.

The third stage has been the series of regulations permitting the
banks to continue their functions to take care of the distribution
of food and household necessities and the payment of payrolls.

This bank holiday, while resulting in many cases in great
inconvenience, is affording us the opportunity to supply the
currency necessary to meet the situation.  No sound bank is a dollar
worse off than it was when it closed its doors last Monday.  Neither
is any bank which may turn out not to be in a position for
immediate opening.  The new law allows the twelve Federal Reserve
Banks to issue additional currency on good assets and thus the
banks which reopen will be able to meet every legitimate call.  The
new currency is being sent out by the Bureau of Engraving and
Printing in large volume to every part of the country.  It is sound
currency because it is backed by actual, good assets.

A question you will ask is this:  why are all the banks not to be
reopened at the same time?  The answer is simple.  Your government
does not intend that the history of the past few years shall be
repeated.  We do not want and will not have another epidemic of bank
failures.

As a result, we start tomorrow, Monday, with the opening of banks
in the twelve Federal Reserve Bank cities--those banks which on
first examination by the treasury have already been found to be all
right.  This will be followed on Tuesday by the resumption of all
their functions by banks already found to be sound in cities where
there are recognized clearing houses.  That means about 250 cities
of the United states.

On Wednesday and succeeding days banks in smaller places all
through the country will resume business, subject, of course, to
the government's physical ability to complete its survey.  It is
necessary that the reopening of banks be extended over a period in
order to permit the banks to make applications for necessary loans,
to obtain currency needed to meet their requirements and to enable
the government to make common sense checkups.

Let me make it clear to you that if your bank does not open the
first day you are by no means justified in believing that it will
not open.  A bank that opens on one of the subsequent days is in
exactly the same status as the bank that opens tomorrow.

I know that many people are worrying about state banks not members
of the Federal Reserve System.  These banks can and will receive
assistance from members banks and from the Reconstruction Finance
Corporation.  These state banks are following the same course as the
national banks except that they get their licenses to resume
business from the state authorities, and these authorities have
been asked by the Secretary of the Treasury to permit their good
banks to open up on the same schedule as the national banks.  I am
confident that the state banking departments will be as careful as
the national government in the policy relating to the opening of
banks and will follow the same broad policy.

It is possible that when the banks resume a very few people who
have not recovered from their fear may again begin withdrawals.  Let
me make it clear that the banks will take care of all needs--and it
is my belief that hoarding during the past week has become an
exceedingly unfashionable pastime.  It needs no prophet to tell you
that when the people find that they can get their money--that they
can get it when they want it for all legitimate purposes--the
phantom of fear will soon be laid.  People will again be glad to
have their money where it will be safely taken care of and where
they can use it conveniently at any time.  I can assure you that it
is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the
mattress.

The success of our whole great national program depends, of course,
upon the cooperation of the public--on its intelligent support and
use of a reliable system.

Remember that the essential accomplishment of the new legislation
is that it makes it possible for banks more readily to convert
their assets into cash than was the case before.  More liberal
provision has been made for banks to borrow on these assets at the
Reserve Banks and more liberal provision has also been made for
issuing currency on the security of those good assets.  This
currency is not fiat currency.  It is issued only on adequate
security--and every good bank has an abundance of such security.

One more point before I close.  There will be, of course, some banks
unable to reopen without being reorganized.  The new law allows the
government to assist in making these reorganizations quickly and
effectively and even allows the government to subscribe to at least
a part of new capital which may be required.

I hope you can see from this elemental recital of what your
government is doing that there is nothing complex, or radical, in
the process.

We had a bad banking situation.  Some of our bankers had shown
themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the
people's funds.  They had used the money entrusted to them in
speculations and unwise loans.  This was, of course, not true in the
vast majority of our banks, but it was true in enough of them to
shock the people for a time into a sense of insecurity and to put
them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but
seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted
them all.  It was the government's job to straighten out this
situation and do it as quickly as possible--and the job is being
performed.

I do not promise you that every bank will be reopened or that
individual losses will not be suffered, but there will be no losses
that possibly could be avoided; and there would have been more and
greater losses had we continued to drift.  I can even promise you
salvation for some at least of the sorely pressed banks.  We shall
be engaged not merely in reopening sound banks but in the creation
of sound banks through reorganization.

It has been wonderful to me to catch the note of confidence from
all over the country.  I can never be sufficiently grateful to the
people for the loyal support they have given me in their acceptance
of the judgment that has dictated our course, even though all our
processes may not have seemed clear to them.

After all, there is an element in the readjustment of our financial
system more important than currency, more important than gold, and
that is the confidence of the people.  Confidence and courage are
the essentials of success in carrying out our plan.  You people must
have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses.  Let us
unite in banishing fear.  We have provided the machinery to restore
our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work.

It is your problem no less than it is mine.  Together we cannot
fail.



May 7, 1933.


On a Sunday night a week after my inauguration I used the radio to
tell you about the banking crisis and the measures we were taking
to meet it.  I think that in that way I made clear to the country
various facts that might otherwise have been misunderstood and in
general provided a means of understanding which did much to restore
confidence.

Tonight, eight weeks later, I come for the second time to give you
my report; in the same spirit and by the same means to tell you
about what we have been doing and what we are planning to do.

Two months ago we were facing serious problems.  The country was
dying by inches.  It was dying because trade and commerce had
declined to dangerously low levels; prices for basic commodities
were such as to destroy the value of the assets of national
institutions such as banks, savings banks, insurance companies, and
others.  These institutions, because of their great needs, were
foreclosing mortgages, calling loans, refusing credit.  Thus there
was actually in process of destruction the property of millions of
people who had borrowed money on that property in terms of dollars
which had had an entirely different value from the level of March,
1933.  That situation in that crisis did not call for any
complicated consideration of economic panaceas or fancy plans.  We
were faced by a condition and not a theory.

There were just two alternatives:  The first was to allow the
foreclosures to continue, credit to be withheld and money to go
into hiding, and thus forcing liquidation and bankruptcy of banks,
railroads and insurance companies and a recapitalizing of all
business and all property on a lower level.  This alternative meant
a continuation of what is loosely called "deflation", the net
result of which would have been extraordinary hardships on all
property owners and, incidentally, extraordinary hardships on all
persons working for wages through an increase in unemployment and a
further reduction of the wage scale.

It is easy to see that the result of this course would have not
only economic effects of a very serious nature but social results
that might bring incalculable harm.  Even before I was inaugurated I
came to the conclusion that such a policy was too much to ask the
American people to bear.  It involved not only a further loss of
homes, farms, savings and wages but also a loss of spiritual
values--the loss of that sense of security for the present and the
future so necessary to the peace and contentment of the individual
and of his family.  When you destroy these things you will find it
difficult to establish confidence of any sort in the future.  It was
clear that mere appeals from Washington for confidence and the mere
lending of more money to shaky institutions could not stop this
downward course.  A prompt program applied as quickly as possible
seemed to me not only justified but imperative to our national
security.  The Congress, and when I say Congress I mean the members
of both political parties, fully understood this and gave me
generous and intelligent support.  The members of Congress realized
that the methods of normal times had to be replaced in the
emergency by measures which were suited to the serious and pressing
requirements of the moment.  There was no actual surrender of power,
Congress still retained its constitutional authority, and no one
has the slightest desire to change the balance of these powers.  The
function of Congress is to decide what has to be done and to select
the appropriate agency to carry out its will.  To this policy it has
strictly adhered.  The only thing that has been happening has been
to designate the President as the agency to carry out certain of
the purposes of the Congress.  This was constitutional and in
keeping with the past American tradition.

The legislation which has been passed or is in the process of
enactment can properly be considered as part of a well-grounded
plan.

First, we are giving opportunity of employment to one-quarter of a
million of the unemployed, especially the young men who have
dependents, to go into the forestry and flood prevention work.  This
is a big task because it means feeding, clothing and caring for
nearly twice as many men as we have in the regular army itself.  In
creating this civilian conservation corps we are killing two birds
with one stone.  We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural
resources and we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual
distress.  This great group of men has entered upon its work on a
purely voluntary basis; no military training is involved and we are
conserving not only our natural resources, but our human resources.
One of the great values to this work is the fact that it is direct
and requires the intervention of very little machinery.

Second, I have requested the Congress and have secured action upon
a proposal to put the great properties owned by our government at
Muscle Shoals to work after long years of wasteful inaction, and
with this a broad plan for the improvement of a vast area in the
Tennessee Valley.  It will add to the comfort and happiness of
hundreds of thousands of people and the incident benefits will
reach the entire nation.

Next, the Congress is about to pass legislation that will greatly
ease the mortgage distress among the farmers and the home owners of
the nation, by providing for the easing of the burden of debt now
bearing so heavily upon millions of our people.

Our next step in seeking immediate relief is a grant of half a
billion dollars to help the states, counties and municipalities in
their duty to care for those who need direct and immediate relief.

The Congress also passed legislation authorizing the sale of beer
in such states as desired it.  This has already resulted in
considerable reemployment and incidentally has provided much needed
tax revenue.

We are planning to ask the Congress for legislation to enable the
government to undertake public works, thus stimulating directly and
indirectly the employment of many others in well-considered
projects.

Further legislation has been taken up which goes much more
fundamentally into our economic problems.  The Farm Relief Bill
seeks by the use of several methods, alone or together, to bring
about an increased return to farmers for their major farm products,
seeking at the same time to prevent in the days to come disastrous
overproduction which so often in the past has kept farm commodity
prices far below a reasonable return.  This measure provides wide
powers for emergencies.  The extent of its use will depend entirely
upon what the future has in store.

Well-considered and conservative measures will likewise be proposed
which will attempt to give to the industrial workers of the country
a more fair wage return, prevent cut-throat competition and unduly
long hours for labor, and at the same time encourage each industry
to prevent overproduction.

Our Railroad Bill falls into the same class because it seeks to
provide and make certain definite planning by the railroads
themselves, with the assistance of the government, to eliminate the
duplication and waste that is now resulting in railroad
receiverships and continuing operating deficits.

I am certain that the people of this country understand and approve
the broad purposes behind these new governmental policies relating
to agriculture and industry and transportation.  We found ourselves
faced with more agricultural products than we could possibly
consume ourselves and surpluses which other nations did not have
the cash to buy from us except at prices ruinously low.  We found
our factories able to turn out more goods than we could possibly
consume, and at the same time we were faced with a falling export
demand.  We found ourselves with more facilities to transport goods
and crops than there were goods and crops to be transported.  All of
this has been caused in large part by a complete lack of planning
and a complete failure to understand the danger signals that have
been flying ever since the close of the World War.  The people of
this country have been erroneously encouraged to believe that they
could keep on increasing the output of farm and factory
indefinitely and that some magician would find ways and means for
that increased output to be consumed with reasonable profit to the
producer.

Today we have reason to believe that things are a little better
than they were two months ago.  Industry has picked up, railroads
are carrying more freight, farm prices are better, but I am not
going to indulge in issuing proclamations of overenthusiastic
assurance.  We cannot ballyhoo ourselves back to prosperity.  I am
going to be honest at all times with the people of the country.  I
do not want the people of this country to take the foolish course
of letting this improvement come back on another speculative wave.
I do not want the people to believe that because of unjustified
optimism we can resume the ruinous practice of increasing our crop
output and our factory output in the hope that a kind Providence
will find buyers at high prices.  Such a course may bring us
immediate and false prosperity but it will be the kind of
prosperity that will lead us into another tailspin.

It is wholly wrong to call the measure that we have taken
government control of farming, control of industry, and control of
transportation.  It is rather a partnership between government and
farming and industry and transportation, not partnership in
profits, for the profits still go to the citizens, but rather a
partnership in planning and partnership to see that the plans are
carried out.

Let me illustrate with an example.  Take the cotton goods industry.
It is probably true that ninety percent of the cotton manufacturers
would agree to eliminate starvation wages, would agree to stop long
hours of employment, would agree to stop child labor, would agree
to prevent an overproduction that would result in unsalable
surpluses.  But, what good is such an agreement if the other ten
percent of cotton manufacturers pay starvation wages, require long
hours, employ children in their mills and turn out burdensome
surpluses?  The unfair ten percent could produce goods so cheaply
that the fair ninety percent would be compelled to meet the unfair
conditions.  Here is where government comes in.  Government ought to
have the right and will have the right, after surveying and
planning for an industry to prevent, with the assistance of the
overwhelming majority of that industry, unfair practice and to
enforce this agreement by the authority of government.  The so-
called anti-trust laws were intended to prevent the creation of
monopolies.  That purpose of the anti-trust laws must be continued,
but these laws were never intended to encourage the kind of unfair
competition that results in long hours, starvation wages and
overproduction.

The same principle applies to farm products and to transportation
and every other field of organized private industry.

We are working toward a definite goal, which is to prevent the
return of conditions which came very close to destroying what we
call modern civilization.  The actual accomplishment of our purpose
cannot be attained in a day.  Our policies are wholly within
purposes for which our American constitutional government was
established 150 years ago.

I know that the people of this country will understand this and
will also understand the spirit in which we are undertaking this
policy.  I do not deny that we may make mistakes of procedure as we
carry out the policy.  I have no expectation of making a hit every
time I come to bat.  What I seek is the highest possible batting
average, not only for myself but for the team.  Theodore Roosevelt
once said to me:  "If I can be right 75 percent of the time I shall
come up to the fullest measure of my hopes."

Much has been said of late about federal finances and inflation,
the gold standard, etc.  Let me make the facts very simple and my
policy very clear.  In the first place, government credit and
government currency are really one and the same thing.  Behind
government bonds there is only a promise to pay.  Behind government
currency we have, in addition to the promise to pay, a reserve of
gold and a small reserve of silver.  In this connection it is worth
while remembering that in the past the government has agreed to
redeem nearly thirty billions of its debts and its currency in
gold, and private corporations in this country have agreed to
redeem another sixty or seventy billions of securities and
mortgages in gold.  The government and private corporations were
making these agreements when they knew full well that all of the
gold in the United States amounted to only between three and four
billions and that all of the gold in all of the world amounted to
only about eleven billions.

If the holders of these promises to pay started in to demand gold
the first comers would get gold for a few days and they would
amount to about one twenty-fifth of the holders of the securities
and the currency.  The other twenty-four people out of twenty-five,
who did not happen to be at the top of the line, would be told
politely that there was no more gold left.  We have decided to treat
all twenty-five in the same way in the interest of justice and the
exercise of the constitutional powers of this government.  We have
placed everyone on the same basis in order that the general good
may be preserved.

Nevertheless, gold, and to a partial extent silver, are perfectly
good bases for currency and that is why I decided not to let any of
the gold now in the country go out of it.

A series of conditions arose three weeks ago which very readily
might have meant, first, a drain on our gold by foreign countries,
and second, as a result of that, a flight of American capital, in
the form of gold, out of our country.  It is not exaggerating the
possibility to tell you that such an occurrence might well have
taken from us the major part of our gold reserve and resulted in
such a further weakening of our government and private credit as to
bring on actual panic conditions and the complete stoppage of the
wheels of industry.

The administration has the definite objective of raising commodity
prices to such an extent that those who have borrowed money will,
on the average, be able to repay that money in the same kind of
dollar which they borrowed.  We do not seek to let them get such a
cheap dollar that they will be able to pay back a great deal less
than they borrowed.  In other words, we seek to correct a wrong and
not to create another wrong in the opposite direction.  That is why
powers are being given to the administration to provide, if
necessary, for an enlargement of credit, in order to correct the
existing wrong.  These powers will be used when, as, and if it may
be necessary to accomplish the purpose.

Hand in hand with the domestic situation which, of course, is our
first concern, is the world situation, and I want to emphasize to
you that the domestic situation is inevitably and deeply tied in
with the conditions in all of the other nations of the world.  In
other words, we can get, in all probability, a fair measure of
prosperity to return in the United States, but it will not be
permanent unless we get a return to prosperity all over the world.

In the conferences which we have held and are holding with the
leaders of other nations, we are seeking four great objectives:
First, a general reduction of armaments and through this the
removal of the fear of invasion and armed attack, and, at the same
time, a reduction in armament costs, in order to help in the
balancing of government budgets and the reduction of taxation;
second, a cutting down of the trade barriers, in order to restart
the flow of exchange of crops and goods between nations; third, the
setting up of a stabilization of currencies, in order that trade
can make contracts ahead; fourth, the reestablishment of friendly
relations and greater confidence between all nations.

Our foreign visitors these past three weeks have responded to these
purposes in a very helpful way.  All of the nations have suffered
alike in this great depression.  They have all reached the
conclusion that each can best be helped by the common action of
all.  It is in this spirit that our visitors have met with us and
discussed our common problems.  The international conference that
lies before us must succeed.  The future of the world demands it and
we have each of us pledged ourselves to the best joint efforts to
this end.

To you, the people of this country, all of us, the Members of the
Congress and the members of this administration, owe a profound
debt of gratitude.  Throughout the depression you have been patient.
You have granted us wide powers; you have encouraged us with a
widespread approval of our purposes.  Every ounce of strength and
every resource at our command we have devoted to the end of
justifying your confidence.  We are encouraged to believe that a
wise and sensible beginning has been made.  In the present spirit of
mutual confidence and mutual encouragement we go forward.



July 24, 1933.


After the adjournment of the historical special session of the
Congress five weeks ago I purposely refrained from addressing you
for two very good reasons.

First, I think that we all wanted the opportunity of a little quiet
thought to examine and assimilate in a mental picture the crowding
events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting
of the wheels of the New Deal.

Secondly, I wanted a few weeks in which to set up the new
administrative organization and to see the first fruits of our
careful planning.

