Economic conditions in the country are good. There are 61 million people

on the job; wages, farm incomes, and business profits are at high

levels. Total production of goods and services in our country has

increased 8 percent over last year--about twice the normal rate of

growth.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about our economic progress is the way we

are increasing our basic capacity to produce. For example, we are now in

the second year of a 3-year program which will double our output of

aluminum, increase our electric power supply by 40 percent, and increase

our steelmaking capacity by 15 percent. We can then produce 120 million

tons of steel a year, as much as all the rest of the world put together.

This expansion will mean more jobs and higher standards of living for

all of us in the years ahead. At the present time it means greater

strength for us and for the rest of the free world in the fight for

peace.

Now, I must turn to the debit side of the ledger for the past year.

The outstanding fact to note on the debit side of the ledger is that the

Soviet Union, in 1951, continued to expand its military production and

increase its already excessive military power.

It is true that the Soviets have run into increasing difficulties. Their

hostile policies have awakened stern resistance among free men

throughout the world. And behind the Iron Curtain the Soviet rule of

force has created growing political and economic stresses in the

satellite nations.

Nevertheless, the grim fact remains that the Soviet Union is increasing

its armed might. It is still producing more war planes than the free

nations. It has set off two more atomic explosions. The world still

walks in the shadow of another world war.

And here at home, our defense preparations are far from complete.

During 1951 we did not make adequate progress in building up civil

defense against atomic attack. This is a major weakness in our plans for

peace, since inadequate civilian defense is an open invitation to a

surprise attack. Failure to provide adequate civilian defense has the

same effect as adding to the enemy’s supply of atomic bombs.

In the field of defense production we have run into difficulties and

delays in designing and producing the latest types of airplanes and

tanks. Some machine tools and metals are still in extremely short

supply.

In other free countries the defense buildup has created severe economic

problems. It has increased inflation in Europe and has endangered the

continued recovery of our allies.

In the Middle East political tensions and the oil controversy in Iran

are keeping the region in a turmoil. In the Far East the dark threat of

Communist imperialism still hangs over many nations.

This, very briefly, is the good side and the bad side of the picture.

Taking the good and bad together, we have made real progress this last

year along the road to peace. We have increased the power and unity of

the free world. And while we were doing this, we have avoided world war

on the one hand, and appeasement on the other. This is a hard road to

follow, but the events of the last year show that it is the right road

to peace.

We cannot expect to complete the job overnight. The free nations may

have to maintain for years the larger military forces needed to deter

aggression. We must build steadily, over a period of years, toward

political solidarity and economic progress among the free nations in all

parts of the world.

Our task will not be easy; but if we go at it with a will, we can look

forward to steady progress. On our side are all the great resources of

freedom--the ideals of religion and democracy, the aspiration of people

for a better life, and the industrial and technical power of a free

civilization.

These advantages outweigh anything the slave world can produce. The only

thing that can defeat us is our own state of mind. We can lose if we

falter.

The middle period of a great national effort like this is a very

difficult time. The way seems long and hard. The goal seems far distant.

Some people get discouraged. That is only natural.

But if there are any among us who think we ought to ease up in the fight

for peace, I want to remind them of three things--just three things.

First: The threat of world war is still very real. We had one Pearl

Harbor--let’s not get caught off guard again. If you don’t think the

threat of Communist armies is real, talk to some of our men back from

Korea.

Second: If the United States had to try to stand alone against a

Soviet-dominated world, it would destroy the life we know and the ideals

we hold dear. Our allies are essential to us, just as we are essential

to them. The more shoulders there are to bear the burden the lighter

that burden will be.

Third: The things we believe in most deeply are under relentless attack.

We have the great responsibility of saving the basic moral and spiritual

values of our civilization. We have started out well--with a program for

peace that is unparalleled in history. If we believe in ourselves and

the faith we profess, we will stick to that job until it is victoriously

finished.

This is a time for courage, not for grumbling and mumbling.

Now, let us take a look at the things we have to do.

The thing that is uppermost in the minds of all of us is the situation

in Korea. We must, and we will, keep up the fight there until we get the

kind of armistice that will put an end to the aggression and protect the

safety of our forces and the security of the Republic of Korea. Beyond

that we shall continue to work for a settlement in Korea that upholds

the principles of the United Nations.

We went into Korea because we knew that Communist aggression had to be

met firmly if freedom was to be preserved in the world. We went into the

fight to save the Republic of Korea, a free country, established under

the United Nations. These are our aims. We will not give up until we

attain them.

Meanwhile, we must continue to strengthen the forces of freedom

throughout the world.

I hope the Senate will take early and favorable action on the Japanese

peace treaty, on our security pacts with the Pacific countries, and on

the agreement to bring Greece and Turkey into the North Atlantic Treaty.

We are also negotiating an agreement with the German Federal Republic

under which it can play an honorable and equal part among nations and

take its place in the defense of Western Europe.

But treaties and plans are only the skeleton of our defense structure.

The sinew and muscle of defense are the forces and equipment which must

be provided.

In Europe we must go on helping our friends and allies to build up their

military forces. This means we must send weapons in large volume to our

European allies. I have directed that weapons for Europe be given a very

high priority. Economic aid is necessary, too, to supply the margin of

difference between success and failure in making Europe a strong partner

in our joint defense.

In the long run we want to see Europe freed from any dependence on our

aid. Our European allies want that just as bad as we do. The steps that

are now being taken to build European unity should help bring that

about. Six European countries are pooling their coal and steel

production under the Schuman plan. Work is going forward on the merger

of European national forces on the Continent into a single army. These

great projects should become realities in 1952.

We should do all we can to help and encourage the move toward a strong

and united Europe.

In Asia the new Communist empire is a daily threat to millions of

people. The peoples of Asia want to be free to follow their own way of

life. They want to preserve their culture and their traditions against

communism, just as much as we want to preserve ours. They are laboring

under terrific handicaps--poverty, ill health, feudal systems of land

ownership, and the threat of internal subversion or external attack. We

can and we must increase our help to them.

This means military aid, especially to those places like Indochina which

might be hardest hit by some new Communist attack.

It also means economic aid, both technical know-how and capital

investment.

This last year we made available millions of bushels of wheat to relieve

famine in India. But far more important, in the long run, is the work

Americans are doing in India to help the Indian farmers themselves raise

more grain. With the help of our technicians, Indian farmers, using

simple, inexpensive means, have been able since 1948 to double the crops

in one area in India. One farmer there raised 63 bushels of wheat to the

acre, where 13 bushels had been the average before.

This is point 4--our point 4 program at work. It is working--not only in

India but in Iran, Paraguay, Liberia--in 33 countries around the globe.

Our technical missionaries are out there. We need more of them. We need

more funds to speed their efforts, because there is nothing of greater

importance in all our foreign policy. There is nothing that shows more

clearly what we stand for, and what we want to achieve.

My friends of the Congress, less than one-third of the expenditure for

the cost of World War II would have created the developments necessary

to feed the whole world so we wouldn’t have to stomach communism. That

is what we have got to fight, and unless we fight that battle and win

it, we can’t win the cold war or a hot one either.

We have recently lost a great public servant who was leading this effort

to bring opportunity and hope to the people of half the world. Dr. Henry

Bennett and his associates died in line of duty on a point 4 mission. It

is up to us to carry on the great work for which they gave their lives.

During the coming year we must not forget the suffering of the people

who live behind the Iron Curtain. In those areas minorities are being

oppressed, human rights violated, religions persecuted. We should

continue to expose those wrongs. We should continue and expand the

activities of the Voice of America, which brings our message of hope and

truth to those peoples and other peoples throughout the world.

I have just had an opportunity to discuss many of these world problems

with Prime Minister Churchill. We have had a most satisfactory series of

meetings. We thoroughly reviewed the situation in Europe, the Middle

East, and the Far East. We both look forward to steady progress toward

peace through the cooperative action and teamwork of the free nations.

Turning from our foreign policies, let us consider the jobs we have here

at home as a part of our program for peace.

The first of these jobs is to move ahead full steam on the defense

program.

Our objective is to have a well-equipped active defense force large

enough--in concert with the forces of our allies--to deter aggression

and to inflict punishing losses on the enemy immediately if we should be

attacked. This active force must be backed by adequate reserves, and by

the plants and tools to turn out the tremendous quantities of new

weapons that would be needed if war came. We are not building an active

force adequate to carry on full scale war, but we are putting ourselves

in a position to mobilize very rapidly if we have to.

This year I shall recommend some increases in the size of the active

force we are building, with particular emphasis on air power. This means

we shall have to continue large-scale production of planes and other

equipment for a longer period of time than we had originally planned.

Planes and tanks and other weapons-what the military call “hard

goods”--are now beginning to come off the production lines in volume.

Deliveries of hard goods now amount to about a billion and a half

dollars worth a month. A year from now, we expect that rate to be

doubled.

We shall have to hold to a high rate of military output for about a year

after that. In 1954 we hope to have enough equipment so that we can

reduce the production of most military items substantially. The next 2

years should therefore be the peak period of defense production.

Defense needs will take a lot of steel, aluminum, copper, nickel, and

other scarce materials. This means smaller production of some civilian

goods. The cutbacks will be nothing like those during World War II, when

most civilian production was completely stopped. But there will be

considerably less of some goods than we have been used to these past 2

or 3 years.

The very critical part of our defense job this year is to keep down

inflation.

We can control inflation if we make up our minds to do it.

On the executive side of the Government, we intend to hold the line on

prices just as tightly as the law allows. We will permit only those wage

increases which are clearly justified under sound stabilization

policies; and we will see to it that industries absorb cost increases

out of earnings wherever feasible, before they are authorized to raise

prices. We will do that, at any rate, except where the recent amendments

to the law specifically require us to give further price increases.

Congress has a tremendous responsibility in this matter. Our

stabilization law was shot full of holes at the last session. This year,

it will be one of the main tasks before the Congress to repair the

damage and enact a strong anti-inflation law.

