Closely related to the broad problem of livelihood is that of security

against the major hazards of life. Here also, a comprehensive survey of

what has been attempted or accomplished in many Nations and in many

States proves to me that the time has come for action by the national

Government. I shall send to you, in a few days, definite recommendations

based on these studies. These recommendations will cover the broad

subjects of unemployment insurance and old age insurance, of benefits

for children, form others, for the handicapped, for maternity care and

for other aspects of dependency and illness where a beginning can now be

made.

The third factor--better homes for our people--has also been the subject

of experimentation and study. Here, too, the first practical steps can

be made through the proposals which I shall suggest in relation to

giving work to the unemployed.

Whatever we plan and whatever we do should be in the light of these

three clear objectives of security. We cannot afford to lose valuable

time in haphazard public policies which cannot find a place in the broad

outlines of these major purposes. In that spirit I come to an immediate

issue made for us by hard and inescapable circumstance--the task of

putting people to work. In the spring of 1933 the issue of destitution

seemed to stand apart; today, in the light of our experience and our new

national policy, we find we can put people to work in ways which conform

to, initiate and carry forward the broad principles of that policy.

The first objectives of emergency legislation of 1933 were to relieve

destitution, to make it possible for industry to operate in a more

rational and orderly fashion, and to put behind industrial recovery the

impulse of large expenditures in Government undertakings. The purpose of

the National Industrial Recovery Act to provide work for more people

succeeded in a substantial manner within the first few months of its

life, and the Act has continued to maintain employment gains and greatly

improved working conditions in industry.

The program of public works provided for in the Recovery Act launched

the Federal Government into a task for which there was little time to

make preparation and little American experience to follow. Great

employment has been given and is being given by these works.

More than two billions of dollars have also been expended in direct

relief to the destitute. Local agencies of necessity determined the

recipients of this form of relief. With inevitable exceptions the funds

were spent by them with reasonable efficiency and as a result actual

want of food and clothing in the great majority of cases has been

overcome.

But the stark fact before us is that great numbers still remain

unemployed.

A large proportion of these unemployed and their dependents have been

forced on the relief rolls. The burden on the Federal Government has

grown with great rapidity. We have here a human as well as an economic

problem. When humane considerations are concerned, Americans give them

precedence. The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence

immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon

relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally

destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to

administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is

inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the

traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute

workers.

The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by

the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work

cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up .papers in the public parks.

We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution

but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and

determination. This decision brings me to the problem of what the

Government should do with approximately five million unemployed now on

the relief rolls.

About one million and a half of these belong to the group which in the

past was dependent upon local welfare efforts. Most of them are unable

for one reason or another to maintain themselves independently--for the

most part, through no fault of their own. Such people, in the days

before the great depression, were cared for by local efforts--by States,

by counties, by towns, by cities, by churches and by private welfare

agencies. It is my thought that in the future they must be cared for as

they were before. I stand ready through my own personal efforts, and

through the public influence of the office that I hold, to help these

local agencies to get the means necessary to assume this burden.

The security legislation which I shall propose to the Congress will, I

am confident, be of assistance to local effort in the care of this type

of cases. Local responsibility can and will be resumed, for, after all,

common sense tells us that the wealth necessary for this task existed

and still exists in the local community, and the dictates of sound

administration require that this responsibility be in the first instance

a local one. There are, however, an additional three and one half

million employable people who are on relief. With them the problem is

different and the responsibility is different. This group was the victim

of a nation-wide depression caused by conditions which were not local

but national. The Federal Government is the only governmental agency

with sufficient power and credit to meet this situation. We have assumed

this task and we shall not shrink from it in the future. It is a duty

dictated by every intelligent consideration of national policy to ask

you to make it possible for the United States to give employment to all

of these three and one half million employable people now on relief,

pending their absorption in a rising tide of private employment.

It is my thought that with the exception of certain of the normal public

building operations of the Government, all emergency public works shall

be united in a single new and greatly enlarged plan.

With the establishment of this new system we can supersede the Federal

Emergency Relief Administration with a coordinated authority which will

be charged with the orderly liquidation of our present relief activities

and the substitution of a national chart for the giving of work.

This new program of emergency public employment should be governed by a

number of practical principles.

(1) All work undertaken should be useful--not just for a day, or a year,

but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living

conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the Nation.

(2) Compensation on emergency public projects should be in the form of

security payments which should be larger than the amount now received as

a relief dole, but at the same time not so large as to encourage the

rejection of opportunities for private employment or the leaving of

private employment to engage in Government work.

(3) Projects should be undertaken on which a large percentage of direct

labor can be used.

(4) Preference should be given to those projects which will be

self-liquidating in the sense that there is a reasonable expectation

that the Government will get its money back at some future time.

(5) The projects undertaken should be selected and planned so as to

compete as little as possible with private enterprises. This suggests

that if it were not for the necessity of giving useful work to the

unemployed now on relief, these projects in most instances would not now

be undertaken.

(6) The planning of projects would seek to assure work during the coming

fiscal year to the individuals now on relief, or until such time as

private employment is available. In order to make adjustment to

increasing private employment, work should be planned with a view to

tapering it off in proportion to the speed with which the emergency

workers are offered positions with private employers.

(7) Effort should be made to locate projects where they will serve the

greatest unemployment needs as shown by present relief rolls, and the

broad program of the National Resources Board should be freely used for

guidance in selection. Our ultimate objective being the enrichment of

human lives, the Government has the primary duty to use its emergency

expenditures as much as possible to serve those who cannot secure the

advantages of private capital.

Ever since the adjournment of the 73d Congress, the Administration has

been studying from every angle the possibility and the practicability of

new forms of employment. As a result of these studies I have arrived at

certain very definite convictions as to the amount of money that will be

necessary for the sort of public projects that I have described. I shall

submit these figures in my budget message. I assure you now they will be

within the sound credit of the Government.

The work itself will cover a wide field including clearance of slums,

which for adequate reasons cannot be undertaken by private capital; in

rural housing of several kinds, where, again, private capital is unable

to function; in rural electrification; in the reforestation of the great

watersheds of the Nation; in an intensified program to prevent soil

erosion and to reclaim blighted areas; in improving existing road

systems and in constructing national highways designed to handle modern

traffic; in the elimination of grade crossings; in the extension and

enlargement of the successful work of the Civilian Conservation Corps;

in non-Federal works, mostly self-liquidating and highly useful to local

divisions of Government; and on many other projects which the Nation

needs and cannot afford to neglect.

This is the method which I propose to you in order that we may better

meet this present-day problem of unemployment. Its greatest advantage is

that it fits logically and usefully into the long-range permanent policy

of providing the three types of security which constitute as a whole an

American plan for the betterment of the future of the American people.

I shall consult with you from time to time concerning other measures of

national importance. Among the subjects that lie immediately before us

are the consolidation of Federal regulatory administration over all

forms of transportation, the renewal and clarification of the general

purposes of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the strengthening of

our facilities for the prevention, detection and treatment of crime and

criminals, the restoration of sound conditions in the public utilities

field through abolition of the evil features of holding companies, the

gradual tapering off of the emergency credit activities of Government,

and improvement in our taxation forms and methods.

We have already begun to feel the bracing effect upon our economic

system of a restored agriculture. The hundreds of millions of additional

income that farmers are receiving are finding their way into the

channels of trade. The farmers’ share of the national income is slowly

rising. The economic facts justify the widespread opinion of those

engaged in agriculture that our provisions for maintaining a balanced

production give at this time the most adequate remedy for an old and

vexing problem. For the present, and especially in view of abnormal

world conditions, agricultural adjustment with certain necessary

improvements in methods should continue.

It seems appropriate to call attention at this time to the fine spirit

shown during the past year by our public servants. I cannot praise too

highly the cheerful work of the Civil Service employees, and of those

temporarily working for the Government. As for those thousands in our

various public agencies spread throughout the country who, without

compensation, agreed to take over heavy responsibilities in connection

with our various loan agencies and particularly in direct relief work, I

cannot say too much. I do not think any country could show a higher

average of cheerful and even enthusiastic team-work than has been shown

by these men and women.

I cannot with candor tell you that general international relationships

outside the borders of the United States are improved. On the surface of

things many old jealousies are resurrected, old passions aroused; new

strivings for armament and power, in more than one land, rear their ugly

heads. I hope that calm counsel and constructive leadership will provide

the steadying influence and the time necessary for the coming of new and

more practical forms of representative government throughout the world

wherein privilege and power will occupy a lesser place and world welfare

a greater.

I believe, however, that our own peaceful and neighborly attitude toward

other Nations is coming to be understood and appreciated. The

maintenance of international peace is a matter in which we are deeply

and unselfishly concerned. Evidence of our persistent and undeniable

desire to prevent armed conflict has recently been more than once

afforded.

There is no ground for apprehension that our relations with any Nation

will be otherwise than peaceful. Nor is there ground for doubt that the

people of most Nations seek relief from the threat and burden attaching

to the false theory that extravagant armament cannot be reduced and

limited by international accord.

The ledger of the past year shows many more gains than losses. Let us

not forget that, in addition to saving millions from utter destitution,

child labor has been for the moment outlawed, thousands of homes saved

to their owners and most important of all, the morale of the Nation has

been restored. Viewing the year 1934 as a whole, you and I can agree

that we have a generous measure of reasons for giving thanks.

It is not empty optimism that moves me to a strong hope in the coming

year. We can, if we will, make 1935 a genuine period of good feeling,

sustained by a sense of purposeful progress. Beyond the material

recovery, I sense a spiritual recovery as well. The people of America

are turning as never before to those permanent values that are not

limited to the physical objectives of life. There are growing signs of

this on every hand. In the face of these spiritual impulses we are

sensible of the Divine Providence to which Nations turn now, as always,

for guidance and fostering care.

***

State of the Union Address

Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 3, 1936

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and of the House of

Representatives:

We are about to enter upon another year of the responsibility which the

electorate of the United States has placed in our hands. Having come so

far, it is fitting that we should pause to survey the ground which we

have covered and the path which lies ahead.

On the fourth day of March, 1933, on the occasion of taking the oath of

office as President of the United States, I addressed the people of our

country. Need I recall either the scene or the national circumstances

attending the occasion? The crisis of that moment was almost exclusively

a national one. In recognition of that fact, so obvious to the millions

in the streets and in the homes of America, I devoted by far the greater

part of that address to what I called, and the Nation called, critical

days within our own borders.

You will remember that on that fourth of March, 1933, the world picture

was an image of substantial peace. International consultation and

widespread hope for the bettering of relations between the Nations gave

to all of us a reasonable expectation that the barriers to mutual

confidence, to increased trade, and to the peaceful settlement of

disputes could be progressively removed. In fact, my only reference to

the field of world policy in that address was in these words: “I would

dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor--the neighbor

who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the

rights of others--a neighbor who respects his obligations and respects

the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.”