I think it will interest you if I set forth the fundamentals of
this planning for national recovery; and this I am very certain
will make it abundantly clear to you that all of the proposals and
all of the legislation since the fourth day of March have not been
just a collection of haphazard schemes but rather the orderly
component parts of a connected and logical whole.

Long before inauguration day I became convinced that individual
effort and local effort and even disjointed federal effort had
failed and of necessity would fail and, therefore, that a rounded
leadership by the federal government had become a necessity both of
theory and of fact.  Such leadership, however, had its beginning in
preserving and strengthening the credit of the United States
government, because without that no leadership was a possibility.
For years the government had not lived within its income.  The
immediate task was to bring our regular expenses within our
revenues.  That has been done.

It may seem inconsistent for a government to cut down its regular
expenses and at the same time to borrow and to spend billions for
an emergency.  But it is not inconsistent because a large portion of
the emergency money has been paid out in the form of sound loans
which will be repaid to the treasury over a period of years; and to
cover the rest of the emergency money we have imposed taxes to pay
the interest and the installments on that part of the debt.

So you will see that we have kept our credit good.  We have built a
granite foundation in a period of confusion.  That foundation of the
federal credit stands there broad and sure.  It is the base of the
whole recovery plan.

Then came the part of the problem that concerned the credit of the
individual citizens themselves.  You and I know of the banking
crisis and of the great danger to the savings of our people.  On
March sixth every national bank was closed.  One month later 90
percent of the deposits in the national banks had been made
available to the depositors.  Today only about 5 percent of the
deposits in national banks are still tied up.  The condition
relating to state banks, while not quite so good on a percentage
basis, is showing a steady reduction in the total of frozen
deposits--a result much better than we had expected three months
ago.

The problem of the credit of the individual was made more difficult
because of another fact.  The dollar was a different dollar from the
one with which the average debt had been incurred.  For this reason
large numbers of people were actually losing possession of and
title to their farms and homes.  All of you know the financial steps
which have been taken to correct this inequality.  In addition the
Home Loan Act, the Farm Loan Act and the Bankruptcy Act were
passed.

It was a vital necessity to restore purchasing power by reducing
the debt and interest charges upon our people, but while we were
helping people to save their credit it was at the same time
absolutely essential to do something about the physical needs of
hundreds of thousands who were in dire straits at that very moment.
Municipal and state aid were being stretched to the limit.  We
appropriated half a billion dollars to supplement their efforts and
in addition, as you know, we have put 300,000 young men into
practical and useful work in our forests and to prevent flood and
soil erosion.  The wages they earn are going in greater part to the
support of the nearly one million people who constitute their
families.

In this same classification we can properly place the great public
works program running to a total of over three billion dollars--to
be used for highways and ships and flood prevention and inland
navigation and thousands of self-sustaining state and municipal
improvements.  Two points should be made clear in the allotting and
administration of these projects--first, we are using the utmost
care to choose labor-creating, quick-acting, useful projects,
avoiding the smell of the pork barrel; and secondly, we are hoping
that at least half of the money will come back to the government
from projects which will pay for themselves over a period of years.

Thus far I have spoken primarily of the foundation stones--the
measures that were necessary to reestablish credit and to head
people in the opposite direction by preventing distress and
providing as much work as possible through governmental agencies.
Now I come to the links which will build us a more lasting
prosperity.  I have said that we cannot attain that in a nation half
boom and half broke.  If all of our people have work and fair wages
and fair profits, they can buy the products of their neighbors and
business is good.  But if you take away the wages and the profits of
half of them, business is only half as good.  It doesn't help much
if the fortunate half is very prosperous--the best way is for
everybody to be reasonably prosperous.

For many years the two great barriers to a normal prosperity have
been low farm prices and the creeping paralysis of unemployment.
These factors have cut the purchasing power of the country in half.
I promised action.  Congress did its part when it passed the Farm
and the Industrial Recovery Acts.  Today we are putting these two
acts to work and they will work if people understand their plain
objectives.

First the Farm Act:  It is based on the fact that the purchasing
power of nearly half our population depends on adequate prices for
farm products.  We have been producing more of some crops than we
consume or can sell in a depressed world market.  The cure is not to
produce so much.  Without our help the farmers cannot get together
and cut production, and the Farm Bill gives them a method of
bringing their production down to a reasonable level and of
obtaining reasonable prices for their crops.  I have clearly stated
that this method is in a sense experimental, but so far as we have
gone we have reason to believe that it will produce good results.

It is obvious that if we can greatly increase the purchasing power
of the tens of millions of our people who make a living from
farming and the distribution of farm crops, we will greatly
increase the consumption of those goods which are turned out by
industry.

That brings me to the final step--bringing back industry along
sound lines.

Last Autumn, on several occasions, I expressed my faith that we can
make possible by democratic self-discipline in industry general
increases in wages and shortening of hours sufficient to enable
industry to pay its own workers enough to let those workers buy and
use the things that their labor produces.  This can be done only if
we permit and encourage cooperative action in industry because it
is obvious that without united action a few selfish men in each
competitive group will pay starvation wages and insist on long
hours of work.  Others in that group must either follow suit or
close up shop.  We have seen the result of action of that kind in
the continuing descent into the economic Hell of the past four
years.

There is a clear way to reverse that process:  If all employers in
each competitive group agree to pay their workers the same wages--
reasonable wages--and require the same hours--reasonable hours--
then higher wages and shorter hours will hurt no employer.
Moreover, such action is better for the employer than unemployment
and low wages, because it makes more buyers for his product.  That
is the simple idea which is the very heart of the Industrial
Recovery Act.

On the basis of this simple principle of everybody doing things
together, we are starting out on this nationwide attack on
unemployment.  It will succeed if our people understand it--in the
big industries, in the little shops, in the great cities and in the
small villages.  There is nothing complicated about it and there is
nothing particularly new in the principle.  It goes back to the
basic idea of society and of the nation itself that people acting
in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone
could even hope to bring about.

Here is an example.  In the Cotton Textile Code and in other
agreements already signed, child labor has been abolished.  That
makes me personally happier than any other one thing with which I
have been connected since I came to Washington.  In the textile
industry--an industry which came to me spontaneously and with a
splendid cooperation as soon as the recovery act was signed--child
labor was an old evil.  But no employer acting alone was able to
wipe it out.  If one employer tried it, or if one state tried it,
the costs of operation rose so high that it was impossible to
compete with the employers or states which had failed to act.  The
moment the Recovery Act was passed, this monstrous thing which
neither opinion nor law could reach through years of effort went
out in a flash.  As a British editorial put it, we did more under a
Code in one day than they in England had been able to do under the
common law in eighty-five years of effort.  I use this incident, my
friends, not to boast of what has already been done but to point
the way to you for even greater cooperative efforts this summer and
autumn.

We are not going through another winter like the last.  I doubt if
ever any people so bravely and cheerfully endured a season half so
bitter.  We cannot ask America to continue to face such needless
hardships.  It is time for courageous action, and the Recovery Bill
gives us the means to conquer unemployment with exactly the same
weapon that we have used to strike down child labor.

The proposition is simply this:

If all employers will act together to shorten hours and raise wages
we can put people back to work.  No employer will suffer, because
the relative level of competitive cost will advance by the same
amount for all.  But if any considerable group should lag or shirk,
this great opportunity will pass us by and we will go into another
desperate winter.  This must not happen.

We have sent out to all employers an agreement which is the result
of weeks of consultation.  This agreement checks against the
voluntary codes of nearly all the large industries which have
already been submitted.  This blanket agreement carries the
unanimous approval of the three boards which I have appointed to
advise in this, boards representing the great leaders in labor, in
industry and in social service.  The agreement has already brought a
flood of approval from every state, and from so wide a cross-
section of the common calling of industry that I know it is fair
for all.  It is a plan--deliberate, reasonable and just--intended to
put into effect at once the most important of the broad principles
which are being established, industry by industry, through codes.
Naturally, it takes a good deal of organizing and a great many
hearings and many months, to get these codes perfected and signed,
and we cannot wait for all of them to go through.  The blanket
agreements, however, which I am sending to every employer will
start the wheels turning now, and not six months from now.

There are, of course, men, a few of them who might thwart this
great common purpose by seeking selfish advantage.  There are
adequate penalties in the law, but I am now asking the cooperation
that comes from opinion and from conscience.  These are the only
instruments we shall use in this great summer offensive against
unemployment.  But we shall use them to the limit to protect the
willing from the laggard and to make the plan succeed.

In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge
on their shoulders to be sure that comrades do not fire on
comrades.  On that principle, those who cooperate in this program
must know each other at a glance.  That is why we have provided a
badge of honor for this purpose, a simple design with a legend.  "We
do our part," and I ask that all those who join with me shall
display that badge prominently.  It is essential to our purpose.

Already all the great, basic industries have come forward willingly
with proposed codes, and in these codes they accept the principles
leading to mass reemployment.  But, important as is this heartening
demonstration, the richest field for results is among the small
employers, those whose contribution will give new work for from one
to ten people.  These smaller employers are indeed a vital part of
the backbone of the country, and the success of our plans lies
largely in their hands.

Already the telegrams and letters are pouring into the White
House--messages from employers who ask that their names be placed
on this special Roll of Honor.  They represent great corporations
and companies, and partnerships and individuals.  I ask that even
before the dates set in the agreements which we have sent out, the
employers of the country who have not already done so--the big
fellows and the little fellows--shall at once write or telegraph to
me personally at the White House, expressing their intention of
going through with the plan.  And it is my purpose to keep posted in
the post office of every town, a Roll of Honor of all those who
join with me.

I want to take this occasion to say to the twenty-four governors
who are now in conference in San Francisco, that nothing thus far
has helped in strengthening this great movement more than their
resolutions adopted at the very outset of their meeting, giving
this plan their unanimous and instant approval, and pledging to
support it in their states.

To the men and women whose lives have been darkened by the fact or
the fear of unemployment, I am justified in saying a word of
encouragement because the codes and the agreements already
approved, or about to be passed upon, prove that the plan does
raise wages, and that it does put people back to work.  You can look
on every employer who adopts the plan as one who is doing his part,
and those employers deserve well of everyone who works for a
living.  It will be clear to you, as it is to me, that while the
shirking employer may undersell his competitor, the saving he thus
makes is made at the expense of his country's welfare.

While we are making this great common effort there should be no
discord and dispute.  This is no time to cavil or to question the
standard set by this universal agreement.  It is time for patience
and understanding and cooperation.  The workers of this country have
rights under this law which cannot be taken from them, and nobody
will be permitted to whittle them away, but, on the other hand, no
aggression is now necessary to attain those rights.  The whole
country will be united to get them for you.  The principle that
applies to the employers applies to the workers as well, and I ask
you workers to cooperate in the same spirit.

When Andrew Jackson, "Old Hickory," died, someone asked, "Will he
go to Heaven?" and the answer was, "He will if he wants to."  If I
am asked whether the American people will pull themselves out of
this depression, I answer, "They will if they want to."  The essence
of the plan is a universal limitation of hours of work per week for
any individual by common consent, and a universal payment of wages
above a minimum, also by common consent.  I cannot guarantee the
success of this nationwide plan, but the people of this country can
guarantee its success.  I have no faith in "cure-alls" but I believe
that we can greatly influence economic forces.  I have no sympathy
with the professional economists who insist that things must run
their course and that human agencies can have no influence on
economic ills.  One reason is that I happen to know that
professional economists have changed their definition of economic
laws every five or ten years for a very long time, but I do have
faith, and retain faith, in the strength of common purpose, and in
the strength of unified action taken by the American people.

That is why I am describing to you the simple purposes and the
solid foundations upon which our program of recovery is built.  That
is why I am asking the employers of the nation to sign this common
covenant with me--to sign it in the name of patriotism and
humanity.  That is why I am asking the workers to go along with us
in a spirit of understanding and of helpfulness.



October 22,1933.


It is three months since I have talked with the people of this
country about our national problems; but during this period many
things have happened, and I am glad to say that the major part of
them have greatly helped the well-being of the average citizen.

Because, in every step which your government is taking we are
thinking in terms of the average of you--in the old words, "the
greatest good to the greatest number"--we, as reasonable people,
cannot expect to bring definite benefits to every person or to
every occupation or business, or industry or agriculture.  In the
same way, no reasonable person can expect that in this short space
of time, during which new machinery had to be not only put to work,
but first set up, that every locality in every one of the forty-
eight states of the country could share equally and simultaneously
in the trend to better times.

The whole picture, however--the average of the whole territory from
coast to coast--the average of the whole population of 120,000,000
people--shows to any person willing to look, facts and action of
which you and I can be proud.

In the early spring of this year there were actually and
proportionately more people out of work in this country than in any
other nation in the world.  Fair estimates showed twelve or thirteen
millions unemployed last March.  Among those there were, of course,
several millions who could be classed as normally unemployed--
people who worked occasionally when they felt like it, and others
who preferred not to work at all.  It seems, therefore, fair to say
that there were about 10 millions of our citizens who earnestly,
and in many cases hungrily, were seeking work and could not get it.
Of these, in the short space of a few months, I am convinced that
at least 4 millions have been given employment--or, saying it
another way, 40 percent of those seeking work have found it.

That does not mean, my friends, that I am satisfied, or that you
are satisfied that our work is ended.  We have a long way to go but
we are on the way.

How are we constructing the edifice of recovery--the temple which,
when completed, will no longer be a temple of money-changers or of
beggars, but rather a temple dedicated to and maintained for a
greater social justice, a greater welfare for America--the
habitation of a sound economic life?  We are building, stone by
stone, the columns which will support that habitation.  Those
columns are many in number and though, for a moment the progress of
one column may disturb the progress on the pillar next to it, the
work on all of them must proceed without let or hindrance.

We all know that immediate relief for the unemployed was the first
essential of such a structure and that is why I speak first of the
fact that three hundred thousand young men have been given
employment and are being given employment all through this winter
in the Civilian Conservation Corps Camps in almost every part of
the nation.

So, too, we have, as you know, expended greater sums in cooperation
with states and localities for work relief and home relief than
ever before--sums which during the coming winter cannot be lessened
for the very simple reason that though several million people have
gone back to work, the necessities of those who have not yet
obtained work is more severe than at this time last year.

Then we come to the relief that is being given to those who are in
danger of losing their farms or their homes.  New machinery had to
be set up for farm credit and for home credit in every one of the
thirty-one hundred counties of the United States, and every day
that passes is saving homes and farms to hundreds of families.  I
have publicly asked that foreclosures on farms and chattels and on
homes be delayed until every mortgagor in the country shall have
had full opportunity to take advantage of federal credit.  I make
the further request which many of you know has already been made
through the great federal credit organizations that if there is any
family in the United States about to lose its home or about to lose
its chattels, that family should telegraph at once either to the
Farm Credit Administration or the Home Owners Loan Corporation in
Washington requesting their help.

Two other great agencies are in full swing.  The Reconstruction
Finance Corporation continues to lend large sums to industry and
finance with the definite objective of making easy the extending of
credit to industry, commerce and finance.

The program of public works in three months has advanced to this
point:  Out of a total appropriated for public works of three
billion three hundred million, one billion eight hundred million
has already been allocated to federal projects of all kinds and
literally in every part of the United States and work on these is
starting forward.  In addition, three hundred millions have been
allocated to public works to be carried out by states,
municipalities and private organizations, such as those undertaking
slum clearance.  The balance of the public works money, nearly all
of it intended for state or local projects, waits only on the
presentation of proper projects by the states and localities
themselves.  Washington has the money and is waiting for the proper
projects to which to allot it.

Another pillar in the making is the Agricultural Adjustment
Administration.  I have been amazed by the extraordinary degree of
cooperation given to the government by the cotton farmers in the
South, the wheat farmers of the West, the tobacco farmers of the
Southeast, and I am confident that the corn-hog farmers of the
Middle West will come through in the same magnificent fashion.  The
problem we seek to solve had been steadily getting worse for twenty
years, but during the last six months we have made more rapid
progress than any nation has ever made in a like period of time.  It
is true that in July farm commodity prices had been pushed up
higher than they are today, but that push came in part from pure
speculation by people who could not tell you the difference between
wheat and rye, by people who had never seen cotton growing, by
people who did not know that hogs were fed on corn--people who have
no real interest in the farmer and his problems.

In spite, however, of the speculative reaction from the speculative
advance, it seems to be well established that during the course of
the year 1933 the farmers of the United States will receive 33
percent more dollars for what they have produced than they received
in the year 1932.  Put in another way, they will receive $400 in
1933, where they received $300 the year before.  That, remember, is
for the average of the country, for I have reports that some
sections are not any better off than they were a year ago.  This
applies among the major products, especially to cattle raising and
the dairy industry.  We are going after those problems as fast as we
can.

I do not hesitate to say, in the simplest, clearest language of
which I am capable, that although the prices of many products of
the farm have gone up and although many farm families are better
off than they were last year, I am not satisfied either with the
amount or the extent of the rise, and that it is definitely a part
of our policy to increase the rise and to extend it to those
products which have as yet felt no benefit.  If we cannot do this
one way we will do it another.  Do it, we will.

Standing beside the pillar of the farm--the A.A.A.--is the pillar
of industry--the N.R.A.  Its object is to put industry and business
workers into employment and to increase their purchasing power
through increased wages.

It has abolished child labor.  It has eliminated the sweat shop.  It
has ended sixty cents a week paid in some mills and eighty cents a
week paid in some mines.  The measure of the growth of this pillar
lies in the total figures of reemployment which I have already
given you and in the fact that reemployment is continuing and not
stopping.  The secret of N.R.A. is cooperation.  That cooperation has
been voluntarily given through the signing of the blanket codes and
through the signing of specific codes which already include all of
the greater industries of the nation.