As a part of our program to keep our country strong, we are determined

to preserve the financial strength of the Government. This means high

taxes over the next few years. We must see to it that these taxes are

shared among the people as fairly as possible. I expect to discuss these

matters in the Economic Report and the Budget Message which will soon be

presented to the Congress.

Our tax laws must be fair. And we must make absolutely certain they are

administered fairly, without fear or favor of any kind for anybody. To

this end, steps have already been taken to remedy weaknesses which have

been disclosed in the administration of the tax laws. In addition, I

hope the Congress will approve my reorganization plan for the Bureau of

Internal Revenue. We must do everything necessary in order to make just

as certain as is humanly possible that every taxpayer receives equal

treatment under the law.

To carry the burden of defense we must have a strong, productive, and

expanding economy here at home. We cannot neglect those things that have

made us the great and powerful nation we are today.

Our strength depends upon the health, the morale, the freedom of our

people. We can take on the burden of leadership in the fight for world

peace because, for nearly 20 years, the Government and the people have

been working together for the general welfare. We have given more and

more of out citizens a fair chance at decent, useful, productive lives.

That is the reason we are as strong as we are today.

This Government of ours--the Congress and the executive both--must keep

on working to bring about a fair deal for all the American people. Some

people will say that we haven’t the time or the money this year for

measures for the welfare of the people. But if we want to win the fight

for peace, this is a part of the job we cannot ignore.

We will have to give up some things, we will have to go forward on

others at a slower pace. But, so far as I am concerned, I do not think

we can give up the things that are vital to our national strength.

I believe most people in this country will agree with me on that.

I think most farmers understand that soil conservation and rural

electrification and agricultural research are not frills or luxuries,

but real necessities in order to boost our farm production.

I think most workers understand that decent housing and good working

conditions are not luxuries, but necessities if the working men and

women of this country are to continue to out-produce the rest of the

world.

I think our businessmen know that scientific research and transportation

services and more steel mills and power projects are not luxuries, but

necessities to keep our business and our industry in the forefront of

industrial progress.

I think everybody knows that social insurance and better schools and

health services are not frills, but necessities in helping all Americans

to be useful and productive citizens, who can contribute their full

share in the national effort to protect and advance our way of life.

We cannot do all we want to in times like these--we have to choose the

things that will contribute most to defense--but we must continue to

make progress if we are to be a strong nation in the years ahead.

Let me give you some examples.

We are going right ahead with the urgently needed work to develop our

natural resources, to conserve our soil, and to prevent floods. We are

going to produce essential power and build the lines that are necessary

and that we have to have to transmit it to our farms and factories. We

are going to encourage exploration for new mineral deposits.

We are going to keep on building essential highways and taking any other

steps that will assure the Nation an adequate transportation system--on

land, on the sea, and in the air.

We must move right ahead this year to see that defense workers and

soldiers’ families get decent housing at rents they can afford to pay.

We must begin our long deferred program of Federal aid to education--to

help the States meet the present crisis in the operation of our schools.

And we must help with the construction of schools in areas where they

are critically needed because of the defense effort.

We urgently need to train more doctors and other health personnel,

through aid to medical education. We also urgently need to expand the

basic public health services in our home communities--especially in

defense areas. The Congress should go ahead with these two measures

immediately.

I have set up an impartial commission to make a thorough study of the

Nation’s health needs. One of the things this commission is looking into

is how to bring the cost of modern medical care within the reach of all

the people. I have repeatedly recommended national health insurance as

the best way to do this. So far as I know, it is still the best way. If

there are any better answers, I hope this commission will find them. But

of one thing I am sure: something must be done, and done soon.

This year we ought to make a number of urgently needed improvements in

our social security law. For one thing, benefits under old-age and

survivors insurance should be raised $5 a month above the present

average of $42. For another thing, the States should be given special

aid to help them increase public assistance payments. By doing these

things now, we can ease the pressure of living costs for people who

depend on those fixed payments.

We should also make some cost-of-living adjustments for those receiving

veterans’ compensation for death or disability incurred in the service

of our country. In addition, now is the time to start a sensible program

of readjustment benefits for our veterans who have seen service since

the fighting broke out in Korea.

Another thing the Congress should do at this session is to strengthen

our system of farm price supports to meet the defense emergency. The

“sliding scale” in the price support law should not be allowed to

penalize farmers for increasing production to meet defense needs. We

should also find a new and less costly method for supporting perishable

commodities than the law now provides.

We need to act promptly to improve our labor law. The Taft-Hartley Act

has many serious and far-reaching defects. Experience has demonstrated

this so clearly that even the sponsors of the act now admit that it

needs to be changed. A fair law, fair to both management and labor, is

indispensable to sound labor relations and to full, uninterrupted

production. I intend to keep on working for a fair law until we get one.

As we build our strength to defend the freedom in the world, we

ourselves must extend the benefits of freedom more widely among all our

own people. We need to take action toward the wider enjoyment of civil

rights. Freedom is the birthright of every American.

The executive branch has been making real progress toward full equality

of treatment and opportunity--in the Armed Forces, in the civil service,

and in private firms working for the Government. Further advances

require action by Congress, and I hope that means will be provided to

give the Members of the Senate and the House a chance to vote on them.

I am glad to hear that home rule for the District of Columbia will be

the first item of business before the Senate. I hope that it, as well as

statehood for Hawaii and Alaska, will be adopted promptly.

All these measures I have been talking about--measures to advance the

well-being of our people--demonstrate to the world the forward movement

of our free society.

This demonstration of the way free men govern themselves has a more

powerful influence on the people of the world--on both sides of the Iron

Curtain--than all the trick slogans and pie-in-the-sky promises of the

Communists.

But our shortcomings, as well as our progress, are watched from abroad.

And there is one shortcoming I want to speak about plainly.

Our kind of government above all others cannot tolerate dishonesty among

public servants.

Some dishonest people worm themselves into almost every human

organization. It is all the more shocking, however, when they make their

way into a Government such as ours, which is based on the principle of

justice for all. Such unworthy public servants must be weeded out. I

intend to see to it that Federal employees who have been guilty of

misconduct are punished for it. I also intend to see to it that the

honest and hard-working great majority of our Federal employees are

protected against partisan slander and malicious attack.

I have already made some recommendations to the Congress to help

accomplish these purposes. I intend to submit further recommendations to

this end. I will welcome the wholehearted cooperation of the Congress in

this effort.

I also think that the Congress can do a great deal to strengthen

confidence in our institutions by applying rigorous standards of moral

integrity to its own operations, and by finding an effective way to

control campaign expenditures, and by protecting the rights of

individuals in congressional investigations.

To meet the crisis which now hangs over the world, we need many

different kinds of strength--military, economic, political, and moral.

And of all these, I am convinced that moral strength is the most vital.

When you come right down to it, it is the courage and the character of

our Nation--and of each one of us as individuals-that will really decide

how well we meet this challenge.

We are engaged in a great undertaking at home and abroad--the greatest,

in fact, that any nation has ever been privileged to embark upon. We are

working night and day to bring peace to the world and to spread the

democratic ideals of justice and self-government to all people. Our

accomplishments are already remarkable. We ought to be full of pride in

what we are doing, and full of confidence and hope in the outcome. No

nation ever had greater resources, or greater energy, or nobler

traditions to inspire it.

And yet, day in and day out, we see a long procession of timid and

fearful men who wring their hands and cry out that we have lost the way,

that we don’t know what we are doing, that we are bound to fail. Some

say we should give up the struggle for peace, and others say we should

have a war and get it over with. That’s a terrible statement. I had

heard it made, but they want us to forget the great objective of

preventing another world war--the objective for which our soldiers have

been fighting in the hills of Korea.

If we are to be worthy of all that has been done for us by our soldiers

in the field, we must be true to the ideals for which they are fighting.

We must reject the counsels of defeat and despair. We must have the

determination to complete the great work for which our men have laid

down their lives.

In all we do, we should remember who we are and what we stand for. We

are Americans. Our forefathers had far greater obstacles than we have,

and much poorer chances of success. They did not lose heart, or turn

aside from their goals. In the darkest of all winters in American

history, at Valley Forge, George Washington said: “We must not, in so

great a contest, expect to meet with nothing but sunshine.” With that

spirit they won their fight for freedom.

We must have that same faith and vision. In the great contest in which

we are engaged today, we cannot expect to have fair weather all the way.

But it is a contest just as important for this country and for all men,

as the desperate struggle that George Washington fought through to

victory.

Let us prove, again, that we are not merely sunshine patriots and summer

soldiers. Let us go forward, trusting in the God of Peace, to win the

goals we seek.

***

State of the Union Address

Harry S. Truman

January 7, 1953

To the Congress of the United States:

I have the honor to report to the Congress on the state of the Union.

This is the eighth such report that, as President, I have been

privileged to present to you and to the country. On previous occasions,

it has been my custom to set forth proposals for legislative action in

the coming year. But that is not my purpose today. The presentation of a

legislative program falls properly to my successor, not to me, and I

would not infringe upon his responsibility to chart the forward course.

Instead, I wish to speak of the course we have been following the past

eight years and the position at which we have arrived.

In just two weeks, General Eisenhower will be inaugurated as President

of the United States and I will resume--most gladly--my place as a

private citizen of this Republic. The Presidency last changed hands

eight years ago this coming April. That was a tragic time: a time of

grieving for President Roosevelt--the great and gallant human being who

had been taken from us; a time of unrelieved anxiety to his successor,

thrust so suddenly into the complexities and burdens of the Presidential

office.

Not so this time. This time we see the normal transition under our

democratic system. One President, at the conclusion of his term, steps

back to private life; his successor, chosen by the people, begins his

tenure of the office. And the Presidency of the United States continues

to function without a moment’s break.