In the years that have followed, that sentiment has remained the

dedication of this Nation. Among the Nations of the great Western

Hemisphere the policy of the good neighbor has happily prevailed. At no

time in the four and a half centuries of modern civilization in the

Americas has there existed--in any year, in any decade, in any

generation in all that time--a greater spirit of mutual understanding,

of common helpfulness, and of devotion to the ideals of serf-government

than exists today in the twenty-one American Republics and their

neighbor, the Dominion of Canada. This policy of the good neighbor among

the Americas is no longer a hope, no longer an objective remaining to be

accomplished. It is a fact, active, present, pertinent and effective. In

this achievement, every American Nation takes an understanding part.

There is neither war, nor rumor of war, nor desire for war. The

inhabitants of this vast area, two hundred and fifty million strong,

spreading more than eight thousand miles from the Arctic to the

Antarctic, believe in, and propose to follow, the policy of the good

neighbor. They wish with all their heart that the rest of the world

might do likewise.

The rest of the world--Ah! there is the rub.

Were I today to deliver an Inaugural Address to the people of the United

States, I could not limit my comments on world affairs to one paragraph.

With much regret I should be compelled to devote the greater part to

world affairs. Since the summer of that same year of 1933, the temper

and the purposes of the rulers of many of the great populations in

Europe and in Asia have not pointed the way either to peace or to

good-will among men. Not only have peace and good-will among men grown

more remote in those areas of the earth during this period, but a point

has been reached where the people of the Americas must take cognizance

of growing ill-will, of marked trends toward aggression, of increasing

armaments, of shortening tempers--a situation which has in it many of

the elements that lead to the tragedy of general war.

On those other continents many Nations, principally the smaller peoples,

if left to themselves, would be content with their boundaries and

willing to solve within themselves and in cooperation with their

neighbors their individual problems, both economic and social. The

rulers of those Nations, deep in their hearts, follow these peaceful and

reasonable aspirations of their peoples. These rulers must remain ever

vigilant against the possibility today or tomorrow of invasion or attack

by the rulers of other peoples who fail to subscribe to the principles

of bettering the human race by peaceful means.

Within those other Nations--those which today must bear the primary,

definite responsibility for jeopardizing world peace--what hope lies? To

say the least, there are grounds for pessimism. It is idle for us or for

others to preach that the masses of the people who constitute those

Nations which are dominated by the twin spirits of autocracy and

aggression, are out of sympathy with their rulers, that they are allowed

no opportunity to express themselves, that they would change things if

they could.

That, unfortunately, is not so clear. It might be true that the masses

of the people in those Nations would change the policies of their

Governments if they could be allowed full freedom and full access to the

processes of democratic government as we understand them. But they do

not have that access; lacking it they follow blindly and fervently the

lead of those who seek autocratic power.

Nations seeking expansion, seeking the rectification of injustices

springing from former wars, or seeking outlets for trade, for population

or even for their own peaceful contributions to the progress of

civilization, fail to demonstrate that patience necessary to attain

reasonable and legitimate objectives by peaceful negotiation or by an

appeal to the finer instincts of world justice.

They have therefore impatiently reverted to the old belief in the law of

the sword, or to the fantastic conception that they, and they alone, are

chosen to fulfill a mission and that all the others among the billion

and a half of human beings in the world must and shall learn from and be

subject to them.

I recognize and you will recognize that these words which I have chosen

with deliberation will not prove popular in any Nation that chooses to

fit this shoe to its foot. Such sentiments, however, will find sympathy

and understanding in those Nations where the people themselves are

honestly desirous of peace but must constantly align themselves on one

side or the other in the kaleidoscopic jockeying for position which is

characteristic of European and Asiatic relations today. For the

peace-loving Nations, and there are many of them, find that their very

identity depends on their moving and moving again on the chess board of

international politics.

I suggested in the spring of 1933 that 85 or 90 percent of all the

people in the world were content with the territorial limits of their

respective Nations and were willing further to reduce their armed forces

if every other Nation in the world would agree to do likewise.

That is equally true today, and it is even more true today that world

peace and world good-will are blocked by only 10 or 15 percent of the

world’s population. That is why efforts to reduce armies have thus far

not only failed, but have been met by vastly increased armaments on land

and in the air. That is why even efforts to continue the existing limits

on naval armaments into the years to come show such little current

success.

But the policy of the United States has been clear and consistent. We

have sought with earnestness in every possible way to limit world

armaments and to attain the peaceful solution of disputes among all

Nations.

We have sought by every legitimate means to exert our moral influence

against repression, against intolerance, against autocracy and in favor

of freedom of expression, equality before the law, religious tolerance

and popular rule.

In the field of commerce we have undertaken to encourage a more

reasonable interchange of the world’s goods. In the field of

international finance we have, so far as we are concerned, put an end to

dollar diplomacy, to money grabbing, to speculation for the benefit of

the powerful and the rich, at the expense of the small and the poor.

As a consistent part of a clear policy, the United States is following a

twofold neutrality toward any and all Nations which engage in wars that

are not of immediate concern to the Americas. First, we decline to

encourage the prosecution of war by permitting belligerents to obtain

arms, ammunition or implements of war from the United States. Second, we

seek to discourage the use by belligerent Nations of any and all

American products calculated to facilitate the prosecution of a war in

quantities over and above our normal exports of them in time of peace.

I trust that these objectives thus clearly and unequivocally stated will

be carried forward by cooperation between this Congress and the

President.

I realize that I have emphasized to you the gravity of the situation

which confronts the people of the world. This emphasis is justified

because of its importance to civilization and therefore to the United

States. Peace is jeopardized by the few and not by the many. Peace is

threatened by those who seek selfish power. The world has witnessed

similar eras--as in the days when petty kings and feudal barons were

changing the map of Europe every fortnight, or when great emperors and

great kings were engaged in a mad scramble for colonial empire. We hope

that we are not again at the threshold of such an era. But if face it we

must, then the United States and the rest of the Americas can play but

one role: through a well-ordered neutrality to do naught to encourage

the contest, through adequate defense to save ourselves from embroilment

and attack, and through example and all legitimate encouragement and

assistance to persuade other Nations to return to the ways of peace and

good-will.

The evidence before us clearly proves that autocracy in world affairs

endangers peace and that such threats do not spring from those Nations

devoted to the democratic ideal. If this be true in world affairs, it

should have the greatest weight in the determination of domestic

policies.

Within democratic Nations the chief concern of the people is to prevent

the continuance or the rise of autocratic institutions that beget

slavery at home and aggression abroad. Within our borders, as in the

world at large, popular opinion is at war with a power-seeking minority.

That is no new thing. It was fought out in the Constitutional Convention

of 1787. From time to time since then, the battle has been continued,

under Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow

Wilson.

In these latter years we have witnessed the domination of government by

financial and industrial groups, numerically small but politically

dominant in the twelve years that succeeded the World War. The present

group of which I speak is indeed numerically small and, while it

exercises a large influence and has much to say in the world of

business, it does not, I am confident, speak the true sentiments of the

less articulate but more important elements that constitute real

American business.

In March, 1933, I appealed to the Congress of the United States and to

the people of the United States in a new effort to restore power to

those to whom it rightfully belonged. The response to that appeal

resulted in the writing of a new chapter in the history of popular

government. You, the members of the Legislative branch, and I, the

Executive, contended for and established a new relationship between

Government and people.

What were the terms of that new relationship? They were an appeal from

the clamor of many private and selfish interests, yes, an appeal from

the clamor of partisan interest, to the ideal of the public interest.

Government became the representative and the trustee of the public

interest. Our aim was to build upon essentially democratic institutions,

seeking all the while the adjustment of burdens, the help of the needy,

the protection of the weak, the liberation of the exploited and the

genuine protection of the people’s property.

It goes without saying that to create such an economic constitutional

order, more than a single legislative enactment was called for. We, you

in the Congress and I as the Executive, had to build upon a broad base.

Now, after thirty-four months of work, we contemplate a fairly rounded

whole. We have returned the control of the Federal Government to the

City of Washington.

To be sure, in so doing, we have invited battle. We have earned the

hatred of entrenched greed. The very nature of the problem that we faced

made it necessary to drive some people from power and strictly to

regulate others. I made that plain when I took the oath of office in

March, 1933. I spoke of the practices of the unscrupulous money-changers

who stood indicted in the court of public opinion. I spoke of the rulers

of the exchanges of mankind’s goods, who failed through their own

stubbornness and their own incompetence. I said that they had admitted

their failure and had abdicated.

Abdicated? Yes, in 1933, but now with the passing of danger they forget

their damaging admissions and withdraw their abdication.

They seek the restoration of their selfish power. They offer to lead us

back round the same old corner into the same old dreary street.

Yes, there are still determined groups that are intent upon that very

thing. Rigorously held up to popular examination, their true character

presents itself. They steal the livery of great national constitutional

ideals to serve discredited special interests. As guardians and trustees

for great groups of individual stockholders they wrongfully seek to

carry the property and the interests entrusted to them into the arena of

partisan politics. They seek--this minority in business and industry--to

control and often do control and use for their own purposes legitimate

and highly honored business associations; they engage in vast propaganda

to spread fear and discord among the people--they would “gang up”

against the people’s liberties.

The principle that they would instill into government if they succeed in

seizing power is well shown by the principles which many of them have

instilled into their own affairs: autocracy toward labor, toward

stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment. Autocrats in

smaller things, they seek autocracy in bigger things. “By their fruits

ye shall know them.”

If these gentlemen believe, as they say they believe, that the measures

adopted by this Congress and its predecessor, and carried out by this

Administration, have hindered rather than promoted recovery, let them be

consistent. Let them propose to this Congress the complete repeal of

these measures. The way is open to such a proposal.

Let action be positive and not negative. The way is open in the Congress

of the United States for an expression of opinion by yeas and nays.

Shall we say that values are restored and that the Congress will,

therefore, repeal the laws under which we have been bringing them back?

Shall we say that because national income has grown with rising

prosperity, we shall repeal existing taxes and thereby put off the day

of approaching a balanced budget and of starting to reduce the national

debt? Shall we abandon the reasonable support and regulation of banking?

Shall we restore the dollar to its former gold content?

Shall we say to the farmer, “The prices for your products are in part

restored. Now go and hoe your own row?”

Shall we say to the home owners, “We have reduced your rates of

interest. We have no further concern with how you keep your home or what

you pay for your money. That is your affair?”