In the vast majority of cases, in the vast majority of localities--
the N.R.A. has been given support in unstinted measure.  We know
that there are chiselers.  At the bottom of every case of criticism
and obstruction we have found some selfish interest, some private
ax to grind.

Ninety percent of complaints come from misconception.  For example,
it has been said that N.R.A. has failed to raise the price of wheat
and corn and hogs; that N.R.A. has not loaned enough money for
local public works.  Of course, N.R.A. has nothing whatsoever to do
with the price of farm products, nor with public works.  It has to
do only with industrial organization for economic planning to wipe
out unfair practices and to create reemployment.  Even in the field
of business and industry, N.R.A. does not apply to the rural
communities or to towns of under twenty-five hundred population,
except in so far as those towns contain factories or chain stores
which come under a specific code.

It is also true that among the chiselers to whom I have referred,
there are not only the big chiselers but also petty chiselers who
seek to make undue profit on untrue statements.

Let me cite to you the example of the salesman in a store in a
large Eastern city who tried to justify the increase in the price
of a cotton shirt from one dollar and a half to two dollars and a
half by saying to the customer that it was due to the cotton
processing tax.  Actually in that shirt there was about one pound of
cotton and the processing tax amounted to four and a quarter cents
on that pound of cotton.

At this point it is only fair that I should give credit to the
sixty or seventy million people who live in the cities and larger
towns of the nation for their understanding and their willingness
to go along with the payment of even these small processing taxes,
though they know full well that the proportion of the processing
taxes on cotton goods and on food products paid for by city
dwellers goes 100 percent towards increasing the agricultural
income of the farm dwellers of the land.

The last pillar of which I speak is that of the money of the
country in the banks of the country.  There are two simple facts.

First, the federal government is about to spend one billion dollars
as an immediate loan on the frozen or non-liquid assets of all
banks closed since January 1, 1933, giving a liberal appraisal to
those assets.  This money will be in the hands of the depositors as
quickly as it is humanly possible to get it out.

Second, the Government Bank Deposit Insurance on all accounts up to
$2500 goes into effect on January first.  We are now engaged in
seeing to it that on or before that date the banking capital
structure will be built up by the government to the point that the
banks will be in sound condition when the insurance goes into
effect.

Finally, I repeat what I have said on many occasions, that ever
since last March the definite policy of the government has been to
restore commodity price levels.  The object has been the attainment
of such a level as will enable agriculture and industry once more
to give work to the unemployed.  It has been to make possible the
payment of public and private debts more nearly at the price level
at which they were incurred.  It has been gradually to restore a
balance in the price structure so that farmers may exchange their
products for the products of industry on a fairer exchange basis.
It has been and is also the purpose to prevent prices from rising
beyond the point necessary to attain these ends.  The permanent
welfare and security of every class of our people ultimately
depends on our attainment of these purposes.

Obviously, and because hundreds of different kinds of crops and
industrial occupations in the huge territory that makes up this
Nation are involved, we cannot reach the goal in only a few months.
We may take one year or two years or three years.

No one who considers the plain facts of our situation believes that
commodity prices, especially agricultural prices, are high enough
yet.

Some people are putting the cart before the horse.  They want a
permanent revaluation of the dollar first.  It is the government's
policy to restore the price level first.  I would not know, and no
one else could tell, just what the permanent valuation of the
dollar will be.  To guess at a permanent gold valuation now would
certainly require later changes caused by later facts.

When we have restored the price level, we shall seek to establish
and maintain a dollar which will not change its purchasing and debt
paying power during the succeeding generation.  I said that in my
message to the American delegation in London last July.  And I say
it now once more.

Because of conditions in this country and because of events beyond
our control in other parts of the world, it becomes increasingly
important to develop and apply the further measures which may be
necessary from time to time to control the gold value of our own
dollar at home.

Our dollar is now altogether too greatly influenced by the
accidents of international trade, by the internal policies of other
nations and by political disturbance in other continents.  Therefore
the United States must take firmly in its own hands the control of
the gold value of our dollar.  This is necessary in order to prevent
dollar disturbances from swinging us away from our ultimate goal,
namely, the continued recovery of our commodity prices.

As a further effective means to this end, I am going to establish a
government market for gold in the United States.  Therefore, under
the clearly defined authority of existing law, I am authorizing the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation to buy gold newly mined in the
United States at prices to be determined from time to time after
consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the President.
Whenever necessary to the end in view, we shall also buy or sell
gold in the world market.

My aim in taking this step is to establish and maintain continuous
control.

This is a policy and not an expedient.

It is not to be used merely to offset a temporary fall in prices.
We are thus continuing to move towards a managed currency.

You will recall the dire predictions made last spring by those who
did not agree with our common policies of raising prices by direct
means.  What actually happened stood out in sharp contrast with
those predictions.  Government credit is high, prices have risen in
part.  Doubtless prophets of evil still exist in our midst.  But
government credit will be maintained and a sound currency will
accompany a rise in the American commodity price level.

I have told you tonight the story of our steady but sure work in
building our common recovery.  In my promises to you both before and
after March 4th, I made two things plain:  First, that I pledged no
miracles and, second, that I would do my best.

I thank you for your patience and your faith.  Our troubles will not
be over tomorrow, but we are on our way and we are headed in the
right direction.



June 28, 1934.


It has been several months since I have talked with you concerning
the problems of government.  Since January, those of us in whom you
have vested responsibility have been engaged in the fulfillment of
plans and policies which had been widely discussed in previous
months.  It seemed to us our duty not only to make the right path
clear but also to tread that path.

As we review the achievements of this session of the Seventy-third
Congress, it is made increasingly clear that its task was
essentially that of completing and fortifying the work it had begun
in March, l933.  That was no easy task, but the Congress was equal
to it.  It has been well said that while there were a few
exceptions, this Congress displayed a greater freedom from mere
partisanship than any other peace-time Congress since the
administration of President Washington himself.  The session was
distinguished by the extent and variety of legislation enacted and
by the intelligence and good will of debate upon these measures.

I mention only a few of the major enactments.  It provided for the
readjustment of the debt burden through the corporate and municipal
bankruptcy acts and the Farm Relief Act.  It lent a hand to industry
by encouraging loans to solvent industries unable to secure
adequate help from banking institutions.  It strengthened the
integrity of finance through the regulation of securities
exchanges.  It provided a rational method of increasing our volume
of foreign trade through reciprocal trading agreements.  It
strengthened our naval forces to conform with the intentions and
permission of existing treaty rights.  It made further advances
towards peace in industry through the Labor Adjustment Act.  It
supplemented our agricultural policy through measures widely
demanded by farmers themselves and intended to avert price
destroying surpluses.  It strengthened the hand of the federal
government in its attempts to suppress gangster crime.  It took
definite steps towards a national housing program through an act
which I signed today designed to encourage private capital in the
rebuilding of the homes of the nation.  It created a permanent
federal body for the just regulation of all forms of communication,
including the telephone, the telegraph and the radio.  Finally, and
I believe most important, it reorganized, simplified and made more
fair and just our monetary system, setting up standards and
policies adequate to meet the necessities of modern economic life,
doing justice to both gold and silver as the metal bases behind the
currency of the United States.

In the consistent development of our previous efforts toward the
saving and safeguarding of our national life, I have continued to
recognize three related steps.  The first was relief, because the
primary concern of any government dominated by the humane ideals of
democracy is the simple principle that in a land of vast resources
no one should be permitted to starve.  Relief was and continues to
be our first consideration.  It calls for large expenditures and
will continue in modified form to do so for a long time to come.  We
may as well recognize that fact.  It comes from the paralysis that
arose as the after-effect of that unfortunate decade characterized
by a mad chase for unearned riches and an unwillingness of leaders
in almost every walk of life to look beyond their own schemes and
speculations.  In our administration of relief we follow two
principles:  First, that direct giving shall, wherever possible, be
supplemented by provision for useful and remunerative work and,
second, that where families in their existing surroundings will in
all human probability never find an opportunity for full self-
maintenance, happiness and enjoyment, we will try to give them a
new chance in new surroundings.

The second step was recovery, and it is sufficient for me to ask
each and every one of you to compare the situation in agriculture
and in industry today with what it was fifteen months ago.

At the same time we have recognized the necessity of reform and
reconstruction--reform because much of our trouble today and in the
past few years has been due to a lack of understanding of the
elementary principles of justice and fairness by those in whom
leadership in business and finance was placed--reconstruction
because new conditions in our economic life as well as old but
neglected conditions had to be corrected.

Substantial gains well known to all of you have justified our
course.  I could cite statistics to you as unanswerable measures of
our national progress--statistics to show the gain in the average
weekly pay envelope of workers in the great majority of
industries--statistics to show hundreds of thousands reemployed in
private industries and other hundreds of thousands given new
employment through the expansion of direct and indirect government
assistance of many kinds, although, of course, there are those
exceptions in professional pursuits whose economic improvement, of
necessity, will be delayed.  I also could cite statistics to show
the great rise in the value of farm products--statistics to prove
the demand for consumers' goods, ranging all the way from food and
clothing to automobiles, and of late to prove the rise in the
demand for durable goods--statistics to cover the great increase in
bank deposits and to show the scores of thousands of homes and of
farms which have been saved from foreclosure.

But the simplest way for each of you to judge recovery lies in the
plain facts of your own individual situation.  Are you better off
than you were last year?  Are your debts less burdensome?  Is your
bank account more secure?  Are your working conditions better?  Is
your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?

Also, let me put to you another simple question:  Have you as an
individual paid too high a price for these gains?  Plausible self-
seekers and theoretical die-hards will tell you of the loss of
individual liberty.  Answer this question also out of the facts of
your own life.  Have you lost any of your rights or liberty or
constitutional freedom of action and choice?  Turn to the Bill of
Rights of the Constitution, which I have solemnly sworn to maintain
and under which your freedom rests secure.  Read each provision of
that Bill of Rights and ask yourself whether you personally have
suffered the impairment of a single jot of these great assurances.
I have no question in my mind as to what your answer will be.  The
record is written in the experiences of your own personal lives.

In other words, it is not the overwhelming majority of the farmers
or manufacturers or workers who deny the substantial gains of the
past year.  The most vociferous of the Doubting Thomases may be
divided roughly into two groups:  First, those who seek special
political privilege and, second, those who seek special financial
privilege.  About a year ago I used as an illustration the 90
percent of the cotton manufacturers of the United States who wanted
to do the right thing by their employees and by the public but were
prevented from doing so by the 10 percent who undercut them by
unfair practices and un-American standards.  It is well for us to
remember that humanity is a long way from being perfect and that a
selfish minority in every walk of life--farming, business, finance
and even government service itself--will always continue to think
of themselves first and their fellow-beings second.

In the working out of a great national program which seeks the
primary good of the greater number, it is true that the toes of
some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on.
But these toes belong to the comparative few who seek to retain or
to gain position or riches or both by some short cut which is
harmful to the greater good.

In the execution of the powers conferred on it by Congress, the
administration needs and will tirelessly seek the best ability that
the country affords.  Public service offers better rewards in the
opportunity for service than ever before in our history--not great
salaries, but enough to live on.  In the building of this service
there are coming to us men and women with ability and courage from
every part of the Union.  The days of the seeking of mere party
advantage through the misuse of public power are drawing to a
close.  We are increasingly demanding and getting devotion to the
public service on the part of every member of the administration,
high and low.

The program of the past year is definitely in operation and that
operation month by month is being made to fit into the web of old
and new conditions.  This process of evolution is well illustrated
by the constant changes in detailed organization and method going
on in the National Recovery Administration.  With every passing
month we are making strides in the orderly handling of the
relationship between employees and employers.  Conditions differ, of
course, in almost every part of the country and in almost every
industry.  Temporary methods of adjustment are being replaced by
more permanent machinery and, I am glad to say, by a growing
recognition on the part of employers and employees of the
desirability of maintaining fair relationships all around.

So also, while almost everybody has recognized the tremendous
strides in the elimination of child labor, in the payment of not
less than fair minimum wages and in the shortening of hours, we are
still feeling our way in solving problems which relate to self-
government in industry, especially where such self-government tends
to eliminate the fair operation of competition.

In this same process of evolution we are keeping before us the
objectives of protecting on the one hand industry against chiselers
within its own ranks, and on the other hand the consumer through
the maintenance of reasonable competition for the prevention of the
unfair sky-rocketing of retail prices.

But, in addition to this our immediate task, we must still look to
the larger future.  I have pointed out to the Congress that we are
seeking to find the way once more to well-known, long-established
but to some degree forgotten ideals and values.  We seek the
security of the men, women and children of the nation.

That security involves added means of providing better homes for
the people of the nation.  That is the first principle of our future
program.

The second is to plan the use of land and water resources of this
country to the end that the means of livelihood of our citizens may
be more adequate to meet their daily needs.

And, finally, the third principle is to use the agencies of
government to assist in the establishment of means to provide sound
and adequate protection against the vicissitudes of modern life--in
other words, social insurance.

Later in the year I hope to talk with you more fully about these
plans.

A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and
strange names for what we are doing.  Sometimes they will call it
"Fascism", sometimes "Communism", sometimes "Regimentation",
sometimes "Socialism".  But, in so doing, they are trying to make
very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple
and very practical.

I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies.  I
believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of
what Americans have always been doing--a fulfillment of old and
tested American ideals.

Let me give you a simple illustration:

While I am away from Washington this summer, a long needed
renovation of and addition to our White House office building is to
be started.  The architects have planned a few new rooms built into
the present all too small one-story structure.  We are going to
include in this addition and in this renovation modern electric
wiring and modern plumbing and modern means of keeping the offices
cool in the hot Washington summers.  But the structural lines of the
old Executive Office Building will remain.  The artistic lines of
the White House buildings were the creation of master builders when
our Republic was young.  The simplicity and the strength of the
structure remain in the face of every modern test.  But within this
magnificent pattern, the necessities of modern government business
require constant reorganization and rebuilding.

If I were to listen to the arguments of some prophets of calamity
who are talking these days, I should hesitate to make these
alterations.  I should fear that while I am away for a few weeks the
architects might build some strange new Gothic tower or a factory
building or perhaps a replica of the Kremlin or of the Potsdam
Palace.  But I have no such fears.  The architects and builders are
men of common sense and of artistic American tastes.  They know that
the principles of harmony and of necessity itself require that the
building of the new structure shall blend with the essential lines
of the old.  It is this combination of the old and the new that
marks orderly peaceful progress--not only in building buildings but
in building government itself.

Our new structure is a part of and a fulfillment of the old.

All that we do seeks to fulfill the historic traditions of the
American people.  Other nations may sacrifice democracy for the
transitory stimulation of old and discredited autocracies.  We are
restoring confidence and well-being under the rule of the people
themselves.  We remain, as John Marshall said a century ago,
"emphatically and truly, a government of the people."  Our
government "in form and in substance. . . emanates from them.  Its
powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on
them, and for their benefits."

Before I close, I want to tell you of the interest and pleasure
with which I look forward to the trip on which I hope to start in a
few days.  It is a good thing for everyone who can possibly do so to
get away at least once a year for a change of scene.  I do not want
to get into the position of not being able to see the forest
because of the thickness of the trees.

I hope to visit our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico, in the Virgin
Islands, in the Canal Zone and in Hawaii.  And, incidentally, it
will give me an opportunity to exchange a friendly word of greeting
to the Presidents of our sister Republics:  Haiti, Colombia and
Panama.

After four weeks on board ship, I plan to land at a port in our
Pacific northwest, and then will come the best part of the whole
trip, for I am hoping to inspect a number of our new great national
projects on the Columbia, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, to see
some of our national parks and, incidentally, to learn much of
actual conditions during the trip across the continent back to
Washington.

While I was in France during the War our boys used to call the
United States "God's country".  Let us make it and keep it "God's
country".



September 30, 1934.


Three months have passed since I talked with you shortly after the
adjournment of the Congress.  Tonight I continue that report,
though, because of the shortness of time, I must defer a number of
subjects to a later date.

Recently the most notable public questions that have concerned us
all have had to do with industry and labor and with respect to
these, certain developments have taken place which I consider of
importance.  I am happy to report that after years of uncertainty,
culminating in the collapse of the spring of 1933, we are bringing
order out of the old chaos with a greater certainty of the
employment of labor at a reasonable wage and of more business at a
fair profit.  These governmental and industrial developments hold
promise of new achievements for the nation.

Men may differ as to the particular form of governmental activity
with respect to industry and business, but nearly all are agreed
that private enterprise in times such as these cannot be left
without assistance and without reasonable safeguards lest it
destroy not only itself but also our processes of civilization.  The
underlying necessity for such activity is indeed as strong now as
it was years ago when Elihu Root said the following very
significant words:

"Instead of the give and take of free individual contract, the
tremendous power of organization has combined great aggregations of
capital in enormous industrial establishments working through vast
agencies of commerce and employing great masses of men in movements
of production and transportation and trade, so great in the mass
that each individual concerned in them is quite helpless by
himself.  The relations between the employer and the employed,
between the owners of aggregated capital and the units of organized
labor, between the small producer, the small trader, the consumer,
and the great transporting and manufacturing and distributing
agencies, all present new questions for the solution of which the
old reliance upon the free action of individual wills appears quite
inadequate.  And in many directions, the intervention of that
organized control which we call government seems necessary to
produce the same result of justice and right conduct which obtained
through the attrition of individuals before the new conditions
arose."