Since the election, I have done my best to assure that the transfer from

one Administration to another shall be smooth and orderly. From General

Eisenhower and his associates, I have had friendly and understanding

collaboration in this endeavor. I have not sought to thrust upon

him--nor has he sought to take--the responsibility which must be mine

until twelve o’clock noon on January twentieth. But together, I hope and

believe we have found means whereby the incoming President can obtain

the full and detailed information he will need to assume the

responsibility the moment he takes the oath of office.

The President-elect is about to take up the greatest burdens, the most

compelling responsibilities, given to any man. And I, with you and all

Americans, wish for him all possible success in undertaking the tasks

that will so soon be his.

What are these tasks? The President is Chief of State, elected

representative of all the people, national spokesman for them and to

them. He is Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces. He is charged with

the conduct of our foreign relations. He is Chief Executive of the

Nation’s largest civilian organization. He must select and nominate all

top officials of the Executive Branch and all Federal judges. And on the

legislative side, he has the obligation and the opportunity to

recommend, and to approve or veto legislation. Besides all this, it is

to him that a great political party turns naturally for leadership, and

that, too, he must provide as President.

This bundle of burdens is unique; there is nothing else like it on the

face of the earth. Each task could be a full-time job. Together, they

would be a tremendous undertaking in the easiest of times.

But our times are not easy; they are hard-as hard and complex, perhaps

as any in our history. Now, the President not only has to carry on these

tasks in such a way that our democracy may grow and flourish and our

people prosper, but he also has to lead the whole free world in

overcoming the communist menace--and all this under the shadow of the

atomic bomb.

This is a huge challenge to the human being who occupies the

Presidential office. But it is not a challenge to him alone, for in

reality he cannot meet it alone. The challenge runs not just to him but

to his whole Administration, to the Congress, to the country.

Ultimately, no President can master his responsibilities, save as his

fellow citizens-indeed, the whole people--comprehend the challenge of

our times and move, with him, to meet it.

It has been my privilege to hold the Presidential office for nearly

eight years now, and much has been done in which I take great pride. But

this is not personal pride. It is pride in the people, in the Nation. It

is pride in our political system and our form of government--balky

sometimes, mechanically deficient perhaps, in many ways--but enormously

alive and vigorous; able through these years to keep the Republic on the

right course, rising to the great occasions, accomplishing the

essentials, meeting the basic challenge of our times.

There have been misunderstandings and controversies these past eight

years, but through it all the President of the United States has had

that measure of support and understanding without which no man could

sustain the burdens of the Presidential office, or hope to discharge its

responsibilities.

For this I am profoundly grateful--grateful to my associates in the

Executive Branch--most of them non-partisan civil servants;

grateful--despite our disagreements-to the Members of the Congress on

both sides of the aisle; grateful especially to the American people, the

citizens of this Republic, governors of us all.

We are still so close to recent controversies that some of us may find

it hard to understand the accomplishments of these past eight years. But

the accomplishments are real and very great, not as the President’s, not

as the Congress’, but as the achievements of our country and all the

people in it.

Let me remind you of some of the things we have done since I first

assumed my duties as President of the United States.

I took the oath of office on April 12, 1945. In May of that same year,

the Nazis surrendered. Then, in July, that great white flash of light,

man-made at Alamogordo, heralded swift and final victory in World War

II--and opened the doorway to the atomic age.

Consider some of the great questions that were posed for us by sudden,

total victory in World War II. Consider also, how well we as a Nation

have responded.

Would the American economy collapse, after the war? That was one

question. Would there be another depression here--a repetition of 1921

or 1929? The free world feared and dreaded it. The communists hoped for

it and built their policies upon that hope.

We answered that question--answered it with a resounding “no.”

Our economy has grown tremendously. Free enterprise has flourished as

never fore. Sixty-two million people are now gainfully employed,

compared with 51 million seven years ago. Private businessmen and

farmers have invested more than 200 billion dollars in new plant and

equipment since the end of World War II. Prices have risen further than

they should have done--but incomes, by and large, have risen even more,

so that real living standards are now considerably higher than seven

years ago. Aided by sound government policies, our expanding economy has

shown the strength and flexibility for swift and almost painless

reconversion from war to peace, in 1945 and 1946; for quick reaction and

recovery--well before Korea--from the beginnings of recession in 1949.

Above all, this live and vital economy of ours has now shown the

remarkable capacity to sustain a great mobilization program for defense,

a vast outpouring of aid to friends and allies all around the world--and

still to produce more goods and services for peaceful use at home than

we have ever known before.

This has been our answer, up to now, to those who feared or hoped for a

depression in this country.

How have we handled our national finances? That was another question

arising at war’s end. In the administration of the Government, no

problem takes more of the President’s time, year in and year out, than

fashioning the Budget, and the related problem of managing the public

debt.

Financing World War II left us with a tremendous public debt, which

reached 279 billion dollars at its peak in February, 1946.

Beginning in July, 1946, when war and reconversion financing had ended,

we have held quite closely to the sound standard that in times of high

employment and high national income, the Federal Budget should be

balanced and the debt reduced.

For the four fiscal years from July 1, 1946, to June 30, 1950, we had a

net surplus of 4.3 billion dollars. Using this surplus, and the

Treasury’s excess cash reserves, the debt was reduced substantially,

reaching a low point of 251 billion dollars in June, 1949, and ending up

at 257 billion dollars on June 30, 1950.

In July of 1950, we began our rapid rearmament, and for two years held

very close to a pay-as-we-go policy. But in the current fiscal year and

the next, rising expenditures for defense will substantially outrun

receipts. This will pose an immediate and serious problem for the new

Congress.

Now let me turn to another question we faced at the war’s end. Would we

take up again, and carry forward, the great projects of social

welfare--so badly needed, so long overdue--that the New Deal had

introduced into our national life? Would our Government continue to have

a heart for the people, or was the progress of the New Deal to be halted

in the aftermath of war as decisively as the progress of Woodrow

Wilson’s New Freedom had been halted after the first world war?

This question, too, we have answered. We have answered it by doubling

old age insurance benefits and extending coverage to ten million more

people. We have answered it by increasing our minimum wage. We have

answered by the three million privately constructed homes that the

Federal Government has helped finance since the war--and the 155

thousand units of low rent public housing placed under construction

since 1949.

We have answered with the 42 thousand new hospital beds provided since

1946 through the joint efforts of the Federal Government and local

communities.

We have answered by helping eight million veterans of World War II to

obtain advanced education, 196 thousand to start in business, and 64

thousand to buy farms.

We have answered by continuing to help farmers obtain electric power,

until today nearly 90 per cent of our farms have power line electric

service.

In these and other ways, we have demonstrated, up to now, that our

democracy has not forgotten how to use the powers of the Government to

promote the people’s welfare and security.

Another of the big post-war questions was this: What we would do with

the Nation’s natural resources--its soils and water, forests and

grasslands. Would we continue the strong conservation movement of the

1930’s, or would we, as we did after the First World War, slip back into

the practices of monopoly, exploitation, and waste?

The answer is plain. All across our country, the soil conservation

movement has spread, aided by Government programs, enriching private and

public lands, preserving them from destruction, improving them for

future use. In our river basins, we have invested nearly 5 billion

dollars of public funds in the last eight years--invested them in

projects to control floods, irrigate farmlands, produce low-cost power

and get it to the housewives and farmers and businessmen who need it. We

have been vigilant in protecting the people’s property--lands and

forests and oil and minerals.

We have had to fight hard against those who would use our resources for

private greed; we have met setbacks; we have had to delay work because

of defense priorities, but on the whole we can be proud of our record in

protecting our natural heritage, and in using our resources for the

public good.

Here is another question we had to face at the war’s close: Would we

continue, in peace as well as war, to promote equality of opportunity

for all our citizens, seeking ways and means to guarantee for all of

them the full enjoyment of their civil rights?

During the war we achieved great economic and social gains for millions

of our fellow citizens who had been held back by prejudice. Were we

prepared, in peacetime, to keep on moving toward full realization of the

democratic promise? Or would we let it be submerged, wiped out, in

post-war riots and reaction, as after World War I?

We answered these questions in a series of forward steps at every level

of government and in many spheres of private life. In our armed forces,

our civil service, our universities, our railway trains, the residential

districts of our cities--in stores and factories all across the

Nation--in the polling booths as well--the barriers are coming down.

This is happening, in part, at the mandate of the courts; in part, at

the insistence of Federal, State and local governments; in part, through

the enlightened action of private groups and persons in every region and

every walk of life.

There has been a great awakening of the American conscience on the

issues of civil rights. And all this progress--still far from complete

but still continuing--has been our answer, up to now, to those who

questioned our intention to live up to the promises of equal freedom for

us all.

There was another question posed for us at the war’s end, which equally

concerned the future course of our democracy: Could the machinery of

government and politics in this Republic be changed, improved, adapted

rapidly enough to carry through, responsibly and well, the vast, new

complicated undertakings called for in our time?

We have answered this question, too, answered it by tackling the most

urgent, most specific, problems which the war experience itself had

brought into sharp focus. The reorganization of the Congress in 1946;

the unification of our armed services, beginning in 1947; the closer

integration of foreign and military policy through the National Security

Council created that same year; and the Executive reorganizations,

before and after the Hoover-Acheson Commission Report in 1949--these are

landmarks in our continuing endeavor to make government an effective

instrument of service to the people.

I come now to the most vital question of all, the greatest of our

concerns: Could there be built in the world a durable structure of

security, a lasting peace for all the nations, or would we drift, as

after World War I, toward another terrible disaster--a disaster which

this time might be the holocaust of atomic war?

That is still the overriding question of our time. We cannot know the

answer yet; perhaps we will not know it finally for a long time to come.

But day and night, these past eight years, we have been building for

peace, searching out the way that leads most surely to security and

freedom and justice in the world for us and all mankind.

This, above all else, has been the task of our Republic since the end of

World War II, and our accomplishment so far should give real pride to

all Americans. At the very least, a total war has been averted, each day

up to this hour. And at the most, we may already have succeeded in

establishing conditions which can keep that kind of war from happening,

for as far ahead as man can see.