Shall we say to the several millions of unemployed citizens who face the

very problem of existence, of getting enough to eat, “We will withdraw

from giving you work. We will turn you back to the charity of your

communities and those men of selfish power who tell you that perhaps

they will employ you if the Government leaves them strictly alone?”

Shall we say to the needy unemployed, “Your problem is a local one

except that perhaps the Federal Government, as an act of mere

generosity, will be willing to pay to your city or to your county a few

grudging dollars to help maintain your soup kitchens?”

Shall we say to the children who have worked all day in the factories,

“Child labor is a local issue and so are your starvation wages;

something to be solved or left unsolved by the jurisdiction of

forty-eight States?”

Shall we say to the laborer, “Your right to organize, your relations

with your employer have nothing to do with the public interest; if your

employer will not even meet with you to discuss your problems and his,

that is none of our affair?”

Shall we say to the unemployed and the aged, “Social security lies not

within the province of the Federal Government; you must seek relief

elsewhere?”

Shall we say to the men and women who live in conditions of squalor in

country and in city, “The health and the happiness of you and your

children are no concern of ours?”

Shall we expose our population once more by the repeal of laws which

protect them against the loss of their honest investments and against

the manipulations of dishonest speculators? Shall we abandon the

splendid efforts of the Federal Government to raise the health standards

of the Nation and to give youth a decent opportunity through such means

as the Civilian Conservation Corps?

Members of the Congress, let these challenges be met. If this is what

these gentlemen want, let them say so to the Congress of the United

States. Let them no longer hide their dissent in a cowardly cloak of

generality. Let them define the issue. We have been specific in our

affirmative action. Let them be specific in their negative attack.

But the challenge faced by this Congress is more menacing than merely a

return to the past--bad as that would be. Our resplendent economic

autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they

prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless

and the strong. They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up

new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people’s Government

this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political

puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for

the liberties of the people. Give them their way and they will take the

course of every autocracy of the past--power for themselves, enslavement

for the public.

Their weapon is the weapon of fear. I have said, “The only thing we have

to fear is fear itself.” That is as true today as it was in 1933. But

such fear as they instill today is not a natural fear, a normal fear; it

is a synthetic, manufactured, poisonous fear that is being spread

subtly, expensively and cleverly by the same people who cried in those

other days, “Save us, save us, lest we perish.”

I am confident that the Congress of the United States well understands

the facts and is ready to wage unceasing warfare against those who seek

a continuation of that spirit of fear. The carrying out of the laws of

the land as enacted by the Congress requires protection until final

adjudication by the highest tribunal of the land. The Congress has the

right and can find the means to protect its own prerogatives.

We are justified in our present confidence. Restoration of national

income, which shows continuing gains for the third successive year,

supports the normal and logical policies under which agriculture and

industry are returning to full activity. Under these policies we

approach a balance of the national budget. National income increases;

tax receipts, based on that income, increase without the levying of new

taxes. That is why I am able to say to this, the Second Session of the

74th Congress, that it is my belief based on existing laws that no new

taxes, over and above the present taxes, are either advisable or

necessary.

National income increases; employment increases. Therefore, we can look

forward to a reduction in the number of those citizens who are in need.

Therefore, also, we can anticipate a reduction in our appropriations for

relief.

In the light of our substantial material progress, in the light of the

increasing effectiveness of the restoration of popular rule, I recommend

to the Congress that we advance; that we do not retreat. I have

confidence that you will not fail the people of the Nation whose mandate

you have already so faithfully fulfilled.

I repeat, with the same faith and the same determination, my words of

March 4, 1933: “We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm

courage of national unity; with a clear consciousness of seeking old and

precious moral values; with a clean satisfaction that comes from the

stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the

assurance of a rounded and permanent national life. We do not distrust

the future of essential democracy.”

I cannot better end this message on the state of the Union than by

repeating the words of a wise philosopher at whose feet I sat many, many

years ago.

“What great crises teach all men whom the example and counsel of the

brave inspire is the lesson: Fear not, view all the tasks of life as

sacred, have faith in the triumph of the ideal, give daily all that you

have to give, be loyal and rejoice whenever you find yourselves part of

a great ideal enterprise. You, at this moment, have the honor to belong

to a generation whose lips are touched by fire. You live in a land that

now enjoys the blessings of peace. But let nothing human be wholly alien

to you. The human race now passes through one of its great crises. New

ideas, new issues--a new call for men to carry on the work of

righteousness, of charity, of courage, of patience, and of loyalty. . .

. However memory bring back this moment to your minds, let it be able to

say to you: That was a great moment. It was the beginning of a new era.

. . . This world in its crisis called for volunteers, for men of faith

in life, of patience in service, of charity and of insight. I responded

to the call however I could. I volunteered to give myself to my

Master--the cause of humane and brave living. I studied, I loved, I

labored, unsparingly and hopefully, to be worthy of my generation.”

***

State of the Union Address

Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 6, 1937

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Congress of the United

States:

For the first time in our national history a President delivers his

Annual Message to a new Congress within a fortnight of the expiration of

his term of office. While there is no change in the Presidency this

year, change will occur in future years. It is my belief that under this

new constitutional practice, the President should in every fourth year,

in so far as seems reasonable, review the existing state of our national

affairs and outline broad future problems, leaving specific

recommendations for future legislation to be made by the President about

to be inaugurated.

At this time, however, circumstances of the moment compel me to ask your

immediate consideration of: First, measures extending the life of

certain authorizations and powers which, under present statutes, expire

within a few weeks; second, an addition to the existing Neutrality Act

to cover specific points raised by the unfortunate civil strife in

Spain; and, third, a deficiency appropriation bill for which I shall

submit estimates this week.

In March, 1933, the problems which faced our Nation and which only our

national Government had the resources to meet were more serious even

than appeared on the surface.

It was not only that the visible mechanism of economic life had broken

down. More disturbing was the fact that long neglect of the needs of the

underprivileged had brought too many of our people to the verge of doubt

as to the successful adaptation of our historic traditions to the

complex modern world. In that lay a challenge to our democratic form of

Government itself.

Ours was the task to prove that democracy could be made to function in

the world of today as effectively as in the simpler world of a hundred

years ago. Ours was the task to do more than to argue a theory. The

times required the confident answer of performance to those whose

instinctive faith in humanity made them want to believe that in the long

run democracy would prove superior to more extreme forms of Government

as a process of getting action when action was wisdom, without the

spiritual sacrifices which those other forms of Government exact.

That challenge we met. To meet it required unprecedented activities

under Federal leadership to end abuses, to restore a large measure of

material prosperity, to give new faith to millions of our citizens who

had been traditionally taught to expect that democracy would provide

continuously wider opportunity and continuously greater security in a

world where science was continuously making material riches more

available to man.

In the many methods of attack with which we met these problems, you and

I, by mutual understanding and by determination to cooperate, helped to

make democracy succeed by refusing to permit unnecessary disagreement to

arise between two of our branches of Government. That spirit of

cooperation was able to solve difficulties of extraordinary magnitude

and ramification with few important errors, and at a cost cheap when

measured by the immediate necessities and the eventual results.

I look forward to a continuance of that cooperation in the next four

years. I look forward also to a continuance of the basis of that

cooperation-- mutual respect for each other’s proper sphere of

functioning in a democracy which is working well, and a common-sense

realization of the need for play in the joints of the machine.

On that basis, it is within the right of the Congress to determine which

of the many new activities shall be continued or abandoned, increased or

curtailed.

On that same basis, the President alone has the responsibility for their

administration. I find that this task of Executive management has

reached the point where our administrative machinery needs comprehensive

overhauling. I shall, therefore, shortly address the Congress more fully

in regard to modernizing and improving the Executive branch of the

Government.

That cooperation of the past four years between the Congress and the

President has aimed at the fulfillment of a twofold policy: first,

economic recovery through many kinds of assistance to agriculture,

industry and banking; and, second, deliberate improvement in the

personal security and opportunity of the great mass of our people.

The recovery we sought was not to be merely temporary. It was to be a

recovery protected from the causes of previous disasters. With that aim

in view--to prevent a future similar crisis--you and I joined in a

series of enactments--safe banking and sound currency, the guarantee of

bank deposits, protection for the investor in securities, the removal of

the threat of agricultural surpluses, insistence on collective

bargaining, the outlawing of sweat shops, child labor and unfair trade

practices, and the beginnings of security for the aged and the worker.

Nor was the recovery we sought merely a purposeless whirring of

machinery. It is important, of course, that every man and woman in the

country be able to find work, that every factory run, that business and

farming as a whole earn profits. But Government in a democratic Nation

does not exist solely, or even primarily, for that purpose.

It is not enough that the wheels turn. They must carry us in the

direction of a greater satisfaction in life for the average man. The

deeper purpose of democratic government is to assist as many of its

citizens as possible, especially those who need it most, to improve

their conditions of life, to retain all personal liberty which does not

adversely affect their neighbors, and to pursue the happiness which

comes with security and an opportunity for recreation and culture.

Even with our present recovery we are far from the goal of that deeper

purpose. There are far-reaching problems still with us for which

democracy must find solutions if it is to consider itself successful.

For example, many millions of Americans still live in habitations which

not only fail to provide the physical benefits of modern civilization

but breed disease and impair the health of future generations. The

menace exists not only in the slum areas of the very large cities, but

in many smaller cities as well. It exists on tens of thousands of farms,

in varying degrees, in every part of the country.

Another example is the prevalence of an un-American type of tenant

farming. I do not suggest that every farm family has the capacity to

earn a satisfactory living on its own farm. But many thousands of tenant

farmers, indeed most of them, with some financial assistance and with

some advice and training, can be made self-supporting on land which can

eventually belong to them. The Nation would be wise to offer them that

chance instead of permitting them to go along as they do now, year after

year, with neither future security as tenants nor hope of ownership of

their homes nor expectation of bettering the lot of their children.

Another national problem is the intelligent development of our social

security system, the broadening of the services it renders, and

practical improvement in its operation. In many Nations where such laws

are in effect, success in meeting the expectations of the community has

come through frequent amendment of the original statute.

And, of course, the most far-reaching and the most inclusive problem of

all is that of unemployment and the lack of economic balance of which

unemployment is at once the result and the symptom. The immediate

question of adequate relief for the needy unemployed who are capable of

performing useful work, I shall discuss with the Congress during the

coming months. The broader task of preventing unemployment is a matter

of long-range evolutionary policy. To that we must continue to give our

best thought and effort. We cannot assume that immediate industrial and

commercial activity which mitigates present pressures justifies the

national Government at this time in placing the unemployment problem in

a filing cabinet of finished business.

Fluctuations in employment are tied to all other wasteful fluctuations

in our mechanism of production and distribution. One of these wastes is

speculation. In securities or commodities, the larger the volume of

speculation, the wider become the upward and downward swings and the

more certain the result that in the long run there will be more losses

than gains in the underlying wealth of the community.