It was in this spirit thus described by Secretary Root that we
approached our task of reviving private enterprise in March, 1933.
Our first problem was, of course, the banking situation because, as
you know, the banks had collapsed.  Some banks could not be saved
but the great majority of them, either through their own resources
or with government aid, have been restored to complete public
confidence.  This has given safety to millions of depositors in
these banks.  Closely following this great constructive effort we
have, through various federal agencies, saved debtors and creditors
alike in many other fields of enterprise, such as loans on farm
mortgages and home mortgages; loans to the railroads and insurance
companies and, finally, help for home owners and industry itself.

In all of these efforts the government has come to the assistance
of business and with the full expectation that the money used to
assist these enterprises will eventually be repaid.  I believe it
will be.

The second step we have taken in the restoration of normal business
enterprise has been to clean up thoroughly unwholesome conditions
in the field of investment.  In this we have had assistance from
many bankers and businessmen, most of whom recognize the past evils
in the banking system, in the sale of securities, in the deliberate
encouragement of stock gambling, in the sale of unsound mortgages
and in many other ways in which the public lost billions of
dollars.  They saw that without changes in the policies and methods
of investment there could be no recovery of public confidence in
the security of savings.  The country now enjoys the safety of bank
savings under the new banking laws, the careful checking of new
securities under the Securities Act and the curtailment of rank
stock speculation through the Securities Exchange Act.  I sincerely
hope that as a result people will be discouraged in unhappy efforts
to get rich quick by speculating in securities.  The average person
almost always loses.  Only a very small minority of the people of
this country believe in gambling as a substitute for the old
philosophy of Benjamin Franklin that the way to wealth is through
work.

In meeting the problems of industrial recovery the chief agency of
the government has been the National Recovery Administration.  Under
its guidance, trades and industries covering over 90 percent of all
industrial employees have adopted codes of fair competition, which
have been approved by the President.  Under these codes, in the
industries covered, child labor has been eliminated.  The work day
and the work week have been shortened.  Minimum wages have been
established and other wages adjusted toward a rising standard of
living.  The emergency purpose of the N.R.A. was to put men to work
and since its creation more than four million persons have been
reemployed, in great part through the cooperation of American
business brought about under the codes.

Benefits of the Industrial Recovery Program have come, not only to
labor in the form of new jobs, in relief from overwork and in
relief from underpay, but also to the owners and managers of
industry because, together with a great increase in the payrolls,
there has come a substantial rise in the total of industrial
profits--a rise from a deficit figure in the first quarter of 1933
to a level of sustained profits within one year from the
inauguration of N.R.A.

Now it should not be expected that even employed labor and capital
would be completely satisfied with present conditions.  Employed
workers have not by any means all enjoyed a return to the earnings
of prosperous times, although millions of hitherto underprivileged
workers are today far better paid than ever before.  Also, billions
of dollars of invested capital have today a greater security of
present and future earning power than before.  This is because of
the establishment of fair, competitive standards and because of
relief from unfair competition in wage cutting which depresses
markets and destroys purchasing power.  But it is an undeniable fact
that the restoration of other billions of sound investments to a
reasonable earning power could not be brought about in one year.
There is no magic formula, no economic panacea, which could simply
revive over-night the heavy industries and the trades dependent
upon them.

Nevertheless the gains of trade and industry, as a whole, have been
substantial.  In these gains and in the policies of the
administration there are assurances that hearten all forward-
looking men and women with the confidence that we are definitely
rebuilding our political and economic system on the lines laid down
by the New Deal--lines which as I have so often made clear, are in
complete accord with the underlying principles of orderly popular
government which Americans have demanded since the white man first
came to these shores.  We count, in the future as in the past, on
the driving power of individual initiative and the incentive of
fair private profit, strengthened with the acceptance of those
obligations to the public interest which rest upon us all.  We have
the right to expect that this driving power will be given
patriotically and whole-heartedly to our nation.

We have passed through the formative period of code making in the
National Recovery Administration and have effected a reorganization
of the N.R.A. suited to the needs of the next phase, which is, in
turn, a period of preparation for legislation which will determine
its permanent form.

In this recent reorganization we have recognized three distinct
functions:  first, the legislative or policy making function;
second, the administrative function of code making and revision;
and, third, the judicial function, which includes enforcement,
consumer complaints and the settlement of disputes between
employers and employees and between one employer and another.

We are now prepared to move into this second phase, on the basis of
our experience in the first phase under the able and energetic
leadership of General Johnson.

We shall watch carefully the working of this new machinery for the
second phase of N.R.A., modifying it where it needs modification
and finally making recommendations to the Congress, in order that
the functions of N.R.A. which have proved their worth may be made a
part of the permanent machinery of government.

Let me call your attention to the fact that the national Industrial
Recovery Act gave businessmen the opportunity they had sought for
years to improve business conditions through what has been called
self-government in industry.  If the codes which have been written
have been too complicated, if they have gone too far in such
matters as price fixing and limitation of production, let it be
remembered that so far as possible, consistent with the immediate
public interest of this past year and the vital necessity of
improving labor conditions, the representatives of trade and
industry were permitted to write their ideas into the codes.  It is
now time to review these actions as a whole to determine through
deliberative means in the light of experience, from the standpoint
of the good of the industries themselves, as well as the general
public interest, whether the methods and policies adopted in the
emergency have been best calculated to promote industrial recovery
and a permanent improvement of business and labor conditions.  There
may be a serious question as to the wisdom of many of those devices
to control production, or to prevent destructive price cutting
which many business organizations have insisted were necessary, or
whether their effect may have been to prevent that volume of
production which would make possible lower prices and increased
employment.  Another question arises as to whether in fixing minimum
wages on the basis of an hourly or weekly wage we have reached into
the heart of the problem which is to provide such annual earnings
for the lowest paid worker as will meet his minimum needs.  We also
question the wisdom of extending code requirements suited to the
great industrial centers and to large employers, to the great
number of small employers in the smaller communities.

During the last twelve months our industrial recovery has been to
some extent retarded by strikes, including a few of major
importance.  I would not minimize the inevitable losses to employers
and employees and to the general public through such conflicts.  But
I would point out that the extent and severity of labor disputes
during this period has been far less than in any previous,
comparable period.

When the businessmen of the country were demanding the right to
organize themselves adequately to promote their legitimate
interests; when the farmers were demanding legislation which would
give them opportunities and incentives to organize themselves for a
common advance, it was natural that the workers should seek and
obtain a statutory declaration of their constitutional right to
organize themselves for collective bargaining as embodied in
Section 7 (a) of the national Industrial Recovery Act.

Machinery set up by the federal government has provided some new
methods of adjustment.  Both employers and employees must share the
blame of not using them as fully as they should.  The employer who
turns away from impartial agencies of peace, who denies freedom of
organization to his employees, or fails to make every reasonable
effort at a peaceful solution of their differences, is not fully
supporting the recovery effort of his government.  The workers who
turn away from these same impartial agencies and decline to use
their good offices to gain their ends are likewise not fully
cooperating with their government.

It is time that we made a clean-cut effort to bring about that
united action of management and labor, which is one of the high
purposes of the Recovery Act.  We have passed through more than a
year of education.  Step by step we have created all the government
agencies necessary to insure, as a general rule, industrial peace,
with justice for all those willing to use these agencies whenever
their voluntary bargaining fails to produce a necessary agreement.

There should be at least a full and fair trial given to these means
of ending industrial warfare; and in such an effort we should be
able to secure for employers and employees and consumers the
benefits that all derive from the continuous, peaceful operation of
our essential enterprises.

Accordingly, I propose to confer within the coming month with small
groups of those truly representative of large employers of labor
and of large groups of organized labor, in order to seek their
cooperation in establishing what I may describe as a specific trial
period of industrial peace.

From those willing to join in establishing this hoped-for period of
peace, I shall seek assurances of the making and maintenance of
agreements, which can be mutually relied upon, under which wages,
hours and working conditions may be determined and any later
adjustments shall be made either by agreement or, in case of
disagreement, through the mediation or arbitration of state or
federal agencies.  I shall not ask either employers or employees
permanently to lay aside the weapons common to industrial war.  But
I shall ask both groups to give a fair trial to peaceful methods of
adjusting their conflicts of opinion and interest, and to
experiment for a reasonable time with measures suitable to civilize
our industrial civilization.

Closely allied to the N.R.A. is the program of Public Works
provided for in the same Act and designed to put more men back to
work, both directly on the public works themselves, and indirectly
in the industries supplying the materials for these public works.
To those who say that our expenditures for public works and other
means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that
no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human
resources.  Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our
greatest extravagance.  Morally, it is the greatest menace to our
social order.  Some people try to tell me that we must make up our
minds that for the future we shall permanently have millions of
unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade.
What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility
to determine.  But as for this country, I stand or fall by my
refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a
permanent army of unemployed.  On the contrary, we must make it a
national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of
unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our
present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise
measures against its return.  I do not want to think that it is the
destiny of any American to remain permanently on relief rolls.

Those, fortunately few in number, who are frightened by boldness
and cowed by the necessity for making decisions, complain that all
we have done is unnecessary and subject to great risks.  Now that
these people are coming out of their storm cellars, they forget
that there ever was a storm.  They point to England.  They would have
you believe that England has made progress out of her depression by
a do-nothing policy, by letting nature take her course.  England has
her peculiarities and we have ours but I do not believe any
intelligent observer can accuse England of undue orthodoxy in the
present emergency.

Did England let nature take her course?  No.  Did England hold to the
gold standard when her reserves were threatened?  No.  Has England
gone back to the gold standard today?  No.  Did England hesitate to
call in ten billion dollars of her war bonds bearing 5 percent
interest, to issue new bonds therefore bearing only 3-1/2 percent
interest, thereby saving the British treasury one hundred and fifty
million dollars a year in interest alone?  No.  And let it be
recorded that the British bankers helped.  Is it not a fact that
ever since the year 1909, Great Britain in many ways has advanced
further along lines of social security than the United States?  Is
it not a fact that relations between capital and labor on the basis
of collective bargaining are much further advanced in Great Britain
than in the United States?  It is perhaps not strange that the
conservative British press has told us with pardonable irony that
much of our New Deal program is only an attempt to catch up with
English reforms that go back ten years or more.

Nearly all Americans are sensible and calm people.  We do not get
greatly excited nor is our peace of mind disturbed, whether we be
businessmen or workers or farmers, by awesome pronouncements
concerning the unconstitutionality of some of our measures of
recovery and relief and reform.  We are not frightened by
reactionary lawyers or political editors.  All of these cries have
been heard before.  More than twenty years ago, when Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were attempting to correct abuses in
our national life, the great Chief Justice White said:

"There is great danger it seems to me to arise from the constant
habit which prevails where anything is opposed or objected to, of
referring without rhyme or reason to the Constitution as a means of
preventing its accomplishment, thus creating the general impression
that the Constitution is but a barrier to progress instead of being
the broad highway through which alone true progress may be
enjoyed."

In our efforts for recovery we have avoided on the one hand the
theory that business should and must be taken over into an all-
embracing government.  We have avoided on the other hand the equally
untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer
reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help.  The
course we have followed fits the American practice of government--a
practice of taking action step by step, of regulating only to meet
concrete needs--a practice of courageous recognition of change.  I
believe with Abraham Lincoln, that "The legitimate object of
government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to
have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves
in their separate and individual capacities."

I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for
many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the
service of the privileged few.  I prefer and I am sure you prefer
that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving
forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man
than he has ever known before in the history of America.



April 28, 1935.


Since my annual message to the Congress on January fourth, last, I
have not addressed the general public over the air.  In the many
weeks since that time the Congress has devoted itself to the
arduous task of formulating legislation necessary to the country's
welfare.  It has made and is making distinct progress.

Before I come to any of the specific measures, however, I want to
leave in your minds one clear fact.  The administration and the
Congress are not proceeding in any haphazard fashion in this task
of government.  Each of our steps has a definite relationship to
every other step.  The job of creating a program for the nation's
welfare is, in some respects, like the building of a ship.  At
different points on the coast where I often visit they build great
seagoing ships.  When one of these ships is under construction and
the steel frames have been set in the keel, it is difficult for a
person who does not know ships to tell how it will finally look
when it is sailing the high seas.

It may seem confused to some, but out of the multitude of detailed
parts that go into the making of the structure the creation of a
useful instrument for man ultimately comes.  It is that way with the
making of a national policy.  The objective of the nation has
greatly changed in three years.  Before that time individual self-
interest and group selfishness were paramount in public thinking.
The general good was at a discount.

Three years of hard thinking have changed the picture.  More and
more people, because of clearer thinking and a better
understanding, are considering the whole rather than a mere part
relating to one section or to one crop, or to one industry, or to
an individual private occupation.  That is a tremendous gain for the
principles of democracy.  The overwhelming majority of people in
this country know how to sift the wheat from the chaff in what they
hear and what they read.  They know that the process of the
constructive rebuilding of America cannot be done in a day or a
year, but that it is being done in spite of the few who seek to
confuse them and to profit by their confusion.  Americans as a whole
are feeling a lot better--a lot more cheerful than for many, many
years.

The most difficult place in the world to get a clear open
perspective of the country as a whole is Washington.  I am reminded
sometimes of what President Wilson once said:  "So many people come
to Washington who know things that are not so, and so few people
who know anything about what the people of the United States are
thinking about."  That is why I occasionally leave this scene of
action for a few days to go fishing or back home to Hyde Park, so
that I can have a chance to think quietly about the country as a
whole.  "To get away from the trees", as they say, "and to look at
the whole forest."  This duty of seeing the country in a long-range
perspective is one which, in a very special manner, attaches to
this office to which you have chosen me.  Did you ever stop to think
that there are, after all, only two positions in the nation that
are filled by the vote of all of the voters--the President and the
Vice-President?  That makes it particularly necessary for the Vice-
President and for me to conceive of our duty toward the entire
country.  I speak, therefore, tonight, to and of the American people
as a whole.

My most immediate concern is in carrying out the purposes of the
great work program just enacted by the Congress.  Its first
objective is to put men and women now on the relief rolls to work
and, incidentally, to assist materially in our already unmistakable
march toward recovery.  I shall not confuse my discussion by a
multitude of figures.  So many figures are quoted to prove so many
things.  Sometimes it depends upon what paper you read and what
broadcast you hear.  Therefore, let us keep our minds on two or
three simple, essential facts in connection with this problem of
unemployment.  It is true that while business and industry are
definitely better our relief rolls are still too large.  However,
for the first time in five years the relief rolls have declined
instead of increased during the winter months.  They are still
declining.  The simple fact is that many million more people have
private work today than two years ago today or one year ago today,
and every day that passes offers more chances to work for those who
want to work.  In spite of the fact that unemployment remains a
serious problem here as in every other nation, we have come to
recognize the possibility and the necessity of certain helpful
remedial measures.  These measures are of two kinds.  The first is to
make provisions intended to relieve, to minimize, and to prevent
future unemployment; the second is to establish the practical means
to help those who are unemployed in this present emergency.  Our
social security legislation is an attempt to answer the first of
these questions; our Works Relief program, the second.

The program for social security now pending before the Congress is
a necessary part of the future unemployment policy of the
government.  While our present and projected expenditures for work
relief are wholly within the reasonable limits of our national
credit resources, it is obvious that we cannot continue to create
governmental deficits for that purpose year after year.  We must
begin now to make provision for the future.  That is why our social
security program is an important part of the complete picture.  It
proposes, by means of old age pensions, to help those who have
reached the age of retirement to give up their jobs and thus give
to the younger generation greater opportunities for work and to
give to all a feeling of security as they look toward old age.

The unemployment insurance part of the legislation will not only
help to guard the individual in future periods of lay-off against
dependence upon relief, but it will, by sustaining purchasing
power, cushion the shock of economic distress.  Another helpful
feature of unemployment insurance is the incentive it will give to
employers to plan more carefully in order that unemployment may be
prevented by the stabilizing of employment itself.

Provisions for social security, however, are protections for the
future.  Our responsibility for the immediate necessities of the
unemployed has been met by the Congress through the most
comprehensive work plan in the history of the nation.  Our problem
is to put to work three and one-half million employable persons now
on the relief rolls.  It is a problem quite as much for private
industry as for the government.

We are losing no time getting the government's vast work relief
program underway, and we have every reason to believe that it
should be in full swing by autumn.  In directing it, I shall
recognize six fundamental principles:

(1) The projects should be useful.

(2) Projects shall be of a nature that a considerable proportion of
the money spent will go into wages for labor.

(3) Projects will be sought which promise ultimate return to the
federal treasury of a considerable proportion of the costs.

(4) Funds allotted for each project should be actually and promptly
spent and not held over until later years.

(5) In all cases projects must be of a character to give employment
to those on the relief rolls.

(6) Projects will be allocated to localities or relief areas in
relation to the number of workers on relief rolls in those areas.

I next want to make it clear exactly how we shall direct the work.

(1) I have set up a Division of Applications and Information to
which all proposals for the expenditure of money must go for
preliminary study and consideration.

(2) After the Division of Applications and Information has sifted
those projects, they will be sent to an Allotment Division composed
of representatives of the more important governmental agencies
charged with carrying on work relief projects.  The group will also
include representatives of cities, and of labor, farming, banking
and industry.  This Allotment Division will consider all of the
recommendations submitted to it and such projects as they approve
will be next submitted to the President who under the Act is
required to make final allocations.