The Second World War radically changed the power relationships of the

world. Nations once great were left shattered and weak, channels of

communication, routes of trade, political and economic ties of many

kinds were ripped apart.

And in this changed, disrupted, chaotic situation, the United States and

the Soviet Union emerged as the two strongest powers of the world. Each

had tremendous human and natural resources, actual or potential, on a

scale unmatched by any other nation.

Nothing could make plainer why the world is in its present state--and

how that came to pass--than an understanding of the diametrically

opposite principles and policies of these two great powers in a

war-ruined world.

For our part, we in this Republic were-and are--free men, heirs of the

American Revolution, dedicated to the truths of our Declaration of

Independence:

“... That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their

Creator with certain unalienable rights... That to secure these rights,

governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from

the consent of the governed.”

Our post-war objective has been in keeping with this great idea. The

United States has sought to use its pre-eminent position of power to

help other nations recover from the damage and dislocation of the war.

We held out a helping hand to enable them to restore their national

lives and to regain their positions as independent, self-supporting

members of the great family of nations. This help was given without any

attempt on our part to dominate or control any nation. We did not want

satellites but partners.

The Soviet Union, however, took exactly the opposite course.

Its rulers saw in the weakened condition of the world not an obligation

to assist in the great work of reconstruction, but an opportunity to

exploit misery and suffering for the extension of their power. Instead

of help, they brought subjugation. They extinguished, blotted out, the

national independence of the countries that the military operations of

World War II had left within their grasp.

The difference stares at us from the map of Europe today. To the west of

the line that tragically divides Europe we see nations continuing to act

and live in the light of their own traditions and principles. On the

other side, we see the dead uniformity of a tyrannical system imposed by

the rulers of the Soviet Union. Nothing could point up more clearly what

the global struggle between the free world and the communists is all

about.

It is a struggle as old as recorded history; it is freedom versus

tyranny.

For the dominant idea of the Soviet regime is the terrible conception

that men do not have rights but live at the mercy of the state.

Inevitably this idea of theirs--and all the consequences flowing from

it--collided with the efforts of free nations to build a just and

peaceful world. The “cold war” between the communists and the free world

is nothing more or less than the Soviet attempt to checkmate and defeat

our peaceful purposes, in furtherance of their own dread objective.

We did not seek this struggle, God forbid. We did our utmost to avoid

it. In World War II, we and the Russians had fought side by side, each

in our turn attacked and forced to combat by the aggressors. After the

war, we hoped that our wartime collaboration could be maintained, that

the frightful experience of Nazi invasion, of devastation in the heart

of Russia, had turned the Soviet rulers away from their old proclaimed

allegiance to world revolution and communist dominion. But instead, they

violated, one by one, the solemn agreements they had made with us in

wartime. They sought to use the rights and privileges they had obtained

in the United Nations, to frustrate its purposes and cut down its powers

as an effective agent of world progress and the keeper of the world’s

peace.

Despite this outcome, the efforts we made toward peaceful collaboration

are a source of our present strength. They demonstrated that we believed

what we proclaimed, that we actually sought honest agreements as the way

to peace. Our whole moral position, our leadership in the free world

today, is fortified by that fact.

The world is divided, not through our fault or failure, but by Soviet

design. They, not we, began the cold war. And because the free world saw

this happen because men know we made the effort and the Soviet rulers

spurned it--the free nations have accepted leadership from our Republic,

in meeting and mastering the Soviet offensive.

It seems to me especially important that all of us be clear, in our own

thinking, about the nature of the threat we have faced-and will face for

a long time to come. The measures we have devised to meet it take shape

and pattern only as we understand what we were--and are--up against.

The Soviet Union occupies a territory of 8 million square miles. Beyond

its borders, East and West, are the nearly five million square miles of

the satellite states--virtually incorporated into the Soviet Union--and

of China, now its close partner. This vast land mass contains an

enormous store of natural resources sufficient to support an economic

development comparable to our own.

That is the Stalinist world. It is a world of great natural diversity in

geography and climate, in distribution of resources, in population,

language, and living standards, in economic and cultural development. It

is a world whose people are not all convinced communists by any means.

It is a world where history and national traditions, particularly in its

borderlands, tend more toward separation than unification, and run

counter to the enforced combination that has been made of these areas

today.

But it is also a world of great man-made uniformities, a world that

bleeds its population white to build huge military forces; a world in

which the police are everywhere and their authority unlimited; a world

where terror and slavery are deliberately administered both as

instruments of government and as means of production; a world where all

effective social power is the state’s monopoly--yet the state itself is

the creature of the communist tyrants.

The Soviet Union, with its satellites, and China are held in the tight

grip of communist party chieftains. The party dominates all social and

political institutions. The party regulates and centrally directs the

whole economy. In Moscow’s sphere, and in Peiping’s, all history,

philosophy, morality and law are centrally established by rigid dogmas,

incessantly drummed into the whole population and subject to

interpretation--or to change by none except the party’s own inner

circle.

And lest their people learn too much of other ways of life, the

communists have walled off their world, deliberately and uniformly, from

the rest of human society.

That is the communist base of operation in-their cold war. In addition,

they have at their command hundreds and thousands of dedicated foreign

communists, people in nearly every free country who will serve Moscow’s

ends. Thus the masters of the Kremlin are provided with deluded

followers all through the free world whom they can manipulate, cynically

and quite ruthlessly, to serve the purposes of the Soviet state.

Given their vast internal base of operations, and their agents in

foreign lands, what are the communist rulers trying to do?

Inside their homeland, the communists are trying to maintain and

modernize huge military forces. And simultaneously, they are endeavoring

to weld their whole vast area and population into a completely

self-contained, advanced industrial society. They aim, some day, to

equal or better the production levels of Western Europe and North

America combined--thus shifting the balance of world economic power, and

war potential, to their side.

They have a long way to go and they know it. But they are prepared to

levy upon living generations any sacrifice that helps strengthen their

armed power, or speed industrial development.

Externally, the communist rulers are trying to expand the boundaries of

their world, whenever and wherever they can. This expansion they have

pursued steadfastly since the close of World War II, using any means

available to them.

Where the Soviet army was present, as in the countries of Eastern

Europe, they have gradually squeezed free institutions to death.

Where post-war chaos existed in industrialized nations, as in Western

Europe, the local Stalinists tried to gain power through political

processes, politically-inspired strikes, and every available means for

subverting free institutions to their evil ends.

Where conditions permitted, the Soviet rulers have stimulated and aided

armed insurrection by communist-led revolutionary forces, as in Greece,

Indo-China, the Philippines, and China, or outright aggression by one of

their satellites, as in Korea.

Where the forces of nationalism, independence, and economic change were

at work throughout the great sweep of Asia and Africa, the communists

tried to identify themselves with the cause of progress, tried to

picture themselves as the friends of freedom and advancement--surely one

of the most cynical efforts of which history offers record.

Thus, everywhere in the free world, the communists seek to fish in

troubled waters, to seize more countries, to enslave more millions of

human souls. They were, and are, ready to ally themselves with any

group, from the extreme left to the extreme right, that offers them an

opportunity to advance their ends.

Geography gives them a central position. They are both a European and an

Asian power, with borders touching many of the most sensitive and vital

areas in the free world around them. So situated, they can use their

armies and their economic power to set up simultaneously a whole series

of threats--or inducements--to such widely dispersed places as Western

Germany, Iran, and Japan. These pressures and attractions can be

sustained at will, or quickly shifted from place to place.

Thus the communist rulers are moving, with implacable will, to create

greater strength in their vast empire, and to create weakness and

division in the free world, preparing for the time their false creed

teaches them must come: the time when the whole world outside their sway

will be so torn by strife and contradictions that it will be ripe for

the communist plucking.

This is the heart of the distorted Marxist interpretation of history.

This is the glass through which Moscow and Peiping look out upon the

world, the glass through which they see the rest of us. They seem really

to believe that history is on their side. And they are trying to boost

“history” along, at every opportunity, in every way they can.

I have set forth here the nature of the communist menace confronting our

Republic and the whole free world. This is the measure of the challenge

we have faced since World War II--a challenge partly military and partly

economic, partly moral and partly intellectual, confronting us at every

level of human endeavor and all around the world.

It has been and must be the free world’s purpose not only to organize

defenses against aggression and subversion, not only to build a

structure of resistance and salvation for the community of nations

outside the iron curtain, but in addition to give expression and

opportunity to the forces of growth and progress in the free world, to

so organize and unify the cooperative community of free men that we will

not crumble but grow stronger over the years, and the Soviet empire, not

the free world, will eventually have to change its ways or fall.

Our whole program of action to carry out this purpose has been directed

to meet two requirements.

The first of these had to do with security. Like the pioneers who

settled this great continent of ours, we have had to carry a musket

while we went about our peaceful business. We realized that if we and

our allies did not have military strength to meet the growing Soviet

military threat, we would never have the opportunity to carry forward

our efforts to build a peaceful world of law and order--the only

environment in which our free institutions could survive and flourish.

Did this mean we had to drop everything else and concentrate on armies

and weapons? Of course it did not: side-by-side with this urgent

military requirement, we had to continue to help create conditions of

economic and social progress in the world. This work had to be carried

forward alongside the first, not only in order to meet the non-military

aspects of the communist drive for power, but also because this creative

effort toward human progress is essential to bring about the kind of

world we as free men want to live in.

These two requirements--military security and human progress--are more

closely related in action than we sometimes recognize. Military security

depends upon a strong economic underpinning and a stable and hopeful

political order; conversely, the confidence that makes for economic and

political progress does not thrive in areas that are vulnerable to

military conquest.

These requirements are related in another way. Both of them depend upon

unity of action among the free nations of the world. This, indeed, has

been the foundation of our whole effort, for the drawing together of the

free people of the world has become a condition essential not only to

their progress, but to their survival as free people.

This is the conviction that underlies all the steps we have been taking

to strengthen and unify the free nations during the past seven years.