And, as is now well known to all of us, the same net loss to society

comes from reckless overproduction and monopolistic underproduction of

natural and manufactured commodities.

Overproduction, underproduction and speculation are three evil sisters

who distill the troubles of unsound inflation and disastrous deflation.

It is to the interest of the Nation to have Government help private

enterprise to gain sound general price levels and to protect those

levels from wide perilous fluctuations. We know now that if early in

1931 Government had taken the steps which were taken two and three years

later, the depression would never have reached the depths of the

beginning of 1933.

Sober second thought confirms most of us in the belief that the broad

objectives of the National Recovery Act were sound. We know now that its

difficulties arose from the fact that it tried to do too much. For

example, it was unwise to expect the same agency to regulate the length

of working hours, minimum wages, child labor and collective bargaining

on the one hand and the complicated questions of unfair trade practices

and business controls on the other.

The statute of N.R.A. has been outlawed. The problems have not. They are

still with us.

That decent conditions and adequate pay for labor, and just return for

agriculture, can be secured through parallel and simultaneous action by

forty-eight States is a proven impossibility. It is equally impossible

to obtain curbs on monopoly, unfair trade practices and speculation by

State action alone. There are those who, sincerely or insincerely, still

cling to State action as a theoretical hope. But experience with

actualities makes it clear that Federal laws supplementing State laws

are needed to help solve the problems which result from modern invention

applied in an industrialized Nation which conducts its business with

scant regard to State lines.

During the past year there has been a growing belief that there is

little fault to be found with the Constitution of the United States as

it stands today. The vital need is not an alteration of our fundamental

law, but an increasingly enlightened view with reference to it.

Difficulties have grown out of its interpretation; but rightly

considered, it can be used as an instrument of progress, and not as a

device for prevention of action.

It is worth our while to read and reread the preamble of the

Constitution, and Article I thereof which confers the legislative powers

upon the Congress of the United States. It is also worth our while to

read again the debates in the Constitutional Convention of one hundred

and fifty years ago. From such reading, I obtain the very definite

thought that the members of that Convention were fully aware that

civilization would raise problems for the proposed new Federal

Government, which they themselves could not even surmise; and that it

was their definite intent and expectation that a liberal interpretation

in the years to come would give to the Congress the same relative powers

over new national problems as they themselves gave to the Congress over

the national problems of their day.

In presenting to the Convention the first basic draft of the

Constitution, Edmund Randolph explained that it was the purpose “to

insert essential principles only, lest the operation of government

should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and

unalterable which ought to be accommodated to times and events.”

With a better understanding of our purposes, and a more intelligent

recognition of our needs as a Nation, it is not to be assumed that there

will be prolonged failure to bring legislative and judicial action into

closer harmony. Means must be found to adapt our legal forms and our

judicial interpretation to the actual present national needs of the

largest progressive democracy in the modern world.

That thought leads to a consideration of world problems. To go no

further back than the beginning of this century, men and women

everywhere were seeking conditions of life very different from those

which were customary before modern invention and modern industry and

modern communications had come into being. The World war, for all of its

tragedy, encouraged these demands, and stimulated action to fulfill

these new desires.

Many national Governments seemed unable adequately to respond; and,

often with the improvident assent of the masses of the people

themselves, new forms of government were set up with oligarchy taking

the place of democracy. In oligarchies, militarism has leapt forward,

while in those Nations which have retained democracy, militarism has

waned.

I have recently visited three of our sister Republics in South America.

The very cordial receptions with which I was greeted were in tribute to

democracy. To me the outstanding observation of that visit was that the

masses of the peoples of all the Americas are convinced that the

democratic form of government can be made to succeed and do not wish to

substitute for it any other form of government. They believe that

democracies are best able to cope with the changing problems of modern

civilization within themselves, and that democracies are best able to

maintain peace among themselves.

The Inter-American Conference, operating on these fundamental principles

of democracy, did much to assure peace in this Hemisphere. Existing

peace machinery was improved. New instruments to maintain peace and

eliminate causes of war were adopted. Wider protection of the interests

of the American Republics in the event of war outside the Western

Hemisphere was provided. Respect for, and observance of, international

treaties and international law were strengthened. Principles of liberal

trade policies, as effective aids to the maintenance of peace, were

reaffirmed. The intellectual and cultural relationships among American

Republics were broadened as a part of the general peace program.

In a world unhappily thinking in terms of war, the representatives of

twenty-one Nations sat around a table, in an atmosphere of complete

confidence and understanding, sincerely discussing measures for

maintaining peace. Here was a great and a permanent achievement directly

affecting the lives and security of the two hundred and fifty million

human beings who dwell in this Western Hemisphere. Here was an example

which must have a wholesome effect upon the rest of the world.

In a very real sense, the Conference in Buenos Aires sent forth a

message on behalf of all the democracies of the world to those Nations

which live otherwise. Because such other Governments are perhaps more

spectacular, it was high time for democracy to assert itself.

Because all of us believe that our democratic form of government can

cope adequately with modern problems as they arise, it is patriotic as

well as logical for us to prove that we can meet new national needs with

new laws consistent with an historic constitutional framework clearly

intended to receive liberal and not narrow interpretation.

The United States of America, within itself, must continue the task of

making democracy succeed.

In that task the Legislative branch of our Government will, I am

confident, continue to meet the demands of democracy whether they relate

to the curbing of abuses, the extension of help to those who need help,

or the better balancing of our interdependent economies.

So, too, the Executive branch of the Government must move forward in

this task, and, at the same time, provide better management for

administrative action of all kinds.

The Judicial branch also is asked by the people to do its part in making

democracy successful. We do not ask the Courts to call non-existent

powers into being, but we have a right to expect that conceded powers or

those legitimately implied shall be made effective instruments for the

common good.

The process of our democracy must not be imperiled by the denial of

essential powers of free government.

Your task and mine is not ending with the end of the depression. The

people of the United States have made it clear that they expect us to

continue our active efforts in behalf of their peaceful advancement.

In that spirit of endeavor and service I greet the 75th Congress at the

beginning of this auspicious New Year.

***

State of the Union Address

Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 3, 1938

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and of the House of

Representatives:

In addressing the Congress on the state of the Union present facts and

future hazards demand that I speak clearly and earnestly of the causes

which underlie events of profound concern to all.

In spite of the determination of this Nation for peace, it has become

clear that acts and policies of nations in other parts of the world have

far-reaching effects not only upon their immediate neighbors but also on

us.

I am thankful that I can tell you that our Nation is at peace. It has

been kept at peace despite provocations which in other days, because of

their seriousness, could well have engendered war. The people of the

United States and the Government of the United States have shown

capacity for restraint and a civilized approach to the purposes of

peace, while at the same time we maintain the integrity inherent in the

sovereignty of 130,000,000 people, lest we weaken or destroy our

influence for peace and jeopardize the sovereignty itself.

It is our traditional policy to live at peace with other nations. More

than that, we have been among the leaders in advocating the use of

pacific methods of discussion and conciliation in international

differences. We have striven for the reduction of military forces.

But in a world of high tension and disorder, in a world where stable

civilization is actually threatened, it becomes the responsibility of

each nation which strives for peace at home and peace with and among

others to be strong enough to assure the observance of those

fundamentals of peaceful solution of conflicts which are the only

ultimate basis for orderly existence.

Resolute in our determination to respect the rights of others, and to

command respect for the rights of ourselves, we must keep ourselves

adequately strong in self-defense.

There is a trend in the world away from the observance both of the

letter and the spirit of treaties. We propose to observe, as we have in

the past, our own treaty obligations to the limit; but we cannot be

certain of reciprocity on the part of others.

Disregard for treaty obligations seems to have followed the surface

trend away from the democratic representative form of government. It

would seem, therefore, that world peace through international agreements

is most safe in the hands of democratic representative governments--or,

in other words, peace is most greatly jeopardized in and by those

nations where democracy has been discarded or has never developed.

I have used the words “surface trend,” for I still believe that

civilized man increasingly insists and in the long run will insist on

genuine participation in his own government. Our people believe that

over the years democracies of the world will survive, and that democracy

will be restored or established in those nations which today know it

not. In that faith lies the future peace of mankind.

At home, conditions call for my equal candor. Events of recent months

are new proof that we cannot conduct a national government after the

practice of 1787, or 1837 or 1887, for the obvious reason that human

needs and human desires are infinitely greater, infinitely more

difficult to meet than in any previous period in the life of our

Republic. Hitherto it has been an acknowledged duty of government to

meet these desires and needs: nothing has occurred of late to absolve

the Congress, the Courts or the President from that task. It faces us as

squarely, as insistently, as in March, 1933.

Much of trouble in our own lifetime has sprung from a long period of

inaction--from ignoring what fundamentally was happening to us, and from

a time-serving unwillingness to face facts as they forced themselves

upon us.

Our national life rests on two nearly equal producing forces,

agriculture and industry, each employing about one-third of our

citizens. The other third transports and distributes the products of the

first two, or performs special services for the whole.

The first great force, agriculture--and with it the production of

timber, minerals and other natural resources--went forward feverishly

and thoughtlessly until nature rebelled and we saw deserts encroach,

floods destroy, trees disappear and soil exhausted.

At the same time we have been discovering that vast numbers of our

farming population live in a poverty more abject than that of many of

the farmers of Europe whom we are wont to call peasants; that the prices

of our products of agriculture are too often dependent on speculation by

non-farming groups; and that foreign nations, eager to become

self-sustaining or ready to put virgin land under the plough are no

longer buying our surpluses of cotton and wheat and lard and tobacco and

fruit as they had before.

Since 1933 we have knowingly faced a choice of three remedies. First, to

cut our cost of farm production below that of other nations--an obvious

impossibility in many crops today unless we revert to human slavery or

its equivalent.

Second, to make the government the guarantor of farm prices and the

underwriter of excess farm production without limit--a course which

would bankrupt the strongest government in the world in a decade.

Third, to place the primary responsibility directly on the farmers

themselves, under the principle of majority rule, so that they may

decide, with full knowledge of the facts of surpluses, scarcities, world

markets and domestic needs, what the planting of each crop should be in

order to maintain a reasonably adequate supply which will assure a

minimum adequate price under the normal processes of the law of supply

and demand.

That means adequacy of supply but not glut. It means adequate reserves

against the day of drought. It is shameless misrepresentation to call

this a policy of scarcity. It is in truth insurance before the fact,

instead of government subsidy after the fact.

Any such plan for the control of excessive surpluses and the speculation

they bring has two enemies. There are those well meaning theorists who

harp on the inherent right of every free born American to do with his

land what he wants--to cultivate it well--or badly; to conserve his

timber by cutting only the annual increment thereof--or to strip it

clean, let fire burn the slash, and erosion complete the ruin; to raise

only one crop--and if that crop fails, to look for food and support from

his neighbors or his government.