(3) The next step will be to notify the proper government agency in
whose field the project falls, and also to notify another agency
which I am creating--a Progress Division.  This Division will have
the duty of coordinating the purchases of materials and supplies
and of making certain that people who are employed will be taken
from the relief rolls.  It will also have the responsibility of
determining work payments in various localities, of making full use
of existing employment services and to assist people engaged in
relief work to move as rapidly as possible back into private
employment when such employment is available.  Moreover, this
Division will be charged with keeping projects moving on schedule.

(4) I have felt it to be essentially wise and prudent to avoid, so
far as possible, the creation of new governmental machinery for
supervising this work.  The national government now has at least
sixty different agencies with the staff and the experience and the
competence necessary to carry on the two hundred and fifty or three
hundred kinds of work that will be undertaken.  These agencies,
therefore, will simply be doing on a somewhat enlarged scale the
same sort of things that they have been doing.  This will make
certain that the largest possible portion of the funds allotted
will be spent for actually creating new work and not for building
up expensive overhead organizations here in Washington.

For many months preparations have been under way.  The allotment of
funds for desirable projects has already begun.  The key men for the
major responsibilities of this great task already have been
selected.  I well realize that the country is expecting before this
year is out to see the "dirt fly", as they say, in carrying on the
work, and I assure my fellow citizens that no energy will be spared
in using these funds effectively to make a major attack upon the
problem of unemployment.

Our responsibility is to all of the people in this country.  This is
a great national crusade to destroy enforced idleness which is an
enemy of the human spirit generated by this depression.  Our attack
upon these enemies must be without stint and without
discrimination.  No sectional, no political distinctions can be
permitted.

It must, however, be recognized that when an enterprise of this
character is extended over more than three thousand counties
throughout the nation, there may be occasional instances of
inefficiency, bad management, or misuse of funds.  When cases of
this kind occur, there will be those, of course, who will try to
tell you that the exceptional failure is characteristic of the
entire endeavor.  It should be remembered that in every big job
there are some imperfections.  There are chiselers in every walk of
life; there are those in every industry who are guilty of unfair
practices; every profession has its black sheep, but long
experience in government has taught me that the exceptional
instances of wrong-doing in government are probably less numerous
than in almost every other line of endeavor.  The most effective
means of preventing such evils in this Works Relief program will be
the eternal vigilance of the American people themselves.  I call
upon my fellow citizens everywhere to cooperate with me in making
this the most efficient and the cleanest example of public
enterprise the world has ever seen.

It is time to provide a smashing answer for those cynical men who
say that a democracy cannot be honest and efficient.  If you will
help, this can be done.  I, therefore, hope you will watch the work
in every corner of this Nation.  Feel free to criticize.  Tell me of
instances where work can be done better, or where improper
practices prevail.  Neither you nor I want criticism conceived in a
purely fault-finding or partisan spirit, but I am jealous of the
right of every citizen to call to the attention of his or her
government examples of how the public money can be more effectively
spent for the benefit of the American people.

I now come, my friends, to a part of the remaining business before
the Congress.  It has under consideration many measures which
provide for the rounding out of the program of economic and social
reconstruction with which we have been concerned for two years.  I
can mention only a few of them tonight, but I do not want my
mention of specific measures to be interpreted as lack of interest
in or disapproval of many other important proposals that are
pending.

The National Industrial Recovery Act expires on the sixteenth of
June.  After careful consideration, I have asked the Congress to
extend the life of this useful agency of government.  As we have
proceeded with the administration of this Act, we have found from
time to time more and more useful ways of promoting its purposes.
No reasonable person wants to abandon our present gains--we must
continue to protect children, to enforce minimum wages, to prevent
excessive hours, to safeguard, define and enforce collective
bargaining, and, while retaining fair competition, to eliminate so
far as humanly possible, the kinds of unfair practices by selfish
minorities which unfortunately did more than anything else to bring
about the recent collapse of industries.

There is likewise pending before the Congress legislation to
provide for the elimination of unnecessary holding companies in the
public utility field.

I consider this legislation a positive recovery measure.  Power
production in this country is virtually back to the 1929 peak.  The
operating companies in the gas and electric utility field are by
and large in good condition.  But under holding company domination
the utility industry has long been hopelessly at war within itself
and with public sentiment.  By far the greater part of the general
decline in utility securities had occurred before I was
inaugurated.  The absentee management of unnecessary holding company
control has lost touch with, and has lost the sympathy of, the
communities it pretends to serve.  Even more significantly it has
given the country as a whole an uneasy apprehension of
overconcentrated economic power.

A business that loses the confidence of its customers and the good-
will of the public cannot long continue to be a good risk for the
investor.  This legislation will serve the investor by ending the
conditions which have caused that lack of confidence and good-will.
It will put the public utility operating industry on a sound basis
for the future, both in its public relations and in its internal
relations.

This legislation will not only in the long run result in providing
lower electric and gas rates to the consumer, but it will protect
the actual value and earning power of properties now owned by
thousands of investors who have little protection under the old
laws against what used to be called frenzied finance.  It will not
destroy values.

Not only business recovery, but the general economic recovery of
the nation will be greatly stimulated by the enactment of
legislation designed to improve the status of our transportation
agencies.  There is need for legislation providing for the
regulation of interstate transportation by buses and trucks, for
the regulation of transportation by water, for the strengthening of
our Merchant Marine and Air Transport, for the strengthening of the
Interstate Commerce Commission to enable it to carry out a rounded
conception of the national transportation system in which the
benefits of private ownership are retained while the public stake
in these important services is protected by the public's
government.

Finally, the reestablishment of public confidence in the banks of
the nation is one of the most hopeful results of our efforts as a
Nation to reestablish public confidence in private banking.  We all
know that private banking actually exists by virtue of the
permission of and regulation by the people as a whole, speaking
through their government.  Wise public policy, however, requires not
only that banking be safe but that its resources be most fully
utilized in the economic life of the country.  To this end it was
decided more than twenty years ago that the government should
assume the responsibility of providing a means by which the credit
of the nation might be controlled, not by a few private banking
institutions, but by a body with public prestige and authority.  The
answer to this demand was the Federal Reserve System.  Twenty years
of experience with this system have justified the efforts made to
create it, but these twenty years have shown by experience definite
possibilities for improvement.  Certain proposals made to amend the
Federal Reserve Act deserve prompt and favorable action by the
Congress.  They are a minimum of wise readjustments of our Federal
Reserve System in the light of past experience and present needs.

These measures I have mentioned are, in large part, the program
which under my constitutional duty I have recommended to the
Congress.  They are essential factors in a rounded program for
national recovery.  They contemplate the enrichment of our national
life by a sound and rational ordering of its various elements and
wise provisions for the protection of the weak against the strong.

Never since my inauguration in March, 1933, have I felt so
unmistakably the atmosphere of recovery.  But it is more than the
recovery of the material basis of our individual lives.  It is the
recovery of confidence in our democratic processes and
institutions.  We have survived all of the arduous burdens and the
threatening dangers of a great economic calamity.  We have in the
darkest moments of our national trials retained our faith in our
own ability to master our destiny.  Fear is vanishing and confidence
is growing on every side, renewed faith in the vast possibilities
of human beings to improve their material and spiritual status
through the instrumentality of the democratic form of government.
That faith is receiving its just reward.  For that we can be
thankful to the God who watches over America.



September 6, 1936.


I have been on a journey of husbandry.  I went primarily to see at
first hand conditions in the drought states; to see how effectively
federal and local authorities are taking care of pressing problems
of relief and also how they are to work together to defend the
people of this country against the effects of future droughts.

I saw drought devastation in nine states.

I talked with families who had lost their wheat crop, lost their
corn crop, lost their livestock, lost the water in their well, lost
their garden and come through to the end of the summer without one
dollar of cash resources, facing a winter without feed or food--
facing a planting season without seed to put in the ground.

That was the extreme case, but there are thousands and thousands of
families on Western farms who share the same difficulties.

I saw cattlemen who because of lack of grass or lack of winter feed
have been completely compelled to sell all but their breeding stock
and will need help to carry even these through the coming winter.  I
saw livestock kept alive only because water had been brought to
them long distances in tank cars.  I saw other farm families who
have not lost everything but who, because they have made only
partial crops, must have some form of help if they are to continue
farming next spring.

I shall never forget the fields of wheat so blasted by heat that
they cannot be harvested.  I shall never forget field after field of
corn stunted, earless and stripped of leaves, for what the sun left
the grasshoppers took.  I saw brown pastures which would not keep a
cow on fifty acres.

Yet I would not have you think for a single minute that there is
permanent disaster in these drought regions, or that the picture I
saw meant depopulating these areas.  No cracked earth, no blistering
sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers, are a permanent match for
the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and
children who have carried on through desperate days, and inspire us
with their self-reliance, their tenacity and their courage.  It was
their fathers' task to make homes; it is their task to keep those
homes; it is our task to help them win their fight.

First let me talk for a minute about this autumn and the coming
winter.  We have the option, in the case of families who need actual
subsistence, of putting them on the dole or putting them to work.
They do not want to go on the dole and they are one thousand
percent right.  We agree, therefore, that we must put them to work
for a decent wage; and when we reach that decision we kill two
birds with one stone, because these families will earn enough by
working, not only to subsist themselves, but to buy food for their
stock, and seed for next year's planting.  Into this scheme of
things there fit of course the government lending agencies which
next year, as in the past, will help with production loans.

Every governor with whom I have talked is in full accord with this
program of doing work for these farm families, just as every
governor agrees that the individual states will take care of their
unemployables but that the cost of employing those who are entirely
able and willing to work must be borne by the federal government.

If then we know, as we do today, the approximate number of farm
families who will require some form of work relief from now on
through the winter, we face the question of what kind of work they
should do.  Let me make it clear that this is not a new question
because it has already been answered to a greater or less extent in
every one of the drought communities.  Beginning in 1934, when we
also had serious drought conditions, the state and federal
governments cooperated in planning a large number of projects--many
of them directly aimed at the alleviation of future drought
conditions.  In accordance with that program literally thousands of
ponds or small reservoirs have been built in order to supply water
for stock and to lift the level of the underground water to protect
wells from going dry.  Thousands of wells have been drilled or
deepened; community lakes have been created and irrigation projects
are being pushed.

Water conservation by means such as these is being expanded as a
result of this new drought all through the Great Plains area, the
Western corn belt and in the states that lie further south.  In the
Middle West water conservation is not so pressing a problem.  Here
the work projects run more to soil erosion control and the building
of farm-to-market roads.

Spending like this is not waste.  It would spell future waste if we
did not spend for such things now.  These emergency work projects
provide money to buy food and clothing for the winter; they keep
the livestock on the farm; they provide seed for a new crop, and,
best of all, they will conserve soil and water in the future in
those areas most frequently hit by drought.

If, for example, in some local area the water table continues to
drop and the topsoil to blow away, the land values will disappear
with the water and the soil.  People on the farms will drift into
the nearby cities; the cities will have no farm trade and the
workers in the city factories and stores will have no jobs.
Property values in the cities will decline.  If, on the other hand,
the farms within that area remain as farms with better water supply
and no erosion, the farm population will stay on the land and
prosper and the nearby cities will prosper too.  Property values
will increase instead of disappearing.  That is why it is worth our
while as a nation to spend money in order to save money.

I have used the argument in relation only to a small area.  It holds
good in its effect on the nation as a whole.  Every state in the
drought area is now doing and always will do business with every
state outside it.  The very existence of the men and women working
in the clothing factories of New York, making clothes worn by
farmers and their families; of the workers in the steel mills in
Pittsburgh, in the automobile factories of Detroit, and in the
harvester factories of Illinois, depend upon the farmers' ability
to purchase the commodities they produce.  In the same way it is the
purchasing power of the workers in these factories in the cities
that enables them and their wives and children to eat more beef,
more pork, more wheat, more corn, more fruit and more dairy
products, and to buy more clothing made from cotton, wool and
leather.  In a physical and a property sense, as well as in a
spiritual sense, we are members one of another.

I want to make it clear that no simple panacea can be applied to
the drought problem in the whole of the drought area.  Plans must
depend on local conditions, for these vary with annual rainfall,
soil characteristics, altitude and topography.  Water and soil
conservation methods may differ in one county from those in an
adjoining county.  Work to be done in the cattle and sheep country
differs in type from work in the wheat country or work in the corn
belt.

The Great Plains Drought Area Committee has given me its
preliminary recommendations for a long-time program for that
region.  Using that report as a basis we are cooperating
successfully and in entire accord with the governors and state
planning boards.  As we get this program into operation the people
more and more will be able to maintain themselves securely on the
land.  That will mean a steady decline in the relief burdens which
the federal government and states have had to assume in time of
drought; but, more important, it will mean a greater contribution
to general national prosperity by these regions which have been hit
by drought.  It will conserve and improve not only property values,
but human values.  The people in the drought area do not want to be
dependent on federal, state or any other kind of charity.  They want
for themselves and their families an opportunity to share fairly by
their own efforts in the progress of America.

The farmers of America want a sound national agricultural policy in
which a permanent land-use program will have an important place.
They want assurance against another year like 1932 when they made
good crops but had to sell them for prices that meant ruin just as
surely as did the drought.  Sound policy must maintain farm prices
in good crop years as well as in bad crop years.  It must function
when we have drought; it must also function when we have bumper
crops.

The maintenance of a fair equilibrium between farm prices and the
prices of industrial products is an aim which we must keep ever
before us, just as we must give constant thought to the sufficiency
of the food supply of the nation even in bad years.  Our modern
civilization can and should devise a more successful means by which
the excess supplies of bumper years can be conserved for use in
lean years.

On my trip I have been deeply impressed with the general efficiency
of those agencies of the federal, state and local governments which
have moved in on the immediate task created by the drought.  In 1934
none of us had preparation; we worked without blueprints and made
the mistakes of inexperience.  Hindsight shows us this.  But as time
has gone on we have been making fewer and fewer mistakes.  Remember
that the federal and state governments have done only broad
planning.  Actual work on a given project originates in the local
community.  Local needs are listed from local information.  Local
projects are decided on only after obtaining the recommendations
and help of those in the local community who are best able to give
it.  And it is worthy of note that on my entire trip, though I asked
the question dozens of times, I heard no complaint against the
character of a single work relief project.

The elected heads of the states concerned, together with their
state officials and their experts from agricultural colleges and
state planning boards, have shown cooperation with and approval of
the work which the federal government has headed.  I am grateful
also to the men and women in all these states who have accepted
leadership in the work in their locality.

In the drought area people are not afraid to use new methods to
meet changes in Nature, and to correct mistakes of the past.  If
overgrazing has injured range lands, they are willing to reduce the
grazing.  If certain wheat lands should be returned to pasture they
are willing to cooperate.  If trees should be planted as windbreaks
or to stop erosion they will work with us.  If terracing or summer
fallowing or crop rotation is called for, they will carry them out.
They stand ready to fit, and not to fight, the ways of Nature.

We are helping, and shall continue to help the farmer to do those
things, through local soil conservation committees and other
cooperative local, state and federal agencies of government.

I have not the time tonight to deal with other and more
comprehensive agricultural policies.

With this fine help we are tiding over the present emergency.  We
are going to conserve soil, conserve water and conserve life.  We
are going to have long-time defenses against both low prices and
drought.  We are going to have a farm policy that will serve the
national welfare.  That is our hope for the future.

There are two reasons why I want to end by talking about
reemployment.  Tomorrow is Labor Day.  The brave spirit with which so
many millions of working people are winning their way out of
depression deserves respect and admiration.  It is like the courage
of the farmers in the drought areas.

That is my first reason.  The second is that healthy employment
conditions stand equally with healthy agricultural conditions as a
buttress of national prosperity.  Dependable employment at fair
wages is just as important to the people in the towns and cities as
good farm income is to agriculture.  Our people must have the
ability to buy the goods they manufacture and the crops they
produce.  Thus city wages and farm buying power are the two strong
legs that carry the nation forward.

Reemployment in industry is proceeding rapidly.  Government spending
was in large part responsible for keeping industry going and
putting it in a position to make this reemployment possible.
Government orders were the backlog of heavy industry; government
wages turned over and over again to make consumer purchasing power
and to sustain every merchant in the community.  Businessmen with
their businesses, small and large, had to be saved.  Private
enterprise is necessary to any nation which seeks to maintain the
democratic form of government.  In their case, just as certainly as
in the case of drought-stricken farmers, government spending has
saved.

Government having spent wisely to save it, private industry begins
to take workers off the rolls of the government relief program.
Until this administration we had no free employment service, except
in a few states and cities.  Because there was no unified employment
service, the worker, forced to move as industry moved, often
travelled over the country, wandering after jobs which seemed
always to travel just a little faster than he did.  He was often
victimized by fraudulent practices of employment clearing houses,
and the facts of employment opportunities were at the disposal
neither of himself nor of the employer.

In 1933 the United States Employment Service was created--a
cooperative state and federal enterprise, through which the federal
government matches dollar for dollar the funds provided by the
states for registering the occupations and skills of workers and
for actually finding jobs for these registered workers in private
industry.  The federal-state cooperation has been splendid.  Already
employment services are operating in thirty-two states, and the
areas not covered by them are served by the federal government.

We have developed a nationwide service with seven hundred district
offices and one thousand branch offices, thus providing facilities
through which labor can learn of jobs available and employers can
find workers.

Last spring I expressed the hope that employers would realize their
deep responsibility to take men off the relief rolls and give them
jobs in private enterprise.  Subsequently I was told by many
employers that they were not satisfied with the information
available concerning the skill and experience of the workers on the
relief rolls.  On August 25th I allocated a relatively small sum to
the employment service for the purpose of getting better and more
recent information in regard to those now actively at work on
W.P.A.  Projects--information as to their skills and previous
occupations--and to keep the records of such men and women up-to-
date for maximum service in making them available to industry.
Tonight I am announcing the allocation of two and a half million
dollars more to enable the Employment Service to make an even more
intensive search then it has yet been equipped to make, to find
opportunities in private employment for workers registered with it.