What have these steps been? First of all, how have we gone about meeting

the requirement of providing for our security against this world-wide

challenge?

Our starting point, as I have said on many occasions, has been and

remains the United Nations.

We were prepared, and so were the other nations of the free world, to

place our reliance on the machinery of the United Nations to safeguard

peace. But before the United Nations could give full expression to the

concept of international security embodied in the Charter, it was

essential that the five permanent members of the Security Council honor

their solemn pledge to cooperate to that end. This the Soviet Union has

not done.

I do not need to outline here the dreary record of Soviet obstruction

and veto and the unceasing efforts of the Soviet representatives to

sabotage the United Nations. It is important, however, to distinguish

clearly between the principle of collective security embodied in the

Charter and the mechanisms of the United Nations to give that principle

effect. We must frankly recognize that the Soviet Union has been able,

in certain instances, to stall the machinery of collective security. Yet

it has not been able to impair the principle of collective security. The

free nations of the world have retained their allegiance to that idea.

They have found the means to act despite the Soviet veto, both through

the United Nations itself and through the application of this principle

in regional and other security arrangements that are fully in harmony

with the Charter and give expression to its purposes.

The free world refused to resign itself to collective suicide merely

because of the technicality of a Soviet veto.

The principle of collective measures to forestall aggression has found

expression in the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, the North Atlantic Treaty,

now extended to include Greece and Turkey, and the several treaties we

have concluded to reinforce security in the Pacific area.

But the free nations have not this time fallen prey to the dangerous

illusion that treaties alone will stop an aggressor. By a series of

vigorous actions, as varied as the nature of the threat, the free

nations have successfully thwarted aggression or the threat of

aggression in many different parts of the world.

Our country has led or supported these collective measures. The aid we

have given to people determined to act in defense of their freedom has

often spelled the difference between success and failure.

We all know what we have done, and I shall not review in detail the

steps we have taken. Each major step was a milepost in the developing

unity, strength and resolute will of the free nations.

The first was the determined and successful effort made through the

United Nations to safeguard the integrity and independence of Iran in

1945 and 1946.

Next was our aid and support to embattled Greece, which enabled her to

defeat the forces threatening her national independence.

In Turkey, cooperative action resulted in building up a bulwark of

military strength for an area vital to the defenses of the entire free

world.

In 1949, we began furnishing military aid to our partners in the North

Atlantic Community and to a number of other free countries.

The Soviet Union’s threats against Germany and Japan, its neighbors to

the West and to the East, have been successfully withstood. Free Germany

is on its way to becoming a member of the peaceful community of nations,

and a partner in the common defense. The Soviet effort to capture Berlin

by blockade was thwarted by the courageous Allied airlift. An

independent and democratic Japan has been brought back into the

community of free nations.

In the Far East, the tactics of communist imperialism have reached

heights of violence unmatched elsewhere--and the problem of concerted

action by the free nations has been at once more acute and more

difficult.

Here, in spite of outside aid and support, the free government of China

succumbed to the communist assault. Our aid has enabled the free Chinese

to rebuild and strengthen their forces on the island of Formosa. In

other areas of the Far East-in Indo-China, Malaya, and the

Philippines--our assistance has helped sustain a staunch resistance

against communist insurrectionary attacks.

The supreme test, up to this point, of the will and determination of the

free nations came in Korea, when communist forces invaded the Republic

of Korea, a state that was in a special sense under the protection of

the United Nations. The response was immediate and resolute. Under our

military leadership, the free nations for the first time took up arms,

collectively, to repel aggression.

Aggression was repelled, driven back, punished. Since that time,

communist strategy has seen fit to prolong the conflict, in spite of

honest efforts by the United Nations to reach an honorable truce. The

months of deadlock have demonstrated that the communists cannot achieve

by persistence, or by diplomatic trickery, what they failed to achieve

by sneak attack. Korea has demonstrated that the free world has the will

and the endurance to match the communist effort to overthrow

international order through local aggression.

It has been a bitter struggle and it has cost us much in brave lives and

human suffering, but it has made it plain that the free nations will

fight side by side, that they will not succumb to aggression or

intimidation, one by one. This, in the final analysis, is the only way

to halt the communist drive to world power.

At the heart of the free world’s defense is the military strength of the

United States.

From 1945 to 1949, the United States was sole possessor of the atomic

bomb. That was a great deterrent and protection in itself.

But when the Soviets produced an atomic explosion--as they were bound to

do in time--we had to broaden the whole basis of our strength. We had to

endeavor to keep our lead in atomic weapons. We had to strengthen our

armed forces generally and to enlarge our productive capacity-our

mobilization base. Historically, it was the Soviet atomic explosion in

the fall of 1949, nine months before the aggression in Korea, which

stimulated the planning for our program of defense mobilization.

What we needed was not just a central force that could strike back

against aggression. We also needed strength along the outer edges of the

free world, defenses for our allies as well as for ourselves, strength

to hold the line against attack as well as to retaliate.

We have made great progress on this task of building strong defenses. In

the last two and one half years, we have more than doubled our own

defenses, and we have helped to increase the protection of nearly all

the other free nations.

All the measures of collective security, resistance to aggression, and

the building of defenses, constitute the first requirement for the

survival and progress of the free world. But, as I have pointed out,

they are interwoven with the necessity of taking steps to create and

maintain economic and social progress in the free nations. There can be

no military strength except where there is economic capacity to back it.

There can be no freedom where there is economic chaos or social

collapse. For these reasons, our national policy has included a wide

range of economic measures.

In Europe, the grand design of the Marshall Plan permitted the people of

Britain and France and Italy and a half dozen other countries, with help

from the United States, to lift themselves from stagnation and find

again the path of rising production, rising incomes, rising standards of

living. The situation was changed almost overnight by the Marshall Plan;

the people of Europe have a renewed hope and vitality, and they are able

to carry a share of the military defense of the free world that would

have been impossible a few years ago.

Now the countries of Europe are moving rapidly towards political and

economic unity, changing the map of Europe in more hopeful ways than it

has been changed for 500 years. Customs unions, European economic

institutions like the Schuman Plan, the movement toward European

political integration, the European Defense Community-all are signs of

practical and effective growth toward greater common strength and unity.

The countries of Western Europe, including the free Republic of Germany

are working together, and the whole free world is the gainer.

It sometimes happens, in the course of history, that steps taken to meet

an immediate necessity serve an ultimate purpose greater than may be

apparent at the time. This, I believe, is the meaning of what has been

going on in Europe under the threat of aggression. The free nations

there, with our help, have been drawing together in defense of their

free institutions. In so doing, they have laid the foundations of a

unity that will endure as a major creative force beyond the exigencies

of this period of history. We may, at this close range, be but dimly

aware of the creative surge this movement represents, but I believe it

to be of historic importance. I believe its benefits will survive long

after communist tyranny is nothing but an unhappy memory.

In Asia and Africa, the economic and social problems are different but

no less urgent. There hundreds of millions of people are in ferment,

exploding into the twentieth century, thrusting toward equality and

independence and improvement in the hard conditions of their lives.

Politically, economically, socially, things cannot and will not stay in

their pre-war mold in Africa and Asia. Change must come--is

coming--fast. Just in the years I have been President, 12 free nations,

with more than 600 million people, have become independent: Burma,

Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, Israel, Libya, India, Pakistan and

Ceylon, and the three Associated States of Indo-China, now members of

the French Union. These names alone are testimony to the sweep of the

great force which is changing the face of half the world.

Working out new relationships among the peoples of the free world would

not be easy in the best of times. Even if there were no Communist drive

for expansion, there would be hard and complex problems of transition

from old social forms, old political arrangements, old economic

institutions to the new ones our century demands--problems of guiding

change into constructive channels, of helping new nations grow strong

and stable. But now, with the Soviet rulers striving to exploit this

ferment for their own purposes, the task has become harder and more

urgent--terribly urgent.

In this situation, we see the meaning and the importance of the Point IV

program, through which we can share our store of know-how and of capital

to help these people develop their economies and reshape their

societies. As we help Iranians to raise more grain, Indians to reduce

the incidence of malaria, Liberians to educate their children better, we

are at once helping to answer the desires of the people for advancement,

and demonstrating the superiority of freedom over communism. There will

be no quick solution for any of the difficulties of the new nations of

Asia and Africa--but there may be no solution at all if we do not press

forward with full energy to help these countries grow and flourish in

freedom and in cooperation with the rest of the free world.

Our measures of economic policy have already had a tremendous effect on

the course of events. Eight years ago, the Kremlin thought post-war

collapse in Western Europe and Japan--with economic dislocation in

America--might give them the signal to advance. We demonstrated they

were wrong. Now they wait with hope that the economic recovery of the

free world has set the stage for violent and disastrous rivalry among

the economically developed nations, struggling for each other’s markets

and a greater share of trade. Here is another test that we shall have to

meet and master in the years immediately ahead. And it will take great

ingenuity and effort--and much time--before we prove the Kremlin wrong

again. But we can do it. It is true that economic recovery presents its

problems, as does economic decline, but they are problems of another

order. They are the problems of distributing abundance fairly, and they

can be solved by the process of international cooperation that has

already brought us so far.

These are the measures we must continue. This is the path we must

follow. We must go on, working with our free associates, building an

international structure for military defense, and for economic, social,

and political progress. We must be prepared for war, because war may be

thrust upon us. But the stakes in our search for peace are immensely

higher than they have ever been before.

For now we have entered the atomic age, and war has undergone a

technological change which makes it a very different thing from what it

used to be. War today between the Soviet empire and the free nations

might dig the grave not only of our Stalinist opponents, but of our own

society, our world as well as theirs.

This transformation has been brought to pass in the seven years from

Alamogordo to Eniwetok. It is only seven years, but the new force of

atomic energy has turned the world into a very different kind of place.