That, I assert is not an inherent right of citizenship. For if a man

farms his land to the waste of the soil or the trees, he destroys not

only his own assets but the Nation’s assets as well. Or if by his

methods he makes himself, year after year, a financial hazard of the

community and the government, he becomes not only a social problem but

an economic menace. The day has gone by when it could be claimed that

government has no interest in such ill-considered practices and no right

through representative methods to stop them.

The other group of enemies is perhaps less well-meaning. It includes

those who for partisan purposes oppose each and every practical effort

to help the situation, and also those who make money from undue

fluctuations in crop prices.

I gladly note that measures which seek to initiate a government program

for a balanced agriculture are now in conference between the two Houses

of the Congress. In their final consideration, I hope for a sound

consistent measure which will keep the cost of its administration within

the figure of current government expenditures in aid of agriculture. The

farmers of this Nation know that a balanced output can be put into

effect without excessive cost and with the cooperation of the great

majority of them.

If this balance can be created by an all-weather farm program, our farm

population will soon be assured of relatively constant purchasing power.

From this will flow two other practical results: the consuming public

will be protected against excessive food and textile prices, and the

industries of the Nation and their workers will find a steadier demand

for wares sold to the agricultural third of our people.

To raise the purchasing power of the farmer is, however, not enough. It

will not stay raised if we do not also raise the purchasing power of

that third of the Nation which receives its income from industrial

employment. Millions of industrial workers receive pay so low that they

have little buying power. Aside from the undoubted fact that they

thereby suffer great human hardship, they are unable to buy adequate

food and shelter, to maintain health or to buy their share of

manufactured goods.

We have not only seen minimum wage and maximum hour provisions prove

their worth economically and socially under government auspices in 1933,

1934 and 1935, but the people of this country, by an overwhelming vote,

are in favor of having the Congress--this Congress--put a floor below

which industrial wages shall not fall, and a ceiling beyond which the

hours of industrial labor shall not rise.

Here again let us analyze the opposition. A part of it is sincere in

believing that an effort thus to raise the purchasing power of lowest

paid industrial workers is not the business of the Federal Government.

Others give “lip service” to a general objective, but do not like any

specific measure that is proposed. In both cases it is worth our while

to wonder whether some of these opponents are not at heart opposed to

any program for raising the wages of the underpaid or reducing the hours

of the overworked.

Another group opposes legislation of this type on the ground that cheap

labor will help their locality to acquire industries and outside

capital, or to retain industries which today are surviving only because

of existing low wages and long hours. It has been my thought that,

especially during these past five years, this Nation has grown away from

local or sectional selfishness and toward national patriotism and unity.

I am disappointed by some recent actions and by some recent utterances

which sound like the philosophy of half a century ago.

There are many communities in the United States where the average family

income is pitifully low. It is in those communities that we find the

poorest educational facilities and the worst conditions of health. Why?

It is not because they are satisfied to live as they do. It is because

those communities have the lowest per capita wealth and income;

therefore, the lowest ability to pay taxes; and, therefore, inadequate

functioning of local government.

Such communities exist in the East, in the Middle West, in the Far West,

and in the South. Those who represent such areas in every part of the

country do their constituents ill service by blocking efforts to raise

their incomes, their property values and, therefore, their whole scale

of living. In the long run, the profits from Child labor, low pay and

overwork enure not to the locality or region where they exist but to the

absentee owners who have sent their capital into these exploited

communities to gather larger profits for themselves. Indeed, new

enterprises and new industries which bring permanent wealth will come

more readily to those communities which insist on good pay and

reasonable hours, for the simple reason that there they will find a

greater industrial efficiency and happier workers.

No reasonable person seeks a complete uniformity in wages in every part

of the United States; nor does any reasonable person seek an immediate

and drastic change from the lowest pay to the highest pay. We are

seeking, of course, only legislation to end starvation wages and

intolerable hours; more desirable wages are and should continue to be

the product of collective bargaining.

Many of those who represent great cities have shown their understanding

of the necessity of helping the agricultural third of the Nation. I hope

that those who represent constituencies primarily agricultural will not

underestimate the importance of extending like aid to the industrial

third.

Wage and hour legislation, therefore, is a problem which is definitely

before this Congress for action. It is an essential part of economic

recovery. It has the support of an overwhelming majority of our people

in every walk of life. They have expressed themselves through the ballot

box.

Again I revert to the increase of national purchasing power as an

underlying necessity of the day. If you increase that purchasing power

for the farmers and for the industrial workers, especially for those in

both groups who have least of it today, you will increase the purchasing

power of the final third of our population--those who transport and

distribute the products of farm and factory, and those of the

professions who serve all groups. I have tried to make clear to you, and

through you to the people of the United States, that this is an urgency

which must be met by complete and not by partial action.

If it is met, if the purchasing power of the Nation as a whole--in other

words, the total of the Nation’s income--can be still further increased,

other happy results will flow from such increase.

We have raised the Nation’s income from thirty-eight billion dollars in

the year 1932 to about sixty-eight billion dollars in the year 1937. Our

goal, our objective is to raise it to ninety or one hundred billion

dollars.

We have heard much about a balanced budget, and it is interesting to

note that many of those who have pleaded for a balanced budget as the

sole need now come to me to plead for additional government expenditures

at the expense of unbalancing the budget. As the Congress is fully

aware, the annual deficit, large for several years, has been declining

the last fiscal year and this. The proposed budget for 1939, which I

shall shortly send to the Congress, will exhibit a further decrease in

the deficit, though not a balance between income and outgo.

To many who have pleaded with me for an immediate balancing of the

budget, by a sharp curtailment or even elimination of government

functions, I have asked the question: “What present expenditures would

you reduce or eliminate?” And the invariable answer has been “that is

not my business--I know nothing of the details, but I am sure that it

could be done.” That is not what you or I would call helpful

citizenship.

On only one point do most of them have a suggestion. They think that

relief for the unemployed by the giving of work is wasteful, and when I

pin them down I discover that at heart they are actually in favor of

substituting a dole in place of useful work. To that neither I nor, I am

confident, the Senators and Representatives in the Congress will ever

consent.

I am as anxious as any banker or industrialist or business man or

investor or economist that the budget of the United States Government be

brought into balance as quickly as possible. But I lay down certain

conditions which seem reasonable and which I believe all should accept.

The first condition is that we continue the policy of not permitting any

needy American who can and is willing to work to starve because the

Federal Government does not provide the work.

The second is that the Congress and the Executive join hands in

eliminating or curtailing any Federal activity which can be eliminated

or curtailed or even postponed without harming necessary government

functions or the safety of the Nation from a national point of view.

The third is to raise the purchasing power of the Nation to the point

that the taxes on this purchasing power--or, in other words, on the

Nation’s income--will be sufficient to meet the necessary expenditures

of the national government.

I have hitherto stated that, in my judgment, the expenditures of the

national government cannot be cut much below seven billion dollars a

year without destroying essential functions or letting people starve.

That sum can be raised and will be cheerfully provided by the American

people, if we can increase the Nation’s income to a point well beyond

the present level.

This does not mean that as the Nation’s income goes up the Federal

expenditures should rise in proportion. On the contrary, the Congress

and the Executive should use every effort to hold the normal Federal

expenditures to approximately the present level, thus making it

possible, with an increase in the Nation’s income and the resulting

increase in tax receipts, not only to balance future budgets but to

reduce the debt.

In line with this policy fall my former recommendations for the

reorganization and improvement of the administrative structure of the

government, both for immediate Executive needs and for the planning of

future national needs. I renew those recommendations.

In relation to tax changes, three things should be kept in mind. First,

the total sum to be derived by the Federal Treasury must not be

decreased as a result of any changes in schedules. Second, abuses by

individuals or corporations designed to escape tax-paying by using

various methods of doing business, corporate and otherwise--abuses which

we have sought, with great success, to end--must not be restored. Third,

we should rightly change certain provisions where they are proven to

work definite hardship, especially on the small business men of the

Nation. But, speculative income should not be favored over earned

income.

It is human nature to argue that this or that tax is responsible for

every ill. It is human nature on the part of those who pay graduated

taxes to attack all taxes based on the principle of ability to pay.

These are the same complainants who for a generation blocked the

imposition of a graduated income tax. They are the same complainants who

would impose the type of flat sales tax which places the burden of

government more on those least able to pay and less on those most able

to pay.

Our conclusion must be that while proven hardships should be corrected,

they should not be corrected in such a way as to restore abuses already

terminated or to shift a greater burden to the less fortunate.

This subject leads naturally into the wider field of the public attitude

toward business. The objective of increasing the purchasing power of the

farming third, the industrial third and the service third of our

population presupposes the cooperation of what we call capital and

labor.

Capital is essential; reasonable earnings on capital are essential; but

misuse of the powers of capital or selfish suspension of the employment

of capital must be ended, or the capitalistic system will destroy itself

through its own abuses.

The overwhelming majority of business men and bankers intend to be good

citizens. Only a small minority have displayed poor citizenship by

engaging in practices which are dishonest or definitely harmful to

society. This statement is straightforward and true. No person in any

responsible place in the Government of the United States today has ever

taken any position contrary to it.

But, unfortunately for the country, when attention is called to, or

attack is made on specific misuses of capital, there has been a

deliberate purpose on the part of the condemned minority to distort the

criticism into an attack on all capital. That is wilful deception but it

does not long deceive.

If attention is called to, or attack made on, certain wrongful business

practices, there are those who are eager to call it “an attack on all

business.” That, too, is wilful deception that will not long deceive.

Let us consider certain facts:

There are practices today which most people believe should be ended.

They include tax avoidance through corporate and other methods, which I

have previously mentioned; excessive capitalization, investment

write-ups and security manipulations; price rigging and collusive

bidding in defiance of the spirit of the antitrust laws by methods which

baffle prosecution under the present statutes. They include

high-pressure salesmanship which creates cycles of overproduction within

given industries and consequent recessions in production until such time

as the surplus is consumed; the use of patent laws to enable larger

corporations to maintain high prices and withhold from the public the

advantages of the progress of science; unfair competition which drives

the smaller producer out of business locally, regionally or even on a

national scale; intimidation of local or state government to prevent the

enactment of laws for the protection of labor by threatening to move

elsewhere; the shifting of actual production from one locality or region

to another in pursuit of the cheapest wage scale.

The enumeration of these abuses does not mean that business as a whole

is guilty of them. Again, it is deception that will not long deceive to

tell the country that an attack on these abuses is an attack on

business.