Tonight I urge the workers to cooperate with and take full
advantage of this intensification of the work of the Employment
Service.  This does not mean that there will be any lessening of our
efforts under our W.P.A. and P.W.A. and other work relief programs
until all workers have decent jobs in private employment at decent
wages.  We do not surrender our responsibility to the unemployed.  We
have had ample proof that it is the will of the American people
that those who represent them in national, state and local
government should continue as long as necessary to discharge that
responsibility.  But it does mean that the government wants to use
resource to get private work for those now employed on government
work, and thus to curtail to a minimum the government expenditures
for direct employment.

Tonight I ask employers, large and small, throughout the nation, to
use the help of the state and Federal Employment Service whenever
in the general pick-up of business they require more workers.

Tomorrow is Labor Day.  Labor Day in this country has never been a
class holiday.  It has always been a national holiday.  It has never
had more significance as a national holiday than it has now.  In
other countries the relationship of employer and employee has been
more or less been accepted as a class relationship not readily to
be broken through.  In this country we insist, as an essential of
the American way of life, that the employer-employee relationship
should be one between free men and equals.  We refuse to regard
those who work with hand or brain as different from or inferior to
those who live from their property.  We insist that labor is
entitled to as much respect as property.  But our workers with hand
and brain deserve more than respect for their labor.  They deserve
practical protection in the opportunity to use their labor at a
return adequate to support them at a decent and constantly rising
standard of living, and to accumulate a margin of security against
the inevitable vicissitudes of life.

The average man must have that twofold opportunity if we are to
avoid the growth of a class-conscious society in this country.

There are those who fail to read both the signs of the times and
American history.  They would try to refuse the worker any effective
power to bargain collectively, to earn a decent livelihood and to
acquire security.  It is those short-sighted ones, not labor, who
threaten this country with that class dissension which in other
countries has led to dictatorship and the establishment of fear and
hatred as the dominant emotions in human life.

All American workers, brain workers and manual workers alike, and
all the rest of us whose well-being depends on theirs, know that
our needs are one in building an orderly economic democracy in
which all can profit and in which all can be secure from the kind
of faulty economic direction which brought us to the brink of
common ruin seven years ago.

There is no cleavage between white collar workers and manual
workers, between artists and artisans, musicians and mechanics,
lawyers and accountants and architects and miners.

Tomorrow, Labor Day, belongs to all of us.  Tomorrow, Labor Day,
symbolizes the hope of all Americans.  Anyone who calls it a class
holiday challenges the whole concept of American democracy.

The Fourth of July commemorates our political freedom--a freedom
which without economic freedom is meaningless indeed.  Labor Day
symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the
average man which will give his political freedom reality.



March 9, 1937.


Last Thursday I described in detail certain economic problems which
everyone admits now face the nation.  For the many messages which
have come to me after that speech, and which it is physically
impossible to answer individually, I take this means of saying
"thank you."

Tonight, sitting at my desk in the White House, I make my first
radio report to the people in my second term of office.

I am reminded of that evening in March, four years ago, when I made
my first radio report to you.  We were then in the midst of the
great banking crisis.

Soon after, with the authority of the Congress, we asked the nation
to turn over all of its privately held gold, dollar for dollar, to
the government of the United States.

Today's recovery proves how right that policy was.

But when, almost two years later, it came before the Supreme Court
its constitutionality was upheld only by a five-to-four vote.  The
change of one vote would have thrown all the affairs of this great
Nation back into hopeless chaos.  In effect, four Justices ruled
that the right under a private contract to exact a pound of flesh
was more sacred than the main objectives of the Constitution to
establish an enduring Nation.

In 1933 you and I knew that we must never let our economic system
get completely out of joint again--that we could not afford to take
the risk of another great depression.

We also became convinced that the only way to avoid a repetition of
those dark days was to have a government with power to prevent and
to cure the abuses and the inequalities which had thrown that
system out of joint.

We then began a program of remedying those abuses and
inequalities--to give balance and stability to our economic
system--to make it bomb-proof against the causes of 1929.

Today we are only part-way through that program--and recovery is
speeding up to a point where the dangers of 1929 are again becoming
possible, not this week or month perhaps, but within a year or two.

National laws are needed to complete that program.  Individual or
local or state effort alone cannot protect us in 1937 any better
than ten years ago.

It will take time--and plenty of time--to work out our remedies
administratively even after legislation is passed.  To complete our
program of protection in time, therefore, we cannot delay one
moment in making certain that our national government has power to
carry through.

Four years ago action did not come until the eleventh hour.  It was
almost too late.

If we learned anything from the depression we will not allow
ourselves to run around in new circles of futile discussion and
debate, always postponing the day of decision.

The American people have learned from the depression.  For in the
last three national elections an overwhelming majority of them
voted a mandate that the Congress and the President begin the task
of providing that protection--not after long years of debate, but
now.

The courts, however, have cast doubts on the ability of the elected
Congress to protect us against catastrophe by meeting squarely our
modern social and economic conditions.

We are at a crisis in our ability to proceed with that protection.
It is a quiet crisis.  There are no lines of depositors outside
closed banks.  But to the far-sighted it is far-reaching in its
possibilities of injury to America.

I want to talk with you very simply about the need for present
action in this crisis--the need to meet the unanswered challenge of
one-third of a Nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed.

Last Thursday I described the American form of government as a
three horse team provided by the Constitution to the American
people so that their field might be plowed.  The three horses are,
of course, the three branches of government--the Congress, the
Executive and the courts.  Two of the horses are pulling in unison
today; the third is not.  Those who have intimated that the
President of the United States is trying to drive that team,
overlook the simple fact that the President, as Chief Executive, is
himself one of the three horses.

It is the American people themselves who are in the driver's seat.

It is the American people themselves who want the furrow plowed.

It is the American people themselves who expect the third horse to
pull in unison with the other two.

I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States
in these past few weeks.  Like the Bible, it ought to be read again
and again.

It is an easy document to understand when you remember that it was
called into being because the Articles of Confederation under which
the original thirteen States tried to operate after the Revolution
showed the need of a national government with power enough to
handle national problems.  In its Preamble, the Constitution states
that it was intended to form a more perfect Union and promote the
general welfare; and the powers given to the Congress to carry out
those purposes can be best described by saying that they were all
the powers needed to meet each and every problem which then had a
national character and which could not be met by merely local
action.

But the framers went further.  Having in mind that in succeeding
generations many other problems then undreamed of would become
national problems, they gave to the Congress the ample broad powers
"to levy taxes. . . and provide for the common defense and general
welfare of the United States."

That, my friends, is what I honestly believe to have been the clear
and underlying purpose of the patriots who wrote a federal
constitution to create a national government with national power,
intended as they said, "to form a more perfect union. . . for
ourselves and our posterity."

For nearly twenty years there was no conflict between the Congress
and the Court.  Then Congress passed a statute which, in 1803, the
Court said violated an express provision of the Constitution.  The
Court claimed the power to declare it unconstitutional and did so
declare it.  But a little later the Court itself admitted that it
was an extraordinary power to exercise and through Mr. Justice
Washington laid down this limitation upon it:  "It is but a decent
respect due to the wisdom, the integrity and the patriotism of the
legislative body, by which any law is passed, to presume in favor
of its validity until its violation of the Constitution is proved
beyond all reasonable doubt."

But since the rise of the modern movement for social and economic
progress through legislation, the Court has more and more often and
more and more boldly asserted a power to veto laws passed by the
Congress and state legislatures in complete disregard of this
original limitation.

In the last four years the sound rule of giving statutes the
benefit of all reasonable doubt has been cast aside.  The Court has
been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body.

When the Congress has sought to stabilize national agriculture, to
improve the conditions of labor, to safeguard business against
unfair competition, to protect our national resources, and in many
other ways, to serve our clearly national needs, the majority of
the Court has been assuming the power to pass on the wisdom of
these acts of the Congress--and to approve or disapprove the public
policy written into these laws.

That is not only my accusation.  It is the accusation of most
distinguished justices of the present Supreme Court.  I have not the
time to quote to you all the language used by dissenting justices
in many of these cases.  But in the case holding the Railroad
Retirement Act unconstitutional, for instance, Chief Justice Hughes
said in a dissenting opinion that the majority opinion was "a
departure from sound principles," and placed "an unwarranted
limitation upon the commerce clause."  And three other justices
agreed with him.

In the case of holding the A.A.A. unconstitutional, Justice Stone
said of the majority opinion that it was a "tortured construction
of the Constitution."  And two other justices agreed with him.

In the case holding the New York Minimum Wage Law unconstitutional,
Justice Stone said that the majority were actually reading into the
Constitution their own "personal economic predilections," and that
if the legislative power is not left free to choose the methods of
solving the problems of poverty, subsistence, and health of large
numbers in the community, then "government is to be rendered
impotent."  And two other justices agreed with him.

In the face of these dissenting opinions, there is no basis for the
claim made by some members of the Court that something in the
Constitution has compelled them regretfully to thwart the will of
the people.

In the face of such dissenting opinions, it is perfectly clear
that, as Chief Justice Hughes has said, "We are under a
Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is."

The Court in addition to the proper use of its judicial functions
has improperly set itself up as a third house of the Congress--a
super-legislature, as one of the justices has called it--reading
into the Constitution words and implications which are not there,
and which were never intended to be there.

We have, therefore, reached the point as a nation where we must
take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court
from itself.  We must find a way to take an appeal from the Supreme
Court to the Constitution itself.  We want a Supreme Court which
will do justice under the Constitution--not over it.  In our courts
we want a government of laws and not of men.

I want--as all Americans want--an independent judiciary as proposed
by the framers of the Constitution.  That means a Supreme Court that
will enforce the Constitution as written--that will refuse to amend
the Constitution by the arbitrary exercise of judicial power--
amended by judicial say-so.  It does not mean a judiciary so
independent that it can deny the existence of facts which are
universally recognized.

How then could we proceed to perform the mandate given us?  It was
said in last year's Democratic platform, "If these problems cannot
be effectively solved within the Constitution, we shall seek such
clarifying amendment as will assure the power to enact those laws,
adequately to regulate commerce, protect public health and safety,
and safeguard economic security."  In other words, we said we would
seek an amendment only if every other possible means by legislation
were to fail.

When I commenced to review the situation with the problem squarely
before me, I came by a process of elimination to the conclusion
that, short of amendments, the only method which was clearly
constitutional, and would at the same time carry out other much
needed reforms, was to infuse new blood into all our courts.  We
must have men worthy and equipped to carry out impartial justice.
But, at the same time, we must have judges who will bring to the
courts a present-day sense of the Constitution--judges who will
retain in the courts the judicial functions of a court, and reject
the legislative powers which the courts have today assumed.

In forty-five out of the forty-eight states of the Union, judges
are chosen not for life but for a period of years.  In many states
judges must retire at the age of seventy.  Congress has provided
financial security by offering life pensions at full pay for
federal judges on all courts who are willing to retire at seventy.
In the case of Supreme Court justices, that pension is $20,000 a
year.  But all federal judges, once appointed, can, if they choose,
hold office for life, no matter how old they may get to be.

What is my proposal?  It is simply this:  whenever a judge or justice
of any federal court has reached the age of seventy and does not
avail himself of the opportunity to retire on a pension, a new
member shall be appointed by the President then in office, with the
approval, as required by the Constitution, of the Senate of the
United States.

That plan has two chief purposes.  By bringing into the judicial
system a steady and continuing stream of new and younger blood, I
hope, first, to make the administration of all federal justice
speedier and, therefore, less costly; secondly, to bring to the
decision of social and economic problems younger men who have had
personal experience and contact with modern facts and circumstances
under which average men have to live and work.  This plan will save
our national Constitution from hardening of the judicial arteries.

The number of judges to be appointed would depend wholly on the
decision of present judges now over seventy, or those who would
subsequently reach the age of seventy.

If, for instance, any one of the six justices of the Supreme Court
now over the age of seventy should retire as provided under the
plan, no additional place would be created.  Consequently, although
there never can be more than fifteen, there may be only fourteen,
or thirteen, or twelve.  And there may be only nine.

There is nothing novel or radical about this idea.  It seeks to
maintain the federal bench in full vigor.  It has been discussed and
approved by many persons of high authority ever since a similar
proposal passed the House of Representatives in 1869.

Why was the age fixed at seventy?  Because the laws of many states,
the practice of the Civil Service, the regulations of the Army and
Navy, and the rules of many of our universities and of almost every
great private business enterprise, commonly fix the retirement age
at seventy years or less.

The statute would apply to all the courts in the federal system.
There is general approval so far as the lower federal courts are
concerned.  The plan has met opposition only so far as the Supreme
Court of the United States itself is concerned.  If such a plan is
good for the lower courts it certainly ought to be equally good for
the highest court from which there is no appeal.

Those opposing this plan have sought to arouse prejudice and fear
by crying that I am seeking to "pack" the Supreme Court and that a
baneful precedent will be established.

What do they mean by the words "packing the Court"?

Let me answer this question with a bluntness that will end all
_honest_ misunderstanding of my purposes.

If by that phrase "packing the Court" it is charged that I wish to
place on the bench spineless puppets who would disregard the law
and would decide specific cases as I wished them to be decided, I
make this answer:  that no President fit for his office would
appoint, and no Senate of honorable men fit for their office would
confirm, that kind of appointees to the Supreme Court.

But if by that phrase the charge is made that I would appoint and
the Senate would confirm justices worthy to sit beside present
members of the Court who understand those modern conditions, that I
will appoint justices who will not undertake to override the
judgment of the Congress on legislative policy, that I will appoint
justices who will act as justices and not as legislators--if the
appointment of such justices can be called "packing the Courts,"
then I say that I and with me the vast majority of the American
people favor doing just that thing--now.

Is it a dangerous precedent for the Congress to change the number
of the justices?  The Congress has always had, and will have, that
power.  The number of justices has been changed several times
before, in the administration of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson--
both signers of the Declaration of Independence--Andrew Jackson,
Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

I suggest only the addition of justices to the bench in accordance
with a clearly defined principle relating to a clearly defined age
limit.  Fundamentally, if in the future, America cannot trust the
Congress it elects to refrain from abuse of our Constitutional
usages, democracy will have failed far beyond the importance to it
of any king of precedent concerning the judiciary.

We think it so much in the public interest to maintain a vigorous
judiciary that we encourage the retirement of elderly judges by
offering them a life pension at full salary.  Why then should we
leave the fulfillment of this public policy to chance or make
independent on upon the desire or prejudice of any individual
justice?

It is the clear intention of our public policy to provide for a
constant flow of new and younger blood into the judiciary.  Normally
every President appoints a large number of district and circuit
court judges and a few members of the Supreme Court.  Until my first
term practically every President of the United States has appointed
at least one member of the Supreme Court.  President Taft appointed
five members and named a Chief Justice; President Wilson, three;
President Harding, four, including a Chief Justice; President
Coolidge, one; President Hoover, three, including a Chief Justice.

Such a succession of appointments should have provided a Court
well-balanced as to age.  But chance and the disinclination of
individuals to leave the Supreme bench have now given us a Court in
which five justices will be over seventy-five years of age before
next June and one over seventy.  Thus a sound public policy has been
defeated.

I now propose that we establish by law an assurance against any
such ill-balanced court in the future.  I propose that hereafter,
when a judge reaches the age of seventy, a new and younger judge
shall be added to the court automatically.  In this way I propose to
enforce a sound public policy by law instead of leaving the
composition of our federal courts, including the highest, to be
determined by chance or the personal indecision of individuals.

If such a law as I propose is regarded as establishing a new
precedent, is it not a most desirable precedent?

Like all lawyers, like all Americans, I regret the necessity of
this controversy.  But the welfare of the United States, and indeed
of the Constitution itself, is what we all must think about first.
Our difficulty with the Court today rises not from the Court as an
institution but from human beings within it.  But we cannot yield
our constitutional destiny to the personal judgment of a few men
who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means
of dealing with the present.

This plan of mine is no attack on the Court; it seeks to restore
the Court to its rightful and historic place in our constitutional
government and to have it resume its high task of building anew on
the Constitution "a system of living law."  The Court itself can
best undo what the Court has done.

I have thus explained to you the reasons that lie behind our
efforts to secure results by legislation within the Constitution.  I
hope that thereby the difficult process of constitutional amendment
may be rendered unnecessary.  But let us examine the process.

There are many types of amendment proposed.  Each one is radically
different from the other.  There is no substantial groups within the
Congress or outside it who are agreed on any single amendment.

It would take months or years to get substantial agreement upon the
type and language of the amendment.  It would take months and years
thereafter to get a two-thirds majority in favor of that amendment
in _both_ Houses of the Congress.

Then would come the long course of ratification by three-fourths of
all the states.  No amendment which any powerful economic interests
or the leaders of any powerful political party have had reason to
oppose has ever been ratified within anything like a reasonable
time.  And thirteen states which contain only five percent of the
voting population can block ratification even though the thirty-
five states with ninety-five percent of the population are in favor
of it.

A very large percentage of newspaper publishers, Chambers of
Commerce, Bar Association, Manufacturers' Associations, who are
trying to give the impression that they really do want a
constitutional amendment would be the first to exclaim as soon as
an amendment was proposed, "Oh!  I was for an amendment all right,
but this amendment you proposed is not the kind of amendment that I
was thinking about.  I am therefore, going to spend my time, my
efforts and my money to block the amendment, although I would be
awfully glad to help get some other kind of amendment ratified."