Science and technology have worked so fast that war’s new meaning may

not yet be grasped by all the .peoples who would be its victims; nor,

perhaps, by the rulers in the Kremlin. But I have been President of the

United States, these seven years, responsible for the decisions which

have brought our science and our engineering to their present place. I

know what this development means now. I know something of what it will

come to mean in the future.

We in this Government realized, even before the first successful atomic

explosion, that this new force spelled terrible danger for all mankind

unless it were brought under international control. We promptly advanced

proposals in the United Nations to take this new source of energy out of

the arena of national rivalries, to make it impossible to use it as a

weapon of war. These proposals, so pregnant with benefit for all

humanity, were rebuffed by the rulers of the Soviet Union.

The language of science is universal, the movement of science is always

forward into the unknown. We could not assume that the Soviet Union

would not develop the same weapon, regardless of all our precautions,

nor that there were not other and even more terrible means of

destruction lying in the unexplored field of atomic energy.

We had no alternative, then, but to press on, to probe the secrets of

atomic power to the uttermost of our capacity, to maintain, if we could,

our initial superiority in the atomic field. At the same time, we sought

persistently for some avenue, some formula, for reaching an agreement

with the Soviet rulers that would place this new form of power under

effective restraints--that would guarantee no nation would use it in

war. I do not have to recount here the proposals we made, the steps

taken in the United Nations, striving at least to open a way to ultimate

agreement. I hope and believe that we will continue to make these

efforts so long as there is the slightest possibility of progress. All

civilized nations are agreed on the urgency of the problem, and have

shown their willingness to agree on effective measures of control--all

save the Soviet Union and its satellites. But they have rejected every

reasonable proposal.

Meanwhile, the progress of scientific experiment has outrun our

expectations. Atomic science is in the full tide of development; the

unfolding of the innermost secrets of matter is uninterrupted and

irresistible. Since Alamogordo we have developed atomic weapons with

many times the explosive force of the early models, and we have produced

them in substantial quantities. And recently, in the thermonuclear tests

at Eniwetok, we have entered another stage in the world-shaking

development of atomic energy. From now on, man moves into a new era of

destructive power, capable of creating explosions of a new order of

magnitude, dwarfing the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We have no reason to think that the stage we have now reached in the

release of atomic energy will be the last. Indeed, the speed of our

scientific and technical progress over the last seven years shows no

signs of abating. We are being hurried forward, in our mastery of the

atom, from one discovery to another, toward yet unforeseeable peaks of

destructive power.

Inevitably, until we can reach international agreement, this is the path

we must follow. And we must realize that no advance we make is

unattainable by others, that no advantage in this race can be more than

temporary.

The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish

millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world,

wipe out the cultural achievements of the past--and destroy the very

structure of a civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up

through hundreds of generations.

Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men. We know this, but

we dare not assume that others would not yield to the temptation science

is now placing in their hands.

With that in mind, there is something I would say, to Stalin: You claim

belief in Lenin’s prophecy that one stage in the development of

communist society would be war between your world and ours. But Lenin

was a pre-atomic man, who viewed society and history with pre-atomic

eyes. Something profound has happened since he wrote. War has changed

its shape and its dimension. It cannot now be a “stage” in the

development of anything save ruin for your regime and your homeland.

I do not know how much time may elapse before the communist rulers bring

themselves to recognize this truth. But when they do, they will find us

eager to reach understandings that will protect the world from the

danger it faces today.

It is no wonder that some people wish that we had never succeeded in

splitting the atom. But atomic power, like any other force of nature, is

not evil in itself. Properly used, it is an instrumentality for human

betterment. As a source of power, as a tool of scientific inquiry, it

has untold possibilities. We are already making good progress in the

constructive use of atomic power. We could do much more if we were free

to concentrate on its peaceful uses exclusively.

Atomic power will be with us all the days of our lives. We cannot

legislate it out of existence. We cannot ignore the dangers or the

benefits it offers.

I believe that man can harness the forces of the atom to work for the

improvement of the lot of human beings everywhere. That is our goal. As

a nation, as a people, we must understand this problem, we must handle

this new force wisely through our democratic processes. Above all, we

must strive, in all earnestness and good faith, to bring it under

effective international control. To do this will require much wisdom and

patience and firmness. The awe-inspiring responsibility in this field

now falls on a new Administration and a new Congress. I will give them

my support, as I am sure all our citizens will, in whatever constructive

steps they may take to make this newest of man’s discoveries a source of

good and not of ultimate destruction.

We cannot tell when or whether the attitude of the Soviet rulers may

change. We do not know how long it may be before they show a willingness

to negotiate effective control of atomic energy and honorable

settlements of other world problems. We cannot measure how deep-rooted

are the Kremlin’s illusions about us. We can be sure, however, that the

rulers of the communist world will not change their basic objectives

lightly or soon.

The communist rulers have a sense of time about these things wholly

unlike our own. We tend to divide our future into short spans, like the

two-year life of this Congress, or the four years of the next

Presidential term. They seem to think and plan in terms of generations.

And there is, therefore, no easy, short-run way to make them see that

their plans cannot prevail.

This means there is ahead of us a long hard test of strength and

stamina, between the free world and the communist domain-our politics

and our economy, our science and technology against the best they can

do--our liberty against their slavery--our voluntary concert Of free

nations against their forced amalgam of “people’s republics”--our

strategy against their strategy-our nerve against their nerve.

Above all, this is a test of the will and the steadiness of the people

of the United States.

There has been no challenge like this in the history of our Republic. We

are called upon to rise to the occasion, as no people before us.

What is required of us is not easy. The way we must learn to live, the

world we have to live in, cannot be so pleasant, safe or simple as most

of us have known before, or confidently hoped to know.

Already we have had to sacrifice a number of accustomed ways of working

and of living, much nervous energy, material resources, even human life.

Yet if one thing is certain in our future, it is that more sacrifice

still lies ahead.

Were we to grow discouraged now, were we to weaken and slack off, the

whole structure we have built, these past eight years, would come apart

and fall away. Never then, no matter by what stringent means, could our

free world regain the ground, the time, the sheer momentum, lost by such

a move. There can and should be changes and improvements in our

programs, to meet new situations, serve new needs. But to desert the

spirit of our basic policies, to step back from them now, would surely

start the free world’s slide toward the darkness that the communists

have prophesied-toward the moment for which they watch and wait.

If we value our freedom and our way of life and want to see them safe,

we must meet the challenge and accept its implications, stick to our

guns and carry out our policies.

I have set out the basic conditions, as I see them, under which we have

been working in the world, and the nature of our basic policies. What,

then, of the future? The answer, I believe, is this: As we continue to

confound Soviet expectations, as our world grows stronger, more united,

more attractive to men on both sides of the iron curtain, then

inevitably there will come a time of change within the communist world.

We do not know how that change will come about, whether by deliberate

decision in the Kremlin, by coup d’etat, by revolution, by defection of

satellites, or perhaps by some unforeseen combination of factors such as

these.

But if the communist rulers understand they cannot win by war, and if we

frustrate their attempts to win by subversion, it is not too much to

expect their world to change its character, moderate its aims, become

more realistic and less implacable, and recede from the cold war they

began.

Do not be deceived by the strong face, the look of monolithic power that

the communist dictators wear before the outside world. Remember their

power has no basis in consent. Remember they are so afraid of the free

world’s ideas and ways of life, they do not dare to let their people

know about them. Think of the massive effort they put forth to try to

stop our Campaign of Truth from reaching their people with its message

of freedom.

The masters of the Kremlin live in fear their power and position would

collapse were their own people to acquire knowledge, information,

comprehension about our free society. Their world has many elements of

strength, but this one fatal flaw: the weakness represented by their

iron curtain and their police state. Surely, a social order at once so

insecure and so fearful, must ultimately lose its competition with our

free society.

Provided just one thing--and this I urge you to consider

carefully--provided that the free world retains the confidence and the

determination to outmatch the best our adversary can accomplish and to

demonstrate for uncertain millions on both sides of the iron curtain the

superiority of the free way of life.

That is the test upon all the free nations; upon none more than our own

Republic.

Our resources are equal to the task. We have the industry, the skills,

the basic economic strength. Above all, we have the vigor of free men in

a free society. We have our liberties. And while we keep them, while we

retain our democratic faith, the ultimate advantage in this hard

competition lies with us, not with the communists.

But there are some things that could shift the advantage to their side.

One of the things that could defeat us is fear--fear of the task we

face, fear of adjusting to it, fear that breeds more fear, sapping our

faith, corroding our liberties, turning citizen against citizen, ally

against ally. Fear could snatch away the very values we are striving to

defend.

Already the danger signals have gone up. Already the corrosive process

has begun. And every diminution of our tolerance, each new act of

enforced conformity, each idle accusation, each demonstration of

hysteria-each new restrictive law--is one more sign that we can lose the

battle against fear.

The communists cannot deprive us of our liberties--fear can. The

communists cannot stamp out our faith in human dignity-fear can. Fear is

an enemy within ourselves, and if we do not root it out, it may destroy

the very way of life we are so anxious to protect.

To beat back fear, we must hold fast to our heritage as free men. We

must renew our confidence in one another, our tolerance, our sense of

being neighbors, fellow citizens. We must take our stand on the Bill of

Rights. The inquisition, the star chamber, have no place in a free

society.

Our ultimate strength lies, not alone in arms, but in the sense of moral

values and moral truths that give meaning and vitality to the purposes

of free people. These values are our faith, our inspiration, the source

of our strength and our indomitable determination.

We face hard tasks, great dangers. But we are Americans and we have

faced hardships and uncertainty before, we have adjusted before to

changing circumstances. Our whole history has been a steady training for

the work it is now ours to do.

No one can lose heart for the task, none can lose faith in our free

ways, who stops to remember where we began, what we have sought, and

what accomplished, all together as Americans.

I have lived a long time and seen much happen in our country. And I know

out of my own experience, that we can do what must be done.

When I think back to the country I grew up in--and then look at what our

country has become--I am quite certain that having done so much, we can

do more.