Another group of problems affecting business, which cannot be termed

specific abuses, gives us food for grave thought about the future.

Generically such problems arise out of the concentration of economic

control to the detriment of the body politic--control of other people’s

money, other people’s labor, other people’s lives.

In many instances such concentrations cannot be justified on the ground

of operating efficiency, but have been created for the sake of

securities profits, financial control, the suppression of competition

and the ambition for power over others. In some lines of industry a very

small numerical group is in such a position of influence that its

actions are of necessity followed by the other units operating in the

same field.

That such influences operate to control banking and finance is equally

true, in spite of the many efforts, through Federal legislation, to take

such control out of the hands of a small group. We have but to talk with

hundreds of small bankers throughout the United States to realize that

irrespective of local conditions, they are compelled in practice to

accept the policies laid down by a small number of the larger banks in

the Nation. The work undertaken by Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson is

not finished yet.

The ownership of vast properties or the organization of thousands of

workers creates a heavy obligation of public service. The power should

not be sought or sanctioned unless the responsibility is accepted as

well. The man who seeks freedom from such responsibility in the name of

individual liberty is either fooling himself or trying to cheat his

fellow men. He wants to eat the fruits of orderly society without paying

for them.

As a Nation we have rejected any radical revolutionary program. For a

permanent correction of grave weaknesses in our economic system we have

relied on new applications of old democratic processes. It is not

necessary to recount what has been accomplished in preserving the homes

and livelihood of millions of workers on farms and in cities, in

reconstructing a sound banking and credit system, in reviving trade and

industry, in reestablishing security of life and property. All we need

today is to look upon the fundamental, sound economic conditions to know

that this business recession causes more perplexity than fear on the

part of most people and to contrast our prevailing mental attitude with

the terror and despair of five years ago.

Furthermore, we have a new moral climate in America. That means that we

ask business and finance to recognize that fact, to cure such

inequalities as they can cure without legislation but to join their

government in the enactment of legislation where the ending of abuses

and the steady functioning of our economic system calls for government

assistance. The Nation has no obligation to make America safe either for

incompetent business men or for business men who fail to note the trend

of the times and continue the use of machinery of economics and

practices of finance as outworn as the cotton spindle of 1870.

Government can be expected to cooperate in every way with the business

of the Nation provided the component parts of business abandon practices

which do not belong to this day and age, and adopt price and production

policies appropriate to the times.

In regard to the relationship of government to certain processes of

business, to which I have referred, it seems clear to me that existing

laws undoubtedly require reconstruction. I expect, therefore, to address

the Congress in a special message on this subject, and I hope to have

the help of business in the efforts of government to help business.

I have spoken of labor as another essential in the three great groups of

the population in raising the Nation’s income. Definite strides in

collective bargaining have been made and the right of labor to organize

has been nationally accepted. Nevertheless in the evolution of the

process difficult situations have arisen in localities and among groups.

Unfortunate divisions relating to jurisdiction among the workers

themselves have retarded production within given industries and have,

therefore, affected related industries. The construction of homes and

other buildings has been hindered in some localities not only by

unnecessarily high prices for materials but also by certain hourly wage

scales.

For economic and social reasons our principal interest for the near

future lies along two lines: first, the immediate desirability of

increasing the wages of the lowest paid groups in all industry; and,

second, in thinking in terms of regularizing the work of the individual

worker more greatly through the year--in other words, in thinking more

in terms of the worker’s total pay for a period of a whole year rather

than in terms of his remuneration by the hour or by the day.

In the case of labor as in the case of capital, misrepresentation of the

policy of the government of the United States is deception which will

not long deceive. In both cases we seek cooperation. In every case power

and responsibility must go hand in hand.

I have spoken of economic causes which throw the Nation’s income out of

balance; I have spoken of practices and abuses which demand correction

through the cooperation of capital and labor with the government. But no

government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting

sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal. There must be

proof that sectional and class interests are prepared more greatly than

they are today to be national in outlook.

A government can punish specific acts of spoliation; but no government

can conscript cooperation. We have improved some matters by way of

remedial legislation. But where in some particulars that legislation has

failed we cannot be sure whether it fails because some of its details

are unwise or because it is being sabotaged. At any rate, we hold our

objectives and our principles to be sound. We will never go back on

them.

Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its

citizenship. If private cooperative endeavor fails to provide work for

willing hands and relief for the unfortunate, those suffering hardship

from no fault of their own have a right to call upon the Government for

aid; and a government worthy of its name must make fitting response.

It is the opportunity and the duty of all those who have faith in

democratic methods as applied in industry, in agriculture and in

business, as well as in the field of politics, to do their utmost to

cooperate with government--without regard to political affiliation,

special interests or economic prejudices--in whatever program may be

sanctioned by the chosen representatives of the people.

That presupposes on the part of the representatives of the people, a

program, its enactment and its administration.

Not because of the pledges of party programs alone, not because of the

clear policies of the past five years, but chiefly because of the need

of national unity in ending mistakes of the past and meeting the

necessities of today, we must carry on. I do not propose to let the

people down.

I am sure the Congress of the United States will not let the people

down.

***

State of the Union Address

Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 4, 1939

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and the Congress:

In Reporting on the state of the nation, I have felt it necessary on

previous occasions to advise the Congress of disturbance abroad and of

the need of putting our own house in order in the face of storm signals

from across the seas. As this Seventy-sixth Congress opens there is need

for further warning.

A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted;

but it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured.

All about us rage undeclared wars--military and economic. All about us

grow more deadly armaments--military and economic. All about us are

threats of new aggression military and economic.

Storms from abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable

to Americans, now as always. The first is religion. It is the source of

the other two--democracy and international good faith.

Religion, by teaching man his relationship to God, gives the individual

a sense of his own dignity and teaches him to respect himself by

respecting his neighbors.

Democracy, the practice of self-government, is a covenant among free men

to respect the rights and liberties of their fellows.

International good faith, a sister of democracy, springs from the will

of civilized nations of men to respect the rights and liberties of other

nations of men.

In a modern civilization, all three--religion, democracy and

international good faith--complement and support each other.

Where freedom of religion has been attacked, the attack has come from

sources opposed to democracy. Where democracy has been overthrown, the

spirit of free worship has disappeared. And where religion and democracy

have vanished, good faith and reason in international affairs have given

way to strident ambition and brute force.

An ordering of society which relegates religion, democracy and good

faith among nations to the background can find no place within it for

the ideals of the Prince of Peace. The United States rejects such an

ordering, and retains its ancient faith.

There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to

defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on

which their churches, their governments and their very civilization are

founded. The defense of religion, of democracy and of good faith among

nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds

to save all.

We know what might happen to us of the United States if the new

philosophies of force were to encompass the other continents and invade

our own. We, no more than other nations, can afford to be surrounded by

the enemies of our faith and our humanity. Fortunate it is, therefore,

that in this Western Hemisphere we have, under a common ideal of

democratic government, a rich diversity of resources and of peoples

functioning together in mutual respect and peace.

That Hemisphere, that peace, and that ideal we propose to do our share

in protecting against storms from any quarter. Our people and our

resources are pledged to secure that protection. From that determination

no American flinches.

This by no means implies that the American Republics disassociate

themselves from the nations of other continents. It does not mean the

Americas against the rest of the world. We as one of the Republics

reiterate our willingness to help the cause of world peace. We stand on

our historic offer to take counsel with all other nations of the world

to the end that aggression among them be terminated, that the race of

armaments cease and that commerce be renewed.

But the world has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift that no

nation can be safe in its will to peace so long as any other powerful

nation refuses to settle its grievances at the council table.

For if any government bristling with implements of war insists on

policies of force, weapons of defense give the only safety.

In our foreign relations we have learned from the past what not to do.

From new wars we have learned what we must do.

We have learned that effective timing of defense, and the distant points

from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what

they were twenty years ago.

We have learned that survival cannot be guaranteed by arming after the

attack begins--for there is new range and speed to offense.

We have learned that long before any overt military act, aggression

begins with preliminaries of propaganda, subsidized penetration, the

loosening of ties of good will, the stirring of prejudice and the

incitement to disunion.

We have learned that God-fearing democracies of the world which observe

the sanctity of treaties and good faith in their dealings with other

nations cannot safely be indifferent to international lawlessness

anywhere. They cannot forever let pass, without effective protest, acts

of aggression against sister nations--acts which automatically undermine

all of us.

Obviously they must proceed along practical, peaceful lines. But the

mere fact that we rightly decline to intervene with arms to prevent acts

of aggression does not mean that we must act as if there were no

aggression at all. Words may be futile, but war is not the only means of

commanding a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. There are many

methods short of war, but stronger and more effective than mere words,

of bringing home to aggressor governments the aggregate sentiments of

our own people.

At the very least, we can and should avoid any action, or any lack of

action, which will encourage, assist or build up an aggressor. We have

learned that when we deliberately try to legislate neutrality, our

neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly--may actually give aid

to an aggressor and deny it to the victim. The instinct of

self-preservation should warn us that we ought not to let that happen

any more.

And we have learned something else--the old, old lesson that probability

of attack is mightily decreased by the assurance of an ever ready

defense. Since 1931, nearly eight years ago, world events of thunderous

import have moved with lightning speed. During these eight years many of

our people clung to the hope that the innate decency of mankind would

protect the unprepared who showed their innate trust in mankind. Today

we are all wiser--and sadder.

Under modern conditions what we mean by “adequate defense”--a policy

subscribed to by all of us--must be divided into three elements. First,

we must have armed forces and defenses strong enough to ward off sudden

attack against strategic positions and key facilities essential to

ensure sustained resistance and ultimate victory. Secondly, we must have

the organization and location of those key facilities so that they may

be immediately utilized and rapidly expanded to meet all needs without

danger of serious interruption by enemy attack.

In the course of a few days I shall send you a special message making

recommendations for those two essentials of defense against danger which

we cannot safely assume will not come.

If these first two essentials are reasonably provided for, we must be

able confidently to invoke the third element, the underlying strength of

citizenship--the self-confidence, the ability, the imagination and the

devotion that give the staying power to see things through.

A strong and united nation may be destroyed if it is unprepared against

sudden attack. But even a nation well armed and well organized from a

strictly military standpoint may, after a period of time, meet defeat if

it is unnerved by self-distrust, endangered by class prejudice, by

dissension between capital and labor, by false economy and by other

unsolved social problems at home.

In meeting the troubles of the world we must meet them as one

people--with a unity born of the fact that for generations those who

have come to our shores, representing many kindreds and tongues, have

been welded by common opportunity into a united patriotism. If another

form of government can present a united front in its attack on a

democracy, the attack must and will be met by a united democracy. Such a

democracy can and must exist in the United States.