Two groups oppose my plan on the ground that they favor a
constitutional amendment.  The first includes those who
fundamentally object to social and economic legislation along
modern lines.  This is the same group who during the campaign last
Fall tried to block the mandate of the people.

Now they are making a last stand.  And the strategy of that last
stand is to suggest the time-consuming process of amendment in
order to kill off by delay the legislation demanded by the mandate.

To them I say:  I do not think you will be able long to fool the
American people as to your purposes.

The other groups is composed of those who honestly believe the
amendment process is the best and who would be willing to support a
reasonable amendment if they could agree on one.

To them I say:  we cannot rely on an amendment as the immediate or
only answer to our present difficulties.  When the time comes for
action, you will find that many of those who pretend to support you
will sabotage any constructive amendment which is proposed.  Look at
these strange bed-fellows of yours.  When before have you found them
really at your side in your fights for progress?

And remember one thing more.  Even if an amendment were passed, and
even if in the years to come it were to be ratified, its meaning
would depend upon the kind of justices who would be sitting on the
Supreme Court bench.  An amendment, like the rest of the
Constitution, is what the justices say it is rather than what its
framers or you might hope it is.

This proposal of mine will not infringe in the slightest upon the
civil or religious liberties so dear to every American.

My record as Governor and President proves my devotion to those
liberties.  You who know me can have no fear that I would tolerate
the destruction by any branch of government of any part of our
heritage of freedom.

The present attempt by those opposed to progress to play upon the
fears of danger to personal liberty brings again to mind that crude
and cruel strategy tried by the same opposition to frighten the
workers of America in a pay-envelope propaganda against the Social
Security Law.  The workers were not fooled by that propaganda then.
The people of America will not be fooled by such propaganda now.

I am in favor of action through legislation:

First, because I believe that it can be passed at this session of
the Congress.

Second, because it will provide a reinvigorated, liberal-minded
judiciary necessary to furnish quicker and cheaper justice from
bottom to top.

Third, because it will provide a series of federal courts willing
to enforce the Constitution as written, and unwilling to assert
legislative powers by writing into it their own political and
economic policies.

During the past half century the balance of power between the three
great branches of the federal government, has been tipped out of
balance by the courts in direct contradiction of the high purposes
of the framers of the Constitution.  It is my purpose to restore
that balance.  You who know me will accept my solemn assurance that
in a world in which democracy is under attack, I seek to make
American democracy succeed.  You and I will do our part.



October 12, 1937.


My Friends:

This afternoon I have issued a Proclamation calling a special
session of the Congress to convene on Monday, November 15, 1937.

I do this in order to give to the Congress an opportunity to
consider important legislation before the regular session in
January, and to enable the Congress to avoid a lengthy session next
year, extending through the summer.

I know that many enemies of democracy will say that it is bad for
business, bad for the tranquility of the country, to have a special
session--even one beginning only six weeks before the regular
session.  But I have never had sympathy with the point of view that
a session of the Congress is an unfortunate intrusion of what they
call "politics" into our national affairs.  Those who do not like
democracy want to keep legislators at home.  But the Congress is an
essential instrument of democratic government; and democratic
government can never be considered an intruder into the affairs of
a democratic nation.

I shall ask this special session to consider immediately certain
important legislation which my recent trip through the nation
convinces me the American people immediately need.  This does not
mean that other legislation, to which I am not referring tonight,
is not important for our national well-being.  But other legislation
can be more readily discussed at the regular session.

Anyone charged with proposing or judging national policies should
have first-hand knowledge of the nation as a whole.

That is why again this year I have taken trips to all parts of the
country.  Last spring I visited the Southwest.  This summer I made
several trips in the East.  Now I am just back from a trip from a
trip all the way across the continent, and later this autumn I hope
to pay my annual visit to the Southeast.

For a President especially it is a duty to think in national terms.

He must think not only of this year but of future years, when
someone else will be President.

He must look beyond the average of the prosperity and well-being of
the country, for averages easily cover up danger spots of poverty
and instability.

He must not let the country be deceived by a merely temporary
prosperity which depends on wasteful exploitation of resources
which cannot last.

He must think not only of keeping us out of war today, but also of
keeping us out of war in generations to come.

The kind of prosperity we want is the sound and permanent kind
which is not built up temporarily at the expense of any section or
any group.  And the kind of peace we want is the sound and permanent
kind, which is built on the cooperative search for peace by all the
nations which want peace.

The other day I was asked to state my outstanding impression gained
on this recent trip.  I said that it seemed to me to be the general
understanding on the part of the average citizen of the broad
objectives and policies which I have just outlined.

Five years of fierce discussion and debate--five years of
information through the radio and the moving picture--have taken
the whole nation to school in the nation's business.  Even those who
have most attacked our objectives have, by their very criticism,
encouraged the mass of our citizens to think about and understand
the issues involved, and, understanding, to approve.

Out of that process, we have learned to think as a nation.  And out
of that process we have learned to feel ourselves a nation.  As
never before in our history, each section of America says to every
other section, "Thy people shall be my people."

For most of the country this has been a good year--better in
dollars and cents than for many years--far better in the soundness
of its prosperity.  And everywhere I went I found particular
optimism about the good effect on business which is expected from
the steady spending by farmers of the largest farm income in many
years.

But we have not yet done all that must be done to make this
prosperity stable.  The people of the United States were checked in
their efforts to prevent future piling up of huge agricultural
surpluses and the tumbling prices which inevitably follow them.
They were checked in their efforts to secure reasonable minimum
wages and maximum hours and the end of child labor.  And because
they were checked, many groups in many parts of the country still
have less purchasing power and a lower standard of living than the
nation as a whole can permanently allow.

Americans realize these facts.  That is why they ask government not
to stop governing simply because prosperity has come back a long
way.

They do not look on government as an interloper in their affairs.
On the contrary, they regard it as the most effective form of
organized self-help.

Sometimes I get bored sitting in Washington hearing certain people
talk and talk about all that government ought _not_ do--people who
got all _they_ wanted from government back in the days when the
financial institutions and the railroads were being bailed out by
the government in 1933.  It is refreshing to go out through the
country and feel the common wisdom that the time to repair the roof
is when the sun is shining.

They want the financial budget balanced.  But they want the human
budget balanced as well.  They want to set up a national economy
which balances itself with as little government subsidy as
possible, for they realize that persistent subsidies ultimately
bankrupt their government.

They are less concerned that every detail be immediately right than
they are that the direction be right.  They know that just so long
as we are traveling on the right road, it does not make much
difference if occasionally we hit a "Thank you marm."

The overwhelming majority of our citizens who live by agriculture
are thinking very clearly how they want government to help them in
connection with the production of crops.  They want government help
in two ways:  first, in the control of surpluses, and, second, in
the proper use of land.

The other day a reporter told me that he had never been able to
understand why the government seeks to curtail crop production and,
at the same time, to open up new irrigated acres.

He was confusing two totally separate objectives.

Crop surplus control relates to the total amount of any major crop
grown in the whole nation on all cultivated land--good or bad--
control by the cooperation of the crop growers and with the help of
the government.  Land use, on the other hand, is a policy of
providing each farmer with the best quality and type of land we
have, or can make available, for his part in that total production.
Adding good new land for diversified crops is offset by abandoning
poor land now uneconomically farmed.

The total amount of production largely determines the price of the
crop, and, therefore, the difference between comfort and misery for
the farmer.

If we Americans were foolish enough to run every shoe factory
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we would soon have more
shoes than the nation could possibly buy--a surplus of shoes so
great that it would have to be destroyed, or given away, or sold at
prices far below the cost of production.  That simple law of supply
and demand equally affects the price of all our major crops.

You and I have heard big manufacturers talk about control of
production by the farmer as an indefensible "economy of scarcity."
And yet these same manufacturers never hesitate to shut down their
own huge plants, throw men out of work, and cut down the purchasing
power of whole communities whenever they think that they must
adjust their production to an oversupply of the goods they make.
When it is their baby who has the measles, they call it not "an
economy of scarcity" but "sound business judgment."

Of course, speaking seriously, what you and I want is such
governmental rules of the game that labor and agriculture and
industry will all produce a balanced abundance without waste.

So we intend this winter to find a way to prevent four-and-a-half
cent cotton, nine cent corn and thirty cent wheat--with all the
disaster those prices mean for all of us--to prevent those prices
from ever coming back again.  To do that, the farmers themselves
want to cooperate to build an all-weather farm program so that in
the long run prices will be more stable.  They believe this can be
done, and the national budget kept out of the red.

And when we have found that way to protect the farmers' prices from
the effects of alternating crop surpluses and crop scarcities, we
shall also have found the way to protect the nation's food supply
from the effects of the same fluctuation.  We ought always to have
enough food at prices within the reach of the consuming public.  For
the consumers in the cities of America, we must find a way to help
the farmers to store up in years of plenty enough to avoid hardship
in the years of scarcity.

Our land use policy is a different thing.  I have just visited much
of the work that the national government is doing to stop soil
erosion, to save our forests, to prevent floods, to produce
electric power for more general use, and to give people a chance to
move from poor land on to better land by irrigating thousands of
acres that need only water to provide an opportunity to make a good
living.

I saw bare and burned hillsides where only a few years ago great
forests were growing.  They are now being planted to young trees,
not only to stop erosion, but to provide a lumber supply for the
future.

I saw C.C.C. boys and W.P.A. workers building check-dams and small
ponds and terraces to raise the water table and make it possible
for farms and villages to remain in safety where they now are.  I
saw the harnessing of the turbulent Missouri, muddy with the
topsoil of many states.  And I saw barges on new channels carrying
produce and freight athwart the nation.

Let me give you two simple illustrations of why government projects
of this type have a national importance for the whole country.

In the Boise Valley in Idaho I saw a district which had been
recently irrigated to enormous fertility so that a family can now
make a pretty good living from forty acres of its land.  Many of the
families, who are making good in that valley today, moved there
from a thousand miles away.  They came from the dust strip that runs
through the middle of the nation all the way from the Canadian
border to Mexico, a strip which includes large portions of ten
states.  That valley in western Idaho, therefore, assumes at once a
national importance as a second chance for willing farmers.  And,
year by year, we propose to add more valleys to take care of
thousands of other families who need the same kind of second chance
in new green pastures.

The other illustration was at the Grand Coulee Dam in the state of
Washington.  The engineer in charge told me that almost half of the
whole cost of that dam to date had been spent for materials that
were manufactured east of the Mississippi River, giving employment
and wages to thousands of industrial workers in the eastern third
of the nation, two thousand miles away.

All of this work needs, of course, a more businesslike system of
planning and greater foresight than we use today.

That is why I recommended to the last session of the Congress the
creation of seven planning regions, in which local people will
originate and coordinate recommendations as to the kind of this
work of this kind to be done in their particular regions.  The
Congress will, of course, determine the projects to be selected
within the budget limits.

To carry out any twentieth century program, we must give the
Executive branch of the government twentieth century machinery to
work with.  I recognize that democratic processes are necessarily
and rightly slower than dictatorial processes.  But I refuse to
believe that democratic processes need be dangerously slow.

For many years we have all known that the Executive and
Administrative departments of the government in Washington are a
higgledy-piggledy patchwork of duplicate responsibilities and
overlapping powers.  The reorganization of this vast government
machinery which I proposed to the Congress last winter does not
conflict with the principle of the democratic process, as some
people say.  It only makes that process work more efficiently.

On my recent trip many people have talked to me about the millions
of men and women and children who still work at insufficient wages
and overlong hours.

American industry has searched the outside world to find new
markets--but it can create on its very doorstep the biggest and
most permanent market it has ever had.  It needs the reduction of
trade barriers to improve its foreign markets, but it should not
overlook the chance to reduce the domestic trade barrier right
here--right away--without waiting for any treaty.  A few more
dollars a week in wages, a better distribution of jobs with a
shorter working day will almost overnight make millions of our
lowest-paid workers actual buyers of billions of dollars of
industrial and farm products.  That increased volume of sales ought
to lessen other cost of production so much that even a considerable
increase in labor costs can be absorbed without imposing higher
prices on the consumer.

I am a firm believer in fully adequate pay for all labor.  But right
now I am most greatly concerned in increasing the pay of the
lowest-paid labor--those who are our most numerous consuming group
but who today do not make enough to maintain a decent standard of
living or to buy the food, and the clothes and the other articles
necessary to keep our factories and farms fully running.

Farsighted businessmen already understand and agree with this
policy.  They agree also that no one section of the country can
permanently benefit itself, or the rest of the country, by
maintaining standards of wages and hours far inferior to other
sections of the country.

Most businessmen, big and little, know that their government
neither wants to put them out of business nor to prevent them from
earning a decent profit.  In spite of the alarms of a few who seek
to regain control of American life, most businessmen, big and
little, know that their government is trying to make property more
secure than ever before by giving every family a real chance to
have a property stake in the nation.

Whatever danger there may be to the property and profits of the
many, if there be any danger, comes not from government's attitude
toward business but from restraints now imposed upon business by
private monopolies and financial oligarchies.  The average
businessman knows that a high cost of living is a great deterrent
to business and that business prosperity depends much upon a low
price policy which encourages the widest possible consumption.  As
one of the country's leading economists recently said, "The
continuance of business recovery in the United States depends far
more upon business policies, business pricing policies, than it
does on anything that may be done, or not done, in Washington."

Our competitive system is, of course, not altogether competitive.
Anybody who buys any large quantity of manufactured goods knows
this, whether it be the government or an individual buyer.  We have
anti-trust laws, to be sure, but they have not been adequate to
check the growth of many monopolies.  Whether or not they might have
been adequate originally, interpretation by the courts and the
difficulties and delays of legal procedure have now definitely
limited their effectiveness.

We are already studying how to strengthen our anti-trust laws in
order to end monopoly--not to hurt but to free legitimate business.

I have touched briefly on these important subjects, which, taken
together, make a program for the immediate future.  To attain it,
legislation is necessary.

As we plan today for the creation of ever higher standards of
living for the people of the United States, we are aware that our
plans may be most seriously affected by events in the world outside
our borders.

By a series of trade agreements, we have been attempting to
recreate the trade of the world which plays so important a part in
our domestic prosperity; but we know that if the world outside our
borders falls into the chaos of war, world trade will be completely
disrupted.

Nor can we view with indifference the destruction of civilized
values throughout the world.  We seek peace, not only for our
generation but also for the generation of our children.

We seek for them the continuance of world civilization in order
that their American civilization may continue to be invigorated by
the achievements of civilized men and women in the rest of the
world.

I want our great democracy to be wise enough to realize that
aloofness from war is not promoted by unawareness of war.  In a
world of mutual suspicions, peace must be affirmatively reached
for.  It cannot just be wished for.  And it cannot just be waited
for.

We have now made known our willingness to attend a conference of
the parties to the Nine Power Treaty of 1922--the Treaty of
Washington--of which we are one of the original signatories.  The
purpose of this conference will be to seek by agreement a solution
of the present situation in China.  In efforts to find that
solution, it is our purpose to cooperate with the other signatories
to this Treaty, including China and Japan.

Such cooperation would be an example of one of the possible paths
to follow in our search for means toward peace throughout the whole
world.

The development of civilization and of human welfare is based on
the acceptance by individuals of certain fundamental decencies in
their relations with each other.  The development of peace in the
world is dependent similarly on the acceptance by nations of
certain fundamental decencies in their relations with each other.

Ultimately, I hope _each_ nation will accept the fact that
violations of these rules of conduct are an injury to the well-
being of _all_ nations.

Meanwhile, remember that from 1913 to 1921, I personally was fairly
close to world events, and in that period, while I learned much of
what to do, I also learned much of what _not_ to do.

The common sense, the intelligence of America agree with my
statement that "America hates war.  America hopes for peace.
Therefore, America actively engages in the search for peace."



April 14, 1938.


My Friends:

Five months have gone by since I last spoke to the people of the
nation about the state of the nation.

I had hoped to be able to defer this talk until next week because,
as we all know, this is Holy Week.  But what I want to say to you,
the people of the country, is of such immediate need and relates so
closely to the lives of human beings and the prevention of human
suffering that I have felt that there should be no delay.  In this
decision I have been strengthened by the thought that by speaking
tonight there may be greater peace of mind and that the hope of
Easter may be more real at firesides everywhere, and therefore that
it is not inappropriate to encourage peace when so many of us are
thinking of the Prince of Peace.

Five years ago we faced a very serious problem of economic and
social recovery.  For four and a half years that recovery proceeded
apace.  It is only in the past seven months that it has received a
visible setback.

And it is only within the past two months, as we have waited
patiently to see whether the forces of business itself would
counteract it, that it has become apparent that government itself
can no longer safely fail to take aggressive government steps to
meet it.

This recession has not returned us the disasters and suffering of
the beginning of 1933.  Your money in the bank is safe; farmers are
no longer in deep distress and have greater purchasing power;
dangers of security speculation have been minimized; national
income is almost 50 percent higher than in 1932; and government has
an established and accepted responsibility for relief.

But I know that many of you have lost your jobs or have seen your
friends or members of your families lose their jobs, and I do not
propose that the government shall pretend not to see these things.
I know that the effect of our present difficulties has been uneven;
that they have affected some groups and some localities seriously,
but that they have been scarcely felt in others.  But I conceive the
first duty of government is to protect the economic welfare of all
the people in all sections and in all groups.  I said in my message
opening the last session of the Congress that if private enterprise
did not provide jobs this spring, government would take up the
slack--that I would not let the people down.  We have all learned
the lesson that government cannot afford to wait until it has lost
the power to act.