After all, it has been scarcely fifteen years since most Americans

rejected out-of-hand the wise counsel that aggressors must be

“quarantined”. The very concept of collective security, the

foundation-stone of all our actions now, was then strange doctrine,

shunned and set aside. Talk about adapting; talk about adjusting; talk

about responding as a people to the challenge of changed times and

circumstances--there has never been a more spectacular example than this

great change in America’s outlook on the world.

Let all of us pause now, think back, consider carefully the meaning of

our national experience. Let us draw comfort from it and faith, and

confidence in our future as Americans.

The Nation’s business is never finished. The basic questions we have

been dealing with, these eight years past, present themselves anew. That

is the way of our society. Circumstances change and current questions

take on different forms, new complications, year by year. But

underneath, the great issues remain the same--prosperity, welfare, human

rights, effective democracy, and above all, peace.

Now we turn to the inaugural of our new President. And in the great work

he is called upon to do he will have need for the support of a united

people, a confident people, with firm faith in one another and in our

common cause. I pledge him my support as a citizen of our Republic, and

I ask you to give him yours.

To him, to you, to all my fellow citizens, I say, Godspeed.

May God bless our country and our cause.

***

State of the Union Address

Dwight D. Eisenhower

February 2, 1953

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Eighty-third Congress:

I welcome the honor of appearing before you to deliver my first message

to the Congress.

It is manifestly the joint purpose of the congressional leadership and

of this administration to justify the summons to governmental

responsibility issued last November by the American people. The grand

labors of this leadership will involve:

Application of America’s influence in world affairs with such fortitude

and such foresight that it will deter aggression and eventually secure

peace;

Establishment of a national administration of such integrity and such

efficiency that its honor at home will ensure respect abroad;

Encouragement of those incentives that inspire creative initiative in

our economy, so that its productivity may fortify freedom everywhere;

and

Dedication to the well-being of all our citizens and to the attainment

of equality of opportunity for all, so that our Nation will ever act

with the strength of unity in every task to which it is called.

The purpose of this message is to suggest certain lines along which our

joint efforts may immediately be directed toward realization of these

four ruling purposes.

The time that this administration has been in office has been too brief

to permit preparation of a detailed and comprehensive program of

recommended action to cover all phases of the responsibilities that

devolve upon our country’s new leaders. Such a program will be filled

out in the weeks ahead as, after appropriate study, I shall submit

additional recommendations for your consideration. Today can provide

only a sure and substantial beginning.

II.

Our country has come through a painful period of trial and

disillusionment since the victory of 1945. We anticipated a world of

peace and cooperation. The calculated pressures of aggressive communism

have forced us, instead, to live in a world of turmoil.

From this costly experience we have learned one clear lesson. We have

learned that the free world cannot indefinitely remain in a posture of

paralyzed tension, leaving forever to the aggressor the choice of time

and place and means to cause greatest hurt to us at least cost to

himself.

This administration has, therefore, begun the definition of a new,

positive foreign policy. This policy will be governed by certain fixed

ideas. They are these:

(1) Our foreign policy must be clear, consistent, and confident. This

means that it must be the product of genuine, continuous cooperation

between the executive and the legislative branches of this Government.

It must be developed and directed in the spirit of true bipartisanship.

(2) The policy we embrace must be a coherent global policy. The freedom

we cherish and defend in Europe and in the Americas is no different from

the freedom that is imperiled in Asia.

(3) Our policy, dedicated to making the free world secure, will envision

all peaceful methods and devices--except breaking faith with our

friends. We shall never acquiesce in the enslavement of any people in

order to purchase fancied gain for ourselves. I shall ask the Congress

at a later date to join in an appropriate resolution making clear that

this Government recognizes no kind of commitment contained in secret

understandings of the past with foreign governments which permit this

kind of enslavement.

(4) The policy we pursue will recognize the truth that no single

country, even one so powerful as ours, can alone defend the liberty of

all nations threatened by Communist aggression from without or

subversion within. Mutual security means effective mutual cooperation.

For the United States, this means that, as a matter of common sense and

national interest, we shall give help to other nations in the measure

that they strive earnestly to do their full share of the common task. No

wealth of aid could compensate for poverty of spirit. The heart of every

free nation must be honestly dedicated to the preserving of its own

independence and security.

(5) Our policy will be designed to foster the advent of practical unity

in Western Europe. The nations of that region have contributed notably

to the effort of sustaining the security of the free world. From the

jungles of Indochina and Malaya to the northern shores of Europe, they

have vastly improved their defensive strength. Where called upon to do

so, they have made costly and bitter sacrifices to hold the line of

freedom.

But the problem of security demands closer cooperation among the nations

of Europe than has been known to date. Only a more closely integrated

economic and political system can provide the greatly increased economic

strength needed to maintain both necessary military readiness and

respectable living standards.

Europe’s enlightened leaders have long been aware of these facts. All

the devoted work that has gone into the Schuman plan, the European Army,

and the Strasbourg Conference has testified to their vision and

determination. These achievements are the more remarkable when we

realize that each of them has marked a victory--for France and for

Germany alike over the divisions that in the past have brought such

tragedy to these two great nations and to the world.

The needed unity of Western Europe manifestly cannot be manufactured

from without; it can only be created from within. But it is right and

necessary that we encourage Europe’s leaders by informing them of the

high value we place upon the earnestness of their efforts toward this

goal. Real progress will be conclusive evidence to the American people

that our material sacrifices in the cause of collective security are

matched by essential political, economic, and military accomplishments

in Western Europe.

(6) Our foreign policy will recognize the importance of profitable and

equitable world trade.

A substantial beginning can and should be made by our friends

themselves. Europe, for example, is now marked by checkered areas of

labor surplus and labor shortage, of agricultural areas needing machines

and industrial areas needing food. Here and elsewhere we can hope that

our friends will take the initiative in creating broader markets and

more dependable currencies, to allow greater exchange of goods and

services among themselves.

Action along these lines can create an economic environment that will

invite vital help from us.

This help includes:

First: Revising our customs regulations to remove procedural obstacles

to profitable trade. I further recommend that the Congress take the

Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act under immediate study and extend it by

appropriate legislation. This objective must not ignore legitimate

safeguarding of domestic industries, agriculture, and labor standards.

In all executive study and recommendations on this problem labor and

management and farmers alike will be earnestly consulted.

Second: Doing whatever Government properly can to encourage the flow of

private American investment abroad. This involves, as a serious and

explicit purpose of our foreign policy, the encouragement of a

hospitable climate for such investment in foreign nations.

Third: Availing ourselves of facilities overseas for the economical

production of manufactured articles which are needed for mutual defense

and which are not seriously competitive with our own normal peacetime

production.

Fourth: Receiving from the rest of the world, in equitable exchange for

what we supply, greater amounts of important raw materials which we do

not ourselves possess in adequate quantities.

III.

In this general discussion of our foreign policy, I must make special

mention of the war in Korea.

This war is, for Americans, the most painful phase of Communist

aggression throughout the world. It is clearly a part of the same

calculated assault that the aggressor is simultaneously pressing in

Indochina and in Malaya, and of the strategic situation that manifestly

embraces the island of Formosa and the Chinese Nationalist forces there.

The working out of any military solution to the Korean war will

inevitably affect all these areas.

The administration is giving immediate increased attention to the

development of additional Republic of Korea forces. The citizens of that

country have proved their capacity as fighting men and their eagerness

to take a greater share in the defense of their homeland. Organization,

equipment, and training will allow them to do so. Increased assistance

to Korea for this purpose conforms fully to our global policies.

In June 1950, following the aggressive attack on the Republic of Korea,

the United States Seventh Fleet was instructed both to prevent attack

upon Formosa and also to insure that Formosa should not be used as a

base of operations against the Chinese Communist mainland.

This has meant, in effect, that the United States Navy was required to

serve as a defensive arm of Communist China. Regardless of the situation

in 1950, since the date of that order the Chinese Communists have

invaded Korea to attack the United Nations forces there. They have

consistently rejected the proposals of the United Nations Command for an

armistice. They recently joined with Soviet Russia in rejecting the

armistice proposal sponsored in the United Nations by the Government of

India. This proposal had been accepted by the United States and 53 other

nations.

Consequently there is no longer any logic or sense in a condition that

required the United States Navy to assume defensive responsibilities on

behalf of the Chinese Communists, thus permitting those Communists, with

greater impunity, to kill our soldiers and those of our United Nations

allies in Korea.

I am, therefore, issuing instructions that the Seventh Fleet no longer

be employed to shield Communist China. This order implies no aggressive

intent on our part. But we certainly have no obligation to protect a

nation fighting us in Korea.

IV.

Our labor for peace in Korea and in the world imperatively demands the

maintenance by the United States of a strong fighting service ready for

any contingency.

Our problem is to achieve adequate military strength within the limits

of endurable strain upon our economy. To amass military power without

regard to our economic capacity would be to defend ourselves against one

kind of disaster by inviting another.

Both military and economic objectives demand a single national military

policy, proper coordination of our armed services, and effective

consolidation of certain logistics activities.

We must eliminate waste and duplication of effort in the armed services.

We must realize clearly that size alone is not sufficient. The biggest

force is not necessarily the best--and we want the best.

We must not let traditions or habits of the past stand in the way of

developing an efficient military force. All members of our forces must

be ever mindful that they serve under a single flag and for a single

cause.

We must effectively integrate our armament programs and plan them in

such careful relation to our industrial facilities that we assure the

best use of our manpower and our materials.

Because of the complex technical nature of our military organization and

because of the security reasons involved, the Secretary of Defense must

take the initiative and assume the responsibility for developing plans

to give our Nation maximum safety at minimum cost. Accordingly, the new

Secretary of Defense and his civilian and military associates will, in

the future, recommend such changes in present laws affecting our defense

activities as may be necessary to clarify responsibilities and improve

the total effectiveness of our defense effort.

This effort must always conform to policies laid down in the National

Security Council.