A dictatorship may command the full strength of a regimented nation. But

the united strength of a democratic nation can be mustered only when its

people, educated by modern standards to know what is going on and where

they are going, have conviction that they are receiving as large a share

of opportunity for development, as large a share of material success and

of human dignity, as they have a right to receive.

Our nation’s program of social and economic reform is therefore a part

of defense, as basic as armaments themselves.

Against the background of events in Europe, in Africa and in Asia during

these recent years, the pattern of what we have accomplished since 1933

appears in even clearer focus.

For the first time we have moved upon deep-seated problems affecting our

national strength and have forged national instruments adequate to meet

them.

Consider what the seemingly piecemeal struggles of these six years add

up to in terms of realistic national preparedness.

We are conserving and developing natural resources--land, water power,

forests.

We are trying to provide necessary food, shelter and medical care for

the health of our population.

We are putting agriculture--our system of food and fibre supply--on a

sounder basis.

We are strengthening the weakest spot in our system of industrial

supply-- its long smouldering labor difficulties.

We have cleaned up our credit system so that depositor and investor

alike may more readily and willingly make their capital available for

peace or war.

We are giving to our youth new opportunities for work and education.

We have sustained the morale of all the population by the dignified

recognition of our obligations to the aged, the helpless and the needy.

Above all, we have made the American people conscious of their

interrelationship and their interdependence. They sense a common destiny

and a common need of each other. Differences of occupation, geography,

race and religion no longer obscure the nation’s fundamental unity in

thought and in action.

We have our difficulties, true--but we are a wiser and a tougher nation

than we were in 1929, or in 1932.

Never have there been six years of such far-flung internal preparedness

in our history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to

command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital,

without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech,

freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.

We see things now that we could not see along the way. The tools of

government which we had in 1933 are outmoded. We have had to forge new

tools for a new role of government operating in a democracy--a role of

new responsibility for new needs and increased responsibility for old

needs, long neglected.

Some of these tools had to be roughly shaped and still need some

machining down. Many of those who fought bitterly against the forging of

these new tools welcome their use today. The American people, as a

whole, have accepted them. The Nation looks to the Congress to improve

the new machinery which we have permanently installed, provided that in

the process the social usefulness of the machinery is not destroyed or

impaired.

All of us agree that we should simplify and improve laws if experience

and operation clearly demonstrate the need. For instance, all of us want

better provision for our older people under our social security

legislation. For the medically needy we must provide better care.

Most of us agree that for the sake of employer and employee alike we

must find ways to end factional labor strife and employer-employee

disputes.

Most of us recognize that none of these tools can be put to maximum

effectiveness unless the executive processes of government are

revamped--reorganized, if you will--into more effective combination. And

even after such reorganization it will take time to develop

administrative personnel and experience in order to use our new tools

with a minimum of mistakes. The Congress, of course, needs no further

information on this.

With this exception of legislation to provide greater government

efficiency, and with the exception of legislation to ameliorate our

railroad and other transportation problems, the past three Congresses

have met in part or in whole the pressing needs of the new order of

things.

We have now passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of

our program of social reform. Our full energies may now be released to

invigorate the processes of recovery in order to preserve our reforms,

and to give every man and woman who wants to work a real job at a living

wage.

But time is of paramount importance. The deadline of danger from within

and from without is not within our control. The hour-glass may be in the

hands of other nations. Our own hour-glass tells us that we are off on a

race to make democracy work, so that we may be efficient in peace and

therefore secure in national defense.

This time element forces us to still greater efforts to attain the full

employment of our labor and our capital.

The first duty of our statesmanship is to bring capital and man-power

together.

Dictatorships do this by main force. By using main force they apparently

succeed at it--for the moment. However we abhor their methods, we are

compelled to admit that they have obtained substantial utilization of

all their material and human resources. Like it or not, they have

solved, for a time at least, the problem of idle men and idle capital.

Can we compete with them by boldly seeking methods of putting idle men

and idle capital together and, at the same time, remain within our

American way of life, within the Bill of Rights, and within the bounds

of what is, from our point of view, civilization itself?

We suffer from a great unemployment of capital. Many people have the

idea that as a nation we are overburdened with debt and are spending

more than we can afford. That is not so. Despite our Federal Government

expenditures the entire debt of our national economic system, public and

private together, is no larger today than it was in 1929, and the

interest thereon is far less than it was in 1929.

The object is to put capital--private as well as public--to work.

We want to get enough capital and labor at work to give us a total

turnover of business, a total national income, of at least eighty

billion dollars a year. At that figure we shall have a substantial

reduction of unemployment; and the Federal Revenues will be sufficient

to balance the current level of cash expenditures on the basis of the

existing tax structure. That figure can be attained, working within the

framework of our traditional profit system.

The factors in attaining and maintaining that amount of national income

are many and complicated.

They include more widespread understanding among business men of many

changes which world conditions and technological improvements have

brought to our economy over the last twenty years--changes in the

interrelationship of price and volume and employment, for

example--changes of the kind in which business men are now educating

themselves through excellent opportunities like the so-called “monopoly

investigation.”

They include a perfecting of our farm program to protect farmers’ income

and consumers’ purchasing power from alternate risks of crop gluts and

crop shortages.

They include wholehearted acceptance of new standards of honesty in our

financial markets.

They include reconcilement of enormous, antagonistic interests--some of

them long in litigation--in the railroad and general transportation

field.

They include the working out of new techniques--private, state and

federal--to protect the public interest in and to develop wider markets

for electric power.

They include a revamping of the tax relationships between federal, state

and local units of government, and consideration of relatively small tax

increases to adjust inequalities without interfering with the aggregate

income of the American people.

They include the perfecting of labor organization and a universal

ungrudging attitude by employers toward the labor movement, until there

is a minimum of interruption of production and employment because of

disputes, and acceptance by labor of the truth that the welfare of labor

itself depends on increased balanced out-put of goods.

To be immediately practical, while proceeding with a steady evolution in

the solving of these and like problems, we must wisely use

instrumentalities, like Federal investment, which are immediately

available to us.

Here, as elsewhere, time is the deciding factor in our choice of

remedies.

Therefore, it does not seem logical to me, at the moment we seek to

increase production and consumption, for the Federal Government to

consider a drastic curtailment of its own investments.

The whole subject of government investing and government income is one

which may be approached in two different ways.

The first calls for the elimination of enough activities of government

to bring the expenses of government immediately into balance with income

of government. This school of thought maintains that because our

national income this year is only sixty billion dollars, ours is only a

sixty billion dollar country; that government must treat it as such; and

that without the help of government, it may some day, somehow, happen to

become an eighty billion dollar country.

If the Congress decides to accept this point of view, it will logically

have to reduce the present functions or activities of government by

one-third. Not only will the Congress have to accept the responsibility

for such reduction; but the Congress will have to determine which

activities are to be reduced.

Certain expenditures we cannot possibly reduce at this session, such as

the interest on the public debt. A few million dollars saved here or

there in the normal or in curtailed work of the old departments and

commissions will make no great saving in the Federal budget. Therefore,

the Congress would have to reduce drastically some of certain large

items, very large items, such as aids to agriculture and soil

conservation, veterans’ pensions, flood control, highways, waterways and

other public works, grants for social and health security, Civilian

Conservation Corps activities, relief for the unemployed, or national

defense itself.

The Congress alone has the power to do all this, as it is the

appropriating branch of the government.

The other approach to the question of government spending takes the

position that this Nation ought not to be and need not be only a sixty

billion dollar nation; that at this moment it has the men and the

resources sufficient to make it at least an eighty billion dollar

nation. This school of thought does not believe that it can become an

eighty billion dollar nation in the near future if government cuts its

operations by one-third. It is convinced that if we were to try it, we

would invite disaster--and that we would not long remain even a sixty

billion dollar nation. There are many complicated factors with which we

have to deal, but we have learned that it is unsafe to make abrupt

reductions at any time in our net expenditure program.

By our common sense action of resuming government activities last

spring, we have reversed a recession and started the new rising tide of

prosperity and national income which we are now just beginning to enjoy.

If government activities are fully maintained, there is a good prospect

of our becoming an eighty billion dollar country in a very short time.

With such a national income, present tax laws will yield enough each

year to balance each year’s expenses.

It is my conviction that down in their hearts the American

public--industry, agriculture, finance--want this Congress to do

whatever needs to be done to raise our national income to eighty billion

dollars a year.

Investing soundly must preclude spending wastefully. To guard against

opportunist appropriations, I have on several occasions addressed the

Congress on the importance of permanent long-range planning. I hope,

therefore, that following my recommendation of last year, a permanent

agency will be set up and authorized to report on the urgency and

desirability of the various types of government investment.

Investment for prosperity can be made in a democracy.

I hear some people say, “This is all so complicated. There are certain

advantages in a dictatorship. It gets rid of labor trouble, of

unemployment, of wasted motion and of having to do your own thinking.”

My answer is, “Yes, but it also gets rid of some other things which we

Americans intend very definitely to keep--and we still intend to do our

own thinking.”

It will cost us taxes and the voluntary risk of capital to attain some

of the practical advantages which other forms of government have

acquired.

Dictatorship, however, involves costs which the American people will

never pay: The cost of our spiritual values. The cost of the blessed

right of being able to say what we please. The cost of freedom of

religion. The cost of seeing our capital confiscated. The cost of being

cast into a concentration camp. The cost of being afraid to walk down

the street with the wrong neighbor. The cost of having our children

brought up, not as free and dignified human beings, but as pawns molded

and enslaved by a machine.

If the avoidance of these costs means taxes on my income; if avoiding

these costs means taxes on my estate at death, I would bear those taxes

willingly as the price of my breathing and my children breathing the

free air of a free country, as the price of a living and not a dead

world.

Events abroad have made it increasingly clear to the American people

that dangers within are less to be feared than dangers from without. If,

therefore, a solution of this problem of idle men and idle capital is

the price of preserving our liberty, no formless selfish fears can stand

in the way.

Once I prophesied that this generation of Americans had a rendezvous

with destiny. That prophecy comes true. To us much is given; more is

expected.

This generation will “nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of

earth. . . . The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which if

followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”

***

State of the Union Address

Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 3, 1940

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and the House of

Representatives:

I wish each and every one of you a very happy New Year.

As the Congress reassembles, the impact of war abroad makes it natural

to approach “the state of the union” through a discussion of foreign

affairs.

But it is important that those who hear and read this message should in

no way confuse that approach with any thought that our Government is

abandoning, or even overlooking, the great significance of its domestic

policies.

The social and economic forces which have been mismanaged abroad until

they have resulted in revolution, dictatorship and war are the same as

those which we here are struggling to adjust peacefully at home.