Therefore, my friends, I have sent a message of far-reaching
importance to the Congress.  I want to read to you tonight certain
passages from that message, and to talk with you about them.

In that message I analyzed the causes of the collapse of 1929 in
these words: "over-speculation in and overproduction of practically
every article or instrument used by man. . . millions of people, to
be sure, had been put to work, but the products of their hands had
exceeded the purchasing power of their pocketbooks. . . .  Under the
inexorable law of supply and demand, supplies so overran demand
which would pay that production was compelled to stop.  Unemployment
and closed factories resulted.  Hence the tragic years from 1929 to
1933."

I pointed out to the Congress that the national income--not the
government's income but the total of the income of all the
individual citizens and families of the United States--every
farmer, every worker, every banker, every professional man and
every person who lived on income derived from investments--that
national income had amounted, in the year 1929, to eighty-one
billion dollars.  By 1932 this had fallen to thirty-eight billion
dollars.  Gradually, and up to a few months ago, it had risen to a
total, an annual total; of sixty-eight billion dollars--a pretty
good come-back from the low point.

I then said this to the Congress:

"But the very vigor of the recovery in both durable goods and
consumers' goods brought into the picture early in certain highly
undesirable practices, which were in large part responsible for the
economic decline which began in the later months of that year.
Again production outran the ability to buy.

"There were many reasons for this overproduction.  One of them was
fear--fear of war abroad, fear of inflation, fear of nation-wide
strikes.  None of these fears have been borne out.

". . .Production in many important lines of goods outran the
ability of the public to purchase them.  For example, through the
winter and spring of 1937 cotton factories in hundreds of cases
were running on a three-shift basis, piling up cotton goods in the
factory, and in the hands of middle men and retailers.  For example,
also, automobile manufacturers not only turned out a normal
increase of finished cars, but encouraged the normal increase to
run into abnormal figures, using every known method to push their
sales.  This meant, of course, that the steel mills of the nation
ran on a twenty-four hour basis, and the tire companies and cotton
factories and glass factories and others speeded up to meet the
same type of abnormally stimulated demand.  The buying power of the
nation lagged behind.

"Thus by the autumn of 1937, last autumn, the nation again had
stocks on hand which the consuming public could not buy because the
purchasing power of the consuming public had not kept pace with the
production.

"During the same period. . . the prices of many vital products had
risen faster than was warranted. . . .  In the case of many
commodities the price to the consumer was raised well above the
inflationary boom prices of 1929.  In many lines of goods and
materials, prices got so high that buyers and builders ceased to
buy or to build.

". . .  The economic process of getting out the raw materials,
putting them through the manufacturing and finishing processes,
selling them to the retailers, selling them to the consumer, and
finally using them, got completely out of balance.

". . .  The laying off of workers came upon us last autumn and has
been continuing at such a pace ever since that all of us,
government and banking and business and workers, and those faced
with destitution, recognize the need for action."

All of this I said to the Congress today and I repeat it to you,
the people of the country tonight.

I went on to point out to the Senate and the House of
Representatives that all the energies of government and business
must be directed to increasing the national income, to putting more
people into private jobs, to giving security and a feeling of
security to all people in all walks of life.

I am constantly thinking of all our people--unemployed and employed
alike--of their human problems of food and clothing and homes and
education and health and old age.  You and I agree that security is
our greatest need; the chance to work, the opportunity of making a
reasonable profit in our business--whether it be a very small
business or a larger one--the possibility of selling our farm
products for enough money for our families to live on decently.  I
know these are the things that decide the well-being of all our
people.

Therefore, I am determined to do all in my power to help you attain
that security and because I know that the people themselves have a
deep conviction that secure prosperity of that kind cannot be a
lasting one except on a basis of business fair dealing and a basis
where all from the top to the bottom share in the prosperity.  I
repeated to the Congress today that neither it nor the Chief
Executive can afford "to weaken or destroy great reforms which,
during the past five years, have been effected on behalf of the
American people.  In our rehabilitation of the banking structure and
of agriculture, in our provisions for adequate and cheaper credit
for all types of business, in our acceptance of national
responsibility for unemployment relief, in our strengthening of the
credit of state and local government, in our encouragement of
housing, and slum clearance and home ownership, in our supervision
of stock exchanges and public utility holding companies and the
issuance of new securities, in our provision for social security,
the electorate of America wants no backward steps taken.

"We have recognized the right of labor to free organization, to
collective bargaining; and machinery for the handling of labor
relations is now in existence.  The principles are established even
though we can all admit that, through the evolution of time,
administration and practices can be improved.  Such improvement can
come about most quickly and most peacefully through sincere efforts
to understand and assist on the part of labor leaders and employers
alike.

"The never-ceasing evolution of human society will doubtless bring
forth new problems which will require new adjustments.  Our
immediate task is to consolidate and maintain the gains achieved.

"In this situation there is no reason and no occasion for any
American to allow his fears to be aroused or his energy and
enterprise to be paralyzed by doubt or uncertainty."

I came to the conclusion that the present-day problem calls for
action both by the government and by the people, that we suffer
primarily from a failure of consumer demand because of lack of
buying power.  Therefore it is up to us to create an economic
upturn.

"How and where can and should the government help to start an
upward spiral?"

I went on in my message today to propose three groups of measures
and I will summarize my recommendations.

First, I asked for certain appropriations which are intended to
keep the government expenditures for work relief and similar
purposes during the coming fiscal year at the same rate of
expenditure as at present.  That includes additional money for the
Works Progress Administration; additional funds for the Farm
Security Administration; additional allotments for the national
Youth Administration, and more money for the Civilian Conservation
Corps, in order that it can maintain the existing number of camps
now in operation.

These appropriations, made necessary by increased unemployment,
will cost about a billion and a quarter dollars more than the
estimates which I sent to the Congress on the third of January .

Second, I told the Congress that the administration proposes to
make additional bank reserves available for the credit needs of the
country.  About one billion four hundred million dollars of gold now
in the treasury will be used to pay these additional expenses of
the government, and three-quarters of a billion dollars of
additional credit will be made available to the banks by reducing
the reserves now required by the Federal Reserve Board.

These two steps--taking care of relief needs and adding to bank
credits--are in our best judgment insufficient by themselves to
start the nation on a sustained upward movement.

Therefore, I came to the third kind of government action which I
consider to be vital.  I said to the Congress:

"You and I cannot afford to equip ourselves with two rounds of
ammunition where three rounds are necessary.  If we stop at relief
and credit, we may find ourselves without ammunition before the
enemy is routed.  If we are fully equipped with the third round of
ammunition, we stand to win the battle against adversity."

This third proposal is to make definite additions to the purchasing
power of the nation by providing new work over and above the
continuing of the old work.

First, to enable the United States Housing Authority to undertake
the immediate construction of about three hundred million dollars
of additional slum clearance projects.

Second, to renew a public works program by starting as quickly as
possible about one billion dollars worth of needed permanent public
improvements in our states, and their counties and cities.

Third, to add one hundred million dollars to the estimate for
federal aid highways in excess of the amount I recommended in
January.

Fourth, to add thirty-seven million dollars over and above the
former estimate of sixty-three million for flood control and
reclamation.

Fifth, to add twenty-five million dollars additional for federal
buildings in various parts of the country.

In recommending this program I am thinking not only of the
immediate economic needs of the people of the nation, but also of
their personal liberties--the most precious possession of all
Americans.  I am thinking of our democracy and of the recent trend
in other parts of the world away from the democratic ideal.

Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations--
disappeared not because the people of those nations disliked
democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and
insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless
in the face of government confusion and government weakness through
lack of leadership in government.  Finally, in desperation, they
chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.
We in America know that our own democratic institutions can be
preserved and made to work.  But in order to preserve them we need
to act together, to meet the problems of the nation boldly, and to
prove that the practical operation of democratic government is
equal to the task of protecting the security of the people.

Not only our future economic soundness but the very soundness of
our democratic institutions depends on the determination of our
government to give employment to idle men.  The people of America
are in agreement in defending their liberties at any cost, and the
first line of that defense lies in the protection of economic
security.  Your government, seeking to protect democracy, must prove
that government is stronger than the forces of business depression.

History proves that dictatorships do not grow out of strong and
successful governments but out of weak and helpless governments.  If
by democratic methods people get a government strong enough to
protect them from fear and starvation, their democracy succeeds,
but if they do not, they grow impatient.  Therefore, the only sure
bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to
protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and
well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its
government.

We are a rich Nation; we can afford to pay for security and
prosperity without having to sacrifice our liberties into the
bargain.

In the first century of our republic we were short of capital,
short of workers and short of industrial production; but we were
rich in free land, free timber and free mineral wealth.  The federal
government rightly assumed the duty of promoting business and
relieving depression by giving subsidies of land and other
resources.

Thus, from our earliest days we have had a tradition of substantial
government help to our system of private enterprise.  But today the
government no longer has vast tracts of rich land to give away and
we have discovered, too, that we must spend large sums of money to
conserve our land from further erosion and our forests from further
depletion.  The situation is also very different from the old days,
because now we have plenty of capital, banks and insurance
companies loaded with idle money; plenty of industrial productive
capacity and many millions of workers looking for jobs.  It is
following tradition as well as necessity, if government strives to
put idle money and idle men to work, to increase our public wealth
and to build up the health and strength of the people--and to help
our system of private enterprise to function.

It is going to cost something to get out of this recession this way
but the profit of getting out of it will pay for the cost several
times over.  Lost working time is lost money.  Every day that a
workman is unemployed, or a machine is unused, or a business
organization is marking time, it is a loss to the nation.  Because
of idle men and idle machines this Nation lost one hundred billion
dollars between 1929 and the Spring of 1933, in less than four
years.  This year you, the people of this country, are making about
twelve billion dollars less than last year.

If you think back to the experiences of the early years of this
administration you will remember the doubts and fears expressed
about the rising expenses of government.  But to the surprise of the
doubters, as we proceeded to carry on the program which included
Public Works and Work Relief, the country grew richer instead of
poorer.

It is worthwhile to remember that the annual national people's
income was thirty billion dollars more last year in 1937 than it
was in 1932.  It is true that the national debt increased sixteen
billion dollars, but remember that in that increase must be
included several billion dollars worth of assets which eventually
will reduce that debt and that many billion dollars of permanent
public improvements--schools, roads, bridges, tunnels, public
buildings, parks and a host of other things--meet your eye in every
one of the thirty-one hundred counties in the United States.

No doubt you will be told that the government spending program of
the past five years did not cause the increase in our national
income.  They will tell you that business revived because of private
spending and investment.  That is true in part, for the government
spent only a small part of the total.  But that government spending
acted as a trigger to set off private activity.  That is why the
total addition to our national production and national income has
been so much greater than the contribution of the government
itself.

In pursuance of that thought I said to the Congress today:

"I want to make it clear that we do not believe that we can get an
adequate rise in national income merely by investing, and lending
or spending public funds.  It is essential in our economy that
private funds must be put to work and all of us recognize that such
funds are entitled to a fair profit."

As national income rises, "let us not forget that government
expenditures will go down and government tax receipts will go up."

The government contribution of land that we once made to business
was the land of all the people.  And the government contribution of
money which we now make to business ultimately comes out of the
labor of all the people.  It is, therefore, only sound morality, as
well as a sound distribution of buying power, that the benefits of
the prosperity coming from this use of the money of all the people
ought to be distributed among all the people--at the bottom as well
as at the top.  Consequently, I am again expressing my hope that the
Congress will enact at this session a wage and hour bill putting a
floor under industrial wages and a limit on working hours--to
ensure a better distribution of our prosperity, a better
distribution of available work, and a sounder distribution of
buying power.

You may get all kinds of impressions in regard to the total cost of
this new program, or in regard to the amount that will be added to
the net national debt.

It is a big program.  Last autumn in a sincere effort to bring
government expenditures and government income into closer balance,
the Budget I worked out called for sharp decreases in government
spending.

In the light of present conditions those estimates were far too
low.  This new program adds two billion and sixty-two million
dollars to direct treasury expenditures and another nine hundred
and fifty million dollars to government loans--the latter sum,
because they are loans, will come back to the treasury in the
future.

The net effect on the debt of the government is this--between now
and July 1, 1939--fifteen months away--the treasury will have to
raise less than a billion and a half dollars of new money.

Such an addition to the net debt of the United States need not give
concern to any citizen, for it will return to the people of the
United States many times over in increased buying power and
eventually in much greater government tax receipts because of the
increase in the citizen income.

What I said to the Congress in the close of my message I repeat to
you.

"Let us unanimously recognize the fact that the federal debt,
whether it be twenty-five billions or forty billions, can only be
paid if the nation obtains a vastly increased citizen income.  I
repeat that if this citizen income can be raised to eighty billion
dollars a year the national government and the overwhelming
majority of state and local governments will be definitely 'out of
the red.'  The higher the national income goes the faster will we be
able to reduce the total of federal and state and local debts.
Viewed from every angle, today's purchasing power--the citizens'
income of today--is not at this time sufficient to drive the
economic system of America at higher speed.  Responsibility of
government requires us at this time to supplement the normal
processes and in so supplementing them to make sure that the
addition is adequate.  We must start again on a long steady upward
incline in national income.

". . .  And in that process, which I believe is ready to start, let
us avoid the pitfalls of the past--the overproduction, the
overspeculation, and indeed all the extremes which we did not
succeed in avoiding in 1929.  In all of this, government cannot and
should not act alone.  Business must help.  And I am sure business
will help.

"We need more than the materials of recovery.  We need a united
national will.

"We need to recognize nationally that the demands of no group,
however just, can be satisfied unless that group is prepared to
share in finding a way to produce the income from which they and
all other groups can be paid. . . .  You, as the Congress, I, as the
President, must by virtue of our offices, seek the national good by
preserving the balance between all groups and all sections.

"We have at our disposal the national resources, the money, the
skill of hand and head to raise our economic level--our citizens'
income.  Our capacity is limited only by our ability to work
together.  What is needed is the will.

"The time has come to bring that will into action with every
driving force at our command.  And I am determined to do my share.

". . .  Certain positive requirements seem to me to accompany the
will--if we have that will.

"There is placed on all of us the duty of self-restraint. . . .
That is the discipline of a democracy.  Every patriotic citizen must
say to himself or herself, that immoderate statement, appeals to
prejudice, the creation of unkindness, are offenses not against an
individual or individuals, but offenses against the whole
population of the United States. . . .

"Self-restraint implies restraint by articulate public opinion,
trained to distinguish fact from falsehood, trained to believe that
bitterness is never a useful instrument in public affairs.  There
can be no dictatorship by an individual or by a group in this
Nation, save through division fostered by hate.  Such division there
must never be."

And finally I should like to say a personal word to you.

I never forget that I live in a house owned by all the American
people and that I have been given their trust.

I try always to remember that their deepest problems are human.  I
constantly talk with those who come to tell me their own points of
view; with those who manage the great industries and financial
institutions of the country; with those who represent the farmer
and the worker; and often with average citizens without high
position who come to this house.  And constantly I seek to look
beyond the doors of the White House, beyond the officialdom of the
national capital, into the hopes and fears of men and women in
their homes.  I have travelled the country over many times.  My
friends, my enemies, my daily mail bring to me reports of what you
are thinking and hoping.  I want to be sure that neither battles nor
burdens of office shall ever blind me to an intimate knowledge of
the way the American people want to live and the simple purposes
for which they put me here.

In these great problems of government I try not to forget that what
really counts at the bottom of it all is that the men and women
willing to work can have a decent job to take care of themselves
and their homes and their children adequately; that the farmer, the
factory worker, the storekeeper, the gas station man, the
manufacturer, the merchant--big and small--the banker who takes
pride in the help that he can give to the building of his
community--that all of these can be sure of a reasonable profit and
safety for the savings they earn--not today nor tomorrow alone, but
as far ahead as they can see.

I can hear your unspoken wonder as to where we are headed in this
troubled world.  I cannot expect all of the people to understand all
of the people's problems; but it is my job to try to those
problems.

I always try to remember that reconciling differences cannot
satisfy everyone completely.  Because I do not expect too much, I am
not disappointed.  But I know that I must never give up--that I must
never let the greater interest of all the people down, merely
because that might be for the moment the easiest personal way out.

I believe that we have been right in the course we have charted.  To
abandon our purpose of building a greater, a more stable and a more
tolerant America would be to miss the tide and perhaps to miss the
port.  I propose to sail ahead.  I feel sure that your hopes and your
help are with me.  For to reach a port, we must sail--sail, not lie
at anchor, sail, not drift.



June 24, 1938.


Our government, happily, is a democracy.  As part of the democratic
process, your President is again taking an opportunity to report on
the progress of national affairs, to report to the real rulers of
this country--the voting public.

The Seventy-Fifth Congress, elected in November, 1936, on a
platform uncompromisingly liberal, has adjourned.  Barring
unforeseen events, there will be no session until the new Congress,
to be elected in November, assembles next January.

On the one hand, the Seventy-Fifth Congress has left many things
undone.

For example, it refused to provide more businesslike machinery for
running the Executive Branch of the government.  The Congress also
failed to meet my suggestion that it take the far-reaching steps
necessary to put the railroads of the country back on their feet.

But, on the other hand, the Congress, striving to carry out the
platform on which most of its members were elected, achieved more
for the future good of the country than any Congress did between
the end of the World War and the spring of 1933.

I mention tonight only the more important of these achievements.

(1) It improved still further our agricult

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