You are well aware that dictatorships--and the philosophy of force that

justifies and accompanies dictatorships--have originated in almost every

case in the necessity for drastic action to improve internal conditions

in places where democratic action for one reason or another has failed

to respond to modern needs and modern demands.

It was with far-sighted wisdom that the framers of our Constitution

brought together in one magnificent phrase three great concepts--“common

defense,” “general welfare” and “domestic tranquility.”

More than a century and a half later we, who are here today, still

believe with them that our best defense is the promotion of our general

welfare and domestic tranquillity.

In previous messages to the Congress I have repeatedly warned that,

whether we like it or not, the daily lives of American citizens will, of

necessity, feel the shock of events on other continents. This is no

longer mere theory; because it has been definitely proved to us by the

facts of yesterday and today.

To say that the domestic well-being of one hundred and thirty million

Americans is deeply affected by the well-being or the ill-being of the

populations of other nations is only to recognize in world affairs the

truth that we all accept in home affairs.

If in any local unit--a city, county, State or region--low standards of

living are permitted to continue, the level of the civilization of the

entire nation will be pulled downward.

The identical principle extends to the rest of the civilized world. But

there are those who wishfully insist, in innocence or ignorance or both,

that the United States of America as a self-contained unit can live

happily and prosperously, its future secure, inside a high wall of

isolation while, outside, the rest of Civilization and the commerce and

culture of mankind are shattered.

I can understand the feelings of those who warn the nation that they

will never again consent to the sending of American youth to fight on

the soil of Europe. But, as I remember, nobody has asked them to

consent--for nobody expects such an undertaking.

The overwhelming majority of our fellow citizens do not abandon in the

slightest their hope and their expectation that the United States will

not become involved in military participation in these wars.

I can also understand the wishfulness of those who oversimplify the

whole situation by repeating that all we have to do is to mind our own

business and keep the nation out of war. But there is a vast difference

between keeping out of war and pretending that this war is none of our

business.

We do not have to go to war with other nations, but at least we can

strive with other nations to encourage the kind of peace that will

lighten the troubles of the world, and by so doing help our own nation

as well.

I ask that all of us everywhere think things through with the single aim

of how best to serve the future of our own nation. I do not mean merely

its future relationship with the outside world. I mean its domestic

future as well--the work, the security, the prosperity, the happiness,

the life of all the boys and girls in the United States, as they are

inevitably affected by such world relationships. For it becomes clearer

and clearer that the future world will be a shabby and dangerous place

to live in--yes, even for Americans to live in--if it is ruled by force

in the hands of a few.

Already the crash of swiftly moving events over the earth has made us

all think with a longer view. Fortunately, that thinking cannot be

controlled by partisanship. The time is long past when any political

party or any particular group can curry or capture public favor by

labeling itself the “peace party” or the “peace bloc.” That label

belongs to the whole United States and to every right thinking man,

woman and child within it.

For out of all the military and diplomatic turmoil, out of all the

propaganda, and counter-propaganda of the present conflicts, there are

two facts which stand out, and which the whole world acknowledges.

The first is that never before has the Government of the United States

of America done so much as in our recent past to establish and maintain

the policy of the Good Neighbor with its sister nations.

The second is that in almost every nation in the world today there is a

true public belief that the United States has been, and will continue to

be, a potent and active factor in seeking the reestablishment of world

peace.

In these recent years we have had a clean record of peace and good-will.

It is an open book that cannot be twisted or defamed. It is a record

that must be continued and enlarged.

So I hope that Americans everywhere will work out for themselves the

several alternatives which lie before world civilization, which

necessarily includes our own.

We must look ahead and see the possibilities for our children if the

rest of the world comes to be dominated by concentrated force

alone--even though today we are a very great and a very powerful nation.

We must look ahead and see the effect on our own future if all the small

nations of the world have their independence snatched from them or

become mere appendages to relatively vast and powerful military systems.

We must look ahead and see the kind of lives our children would have to

lead if a large part of the rest of the world were compelled to worship

a god imposed by a military ruler, or were forbidden to worship God at

all; if the rest of the world were forbidden to read and hear the

facts--the daily news of their own and other nations--if they were

deprived of the truth that makes men free.

We must look ahead and see the effect on our future generations if world

trade is controlled by any nation or group of nations which sets up that

control through military force.

It is, of course, true that the record of past centuries includes

destruction of many small nations, the enslavement of peoples, and the

building of empires on the foundation of force. But wholly apart from

the greater international morality which we seek today, we recognize the

practical fact that with modern weapons and modern conditions, modern

man can no longer lead a civilized life if we are to go back to the

practice of wars and conquests of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries.

Summing up this need of looking ahead, and in words of common sense and

good American citizenship. I hope that we shall have fewer American

ostriches in our midst. It is not good for the ultimate health of

ostriches to bury their heads in the sand.

Only an ostrich would look upon these wars through the eyes of cynicism

or ridicule.

Of course, the peoples of other nations have the right to choose their

own form of Government. But we in this nation still believe that such

choice should be predicated on certain freedoms which we think are

essential everywhere. We know that we ourselves shall never be wholly

safe at home unless other governments recognize such freedoms.

Twenty-one American Republics, expressing the will of two hundred and

fifty million people to preserve peace and freedom in this Hemisphere,

are displaying a unanimity of ideals and practical relationships which

gives hope that what is being done here can be done on other continents.

We in all the Americas are coming to the realization that we can retain

our respective nationalities without, at the same time, threatening the

national existence of our neighbors.

Such truly friendly relationships, for example, permit us to follow our

own domestic policies with reference to our agricultural products, while

at the same time we have the privilege of trying to work out mutual

assistance arrangements for a world distribution of world agricultural

surpluses.

And we have been able to apply the same simple principle to many

manufactured products--surpluses of which must be sold in the world

export markets if we intend to continue a high level of production and

employment.

For many years after the World War blind economic selfishness in most

countries, including our own, resulted in a destructive mine-field of

trade restrictions which blocked the channels of commerce among nations.

Indeed, this policy was one of the contributing causes of existing wars.

It dammed up vast unsalable surpluses, helping to bring about

unemployment and suffering in the United States and everywhere else.

To point the way to break up that log-jam our Trade Agreements Act was

passed--based upon a policy of equality of treatment among nations and

of mutually profitable arrangements of trade.

It is not correct to infer that legislative powers have been transferred

from the Congress to the Executive Branch of the Government. Everyone

recognizes that general tariff legislation is a Congressional function;

but we know that, because of the stupendous task involved in the

fashioning and the passing of a general tariff law, it is advisable to

provide at times of emergency some flexibility to make the general law

adjustable to quickly changing conditions.

We are in such a time today. Our present trade agreement method provides

a temporary flexibility and is, therefore, practical in the best sense.

It should be kept alive to serve our trade interests--agricultural and

industrial--in many valuable ways during the existing wars.

But what is more important, the Trade Agreements Act should be extended

as an indispensable part of the foundation of any stable and enduring

peace.

The old conditions of world trade made for no enduring peace; and when

the time comes, the United States must use its influence to open up the

trade channels of the world, in all nations, in order that no one nation

need feel compelled in later days to seek by force of arms what it can

well gain by peaceful conference. For that purpose, too, we need the

Trade Agreements Act even more today than when it was passed.

I emphasize the leadership which this nation can take when the time

comes for a renewal of world peace. Such an influence will be greatly

weakened if this Government becomes a dog in the manger of trade

selfishness.

The first President of the United States warned us against entangling

foreign alliances. The present President of the United States subscribes

to and follows that precept.

I hope that most of you will agree that trade cooperation with the rest

of the world does not violate that precept in any way.

Even as through these trade agreements we prepare to cooperate in a

world that wants peace, we must likewise be prepared to take care of

ourselves if the world cannot attain peace.

For several years past we have been compelled to strengthen our own

national defense. That has created a very large portion of our Treasury

deficits. This year in the light of continuing world uncertainty, I am

asking the Congress for Army and Navy increases which are based not on

panic but on common sense. They are not as great as enthusiastic

alarmists seek. They are not as small as unrealistic persons claiming

superior private information would demand.

As will appear in the annual budget tomorrow, the only important

increase in any part of the budget is the estimate for national defense.

Practically all other important items show a reduction. But you know,

you can’t eat your cake and have it too. Therefore, in the hope that we

can continue in these days of increasing economic prosperity to reduce

the Federal deficit, I am asking the Congress to levy sufficient

additional taxes to meet the emergency spending for national defense.

Behind the Army and Navy, of course, lies our ultimate line of

defense--“the general welfare” of our people. We cannot report, despite

all the progress that we have made in our domestic problems--despite the

fact that production is back to 1929 levels--that all our problems are

solved. The fact of unemployment of millions of men and women remains a

symptom of a number of difficulties in our economic system not yet

adjusted.

While the number of the unemployed has decreased very greatly, while

their immediate needs for food and clothing--as far as the Federal

Government is concerned--have been largely met, while their morale has

been kept alive by giving them useful public work, we have not yet found

a way to employ the surplus of our labor which the efficiency of our

industrial processes has created.

We refuse the European solution of using the unemployed to build up

excessive armaments which eventually result in dictatorships and war. We

encourage an American way--through an increase of national income which

is the only way we can be sure will take up the slack. Much progress has

been made; much remains to be done.

We recognize that we must find an answer in terms of work and

opportunity.

The unemployment problem today has become very definitely a problem of

youth as well as of age. As each year has gone by hundreds of thousands

of boys and girls have come of working age. They now form an army of

unused youth. They must be an especial concern of democratic Government.

We must continue, above all things, to look for a solution of their

special problem. For they, looking ahead to life, are entitled to action

on our part and not merely to admonitions of optimism or lectures on

economic laws.

Some in our midst have sought to instill a feeling of fear and defeatism

in the minds of the American people about this problem.

To face the task of finding jobs faster than invention can take them

away--is not defeatism. To warble easy platitudes that if we would only

go back to ways that have failed, everything would be all right--is not

courage.

In 1933 we met a problem of real fear and real defeatism. We faced the

facts--with action and not with words alone.

The American people will reject the doctrine of fear, confident that in

the ’thirties we have been building soundly a new order of things,

different from the order of the ’twenties. In this dawn of the decade of

the ’forties, with our program of social improvement started, we will

continue to carry on the processes of recovery, so as to preserve our

gains and provide jobs at living wages.

There are, of course, many other items of great public interest which

could be enumerated in this message--the continued conservation of our

natural resources, the improvement of health and of education, the

extension of social security to larger groups, the freeing of large

areas from restricted transportation discriminations, the extension of

the merit system and many others.

Our continued progress in the social and economic field is important not

only for the significance of each part of it but for the total effect

which our program of domestic betterment has upon that most valuable

asset of a nation in dangerous times--its national unity.