The statutory function of the National Security Council is to assist the

President in the formulation and coordination of significant domestic,

foreign, and military policies required for the security of the Nation.

In these days of tension it is essential that this central body have the

vitality to perform effectively its statutory role. I propose to see

that it does so.

Careful formulation of policies must be followed by clear understanding

of them by all peoples. A related need, therefore, is to make more

effective all activities of the Government related to international

information.

I have recently appointed a committee of representative and informed

citizens to survey this subject and to make recommendations in the near

future for legislative, administrative, or other action.

A unified and dynamic effort in this whole field is essential to the

security of the United States and of the other peoples in the community

of free nations. There is but one sure way to avoid total war--and that

is to win the cold war.

While retaliatory power is one strong deterrent to a would-be aggressor,

another powerful deterrent is defensive power. No enemy is likely to

attempt an attack foredoomed to failure.

Because the building of a completely impenetrable defense against attack

is still not possible, total defensive strength must include civil

defense preparedness. Because we have incontrovertible evidence that

Soviet Russia possesses atomic weapons, this kind of protection becomes

sheer necessity.

Civil defense responsibilities primarily belong to the State and local

governments--recruiting, training, and organizing volunteers to meet any

emergency. The immediate job of the Federal Government is to provide

leadership, to supply technical guidance, and to continue to strengthen

its civil defense stockpile of medical, engineering, and related

supplies and equipment. This work must go forward without lag.

V.

I have referred to the inescapable need for economic health and strength

if we are to maintain adequate military power and exert influential

leadership for peace in the world.

Our immediate task is to chart a fiscal and economic policy that can:

(1) Reduce the planned deficits and then balance the budget, which

means, among other things, reducing Federal expenditures to the safe

minimum;

(2) Meet the huge costs of our defense;

(3) Properly handle the burden of our inheritance of debt and

obligations;

(4) Check the menace of inflation;

(5) Work toward the earliest possible reduction of the tax burden;

(6) Make constructive plans to encourage the initiative of our citizens.

It is important that all of us understand that this administration does

not and cannot begin its task with a clean slate. Much already has been

written on the record, beyond our power quickly to erase or to amend.

This record includes our inherited burden of indebtedness and

obligations and deficits.

The current year’s budget, as you know, carries a 5.9 billion dollar

deficit; and the budget, which was presented to you before this

administration took office, indicates a budgetary deficit of 9.9 billion

for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1954. The national debt is now more

than 265 billion dollars. In addition, the accumulated obligational

authority of the Federal Government for future payment totals over 80

billion dollars. Even this amount is exclusive of large contingent

liabilities, so numerous and extensive as to be almost beyond

description.

The bills for the payment of nearly all of the 80 billion dollars of

obligations will be presented during the next 4 years. These bills,

added to the current costs of government we must meet, make a formidable

burden.

The present authorized Government-debt limit is 275 billion dollars. The

forecast presented by the outgoing administration with the fiscal year

1954 budget indicates that--before the end of the fiscal year and at the

peak of demand for payments during the year--the total Government debt

may approach and even exceed that limit. Unless budgeted deficits are

checked, the momentum of past programs will force an increase of the

statutory debt limit.

Permit me this one understatement: to meet and to correct this situation

will not be easy.

Permit me this one assurance: every department head and I are determined

to do everything we can to resolve it.

The first order of business is the elimination of the annual deficit.

This cannot be achieved merely by exhortation. It demands the concerted

action of all those in responsible positions in the Government and the

earnest cooperation of the Congress.

Already, we have begun an examination of the appropriations and

expenditures of all departments in an effort to find significant items

that may be decreased or canceled without damage to our essential

requirements.

Getting control of the budget requires also that State and local

governments and interested groups of citizens restrain themselves in

their demands upon the Congress that the Federal Treasury spend more and

more money for all types of projects.

A balanced budget is an essential first measure in checking further

depreciation in the buying power of the dollar. This is one of the

critical steps to be taken to bring an end to planned inflation. Our

purpose is to manage the Government’s finances so as to help and not

hinder each family in balancing its own budget.

Reduction of taxes will be justified only as we show we can succeed in

bringing the budget under control. As the budget is balanced and

inflation checked, the tax burden that today stifles initiative can and

must be eased.

Until we can determine the extent to which expenditures can be reduced,

it would not be wise to reduce our revenues.

Meanwhile, the tax structure as a whole demands review. The Secretary of

the Treasury is undertaking this study immediately. We must develop a

system of taxation which will impose the least possible obstacle to the

dynamic growth of the country. This includes particularly real

opportunity for the growth of small businesses. Many readjustments in

existing taxes will be necessary to serve these objectives and also to

remove existing inequities. Clarification and simplification in the tax

laws as well as the regulations will be undertaken.

In the entire area of fiscal policy--which must, in its various aspects,

be treated in recommendations to the Congress in coming weeks--there can

now be stated certain basic facts and principles.

First. It is axiomatic that our economy is a highly complex and

sensitive mechanism. Hasty and ill-considered action of any kind could

seriously upset the subtle equation that encompasses debts, obligations,

expenditures, defense demands, deficits, taxes, and the general economic

health of the Nation. Our goals can be clear, our start toward them can

be immediate--but action must be gradual.

Second. It is clear that too great a part of the national debt comes due

in too short a time. The Department of the Treasury will undertake at

suitable times a program of extending part of the debt over longer

periods and gradually placing greater amounts in the hands of

longer-term investors.

Third. Past differences in policy between the Treasury and the Federal

Reserve Board have helped to encourage inflation. Henceforth, I expect

that their single purpose shall be to serve the whole Nation by policies

designed to stabilize the economy and encourage the free play of our

people’s genius for individual initiative.

In encouraging this initiative, no single item in our current problems

has received more thoughtful consideration by my associates, and by the

many individuals called into our counsels, than the matter of price and

wage control by law.

The great economic strength of our democracy has developed in an

atmosphere of freedom. The character of our people resists artificial

and arbitrary controls of any kind. Direct controls, except those on

credit, deal not with the real causes of inflation but only with its

symptoms. In times of national emergency, this kind of control has a

role to play. Our whole system, however, is based upon the assumption

that, normally, we should combat wide fluctuations in our price

structure by relying largely on the effective use of sound fiscal and

monetary policy, and upon the natural workings of economic law.

Moreover, American labor and American business can best resolve their

wage problems across the bargaining table. Government should refrain

from sitting in with them unless, in extreme cases, the public welfare

requires protection.

We are, of course, living in an international situation that is neither

an emergency demanding full mobilization, nor is it peace. No one can

know how long this condition will persist. Consequently, we are forced

to learn many new things as we go along-clinging to what works,

discarding what does not.

In all our current discussions on these and related facts, the weight of

evidence is clearly against the use of controls in their present forms.

They have proved largely unsatisfactory or unworkable. They have not

prevented inflation; they have not kept down the cost of living.

Dissatisfaction with them is wholly justified. I am convinced that

now--as well as in the long run--free and competitive prices will best

serve the interests of all the people, and best meet the changing,

growing needs of our economy.

Accordingly, I do not intend to ask for a renewal of the present wage

and price controls on April 30, 1953, when present legislation expires.

In the meantime, steps will be taken to eliminate controls in an orderly

manner, and to terminate special agencies no longer needed for this

purpose. It is obviously to be expected that the removal of these

controls will result in individual price changes--some up, some down.

But a maximum of freedom in market prices as well as in collective

bargaining is characteristic of a truly free people.

I believe also that material and product controls should be ended,

except with respect to defense priorities and scarce and critical items

essential for our defense. I shall recommend to the Congress that

legislation be enacted to continue authority for such remaining controls

of this type as will be necessary after the expiration of the existing

statute on June 30, 1953.

I recommend the continuance of the authority for Federal control over

rents in those communities in which serious housing shortages exist.

These are chiefly the so-called defense areas. In these and all areas

the Federal Government should withdraw from the control of rents as soon

as practicable. But before they are removed entirely, each legislature

should have full opportunity to take over, within its own State,

responsibility for this function.

It would be idle to pretend that all our problems in this whole field of

prices will solve themselves by mere Federal withdrawal from direct

controls.

We shall have to watch trends closely. If the freer functioning of our

economic system, as well as the indirect controls which can be

appropriately employed, prove insufficient during this period of strain

and tension, I shall promptly ask the Congress to enact such legislation

as may be required.

In facing all these problems--wages, prices, production, tax rates,

fiscal policy, deficits--everywhere we remain constantly mindful that

the time for sacrifice has not ended. But we are concerned with the

encouragement of competitive enterprise and individual initiative

precisely because we know them to be our Nation’s abiding sources of

strength.

VI.

Our vast world responsibility accents with urgency our people’s

elemental right to a government whose clear qualities are loyalty,

security, efficiency, economy, and integrity.

The safety of America and the trust of the people alike demand that the

personnel of the Federal Government be loyal in their motives and

reliable in the discharge of their duties. Only a combination of both

loyalty and reliability promises genuine security.

To state this principle is easy; to apply it can be difficult. But this

security we must and shall have. By way of example, all principal new

appointees to departments and agencies have been investigated at their

own request by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Confident of your understanding and cooperation, I know that the primary

responsibility for keeping out the disloyal and the dangerous rests

squarely upon the executive branch. When this branch so conducts itself

as to require policing by another branch of the Government, it invites

its own disorder and confusion.

I am determined to meet this responsibility of the Executive. The heads

of all executive departments and agencies have been instructed to

initiate at once effective programs of security with respect to their

personnel. The Attorney General will advise and guide the departments

and agencies in the shaping of these programs, designed at once to

govern the employment of new personnel and to review speedily any

derogatory information concerning incumbent personnel.

To carry out these programs, I believe that the powers of the executive

branch under existing law are sufficient. If they should prove

inadequate, the necessary legislation will be requested.

These programs will be both fair to the rights of the individual and

effective for the safety of the Nation. They will, with care and

justice, apply the basic principle that public employment is not a right

but a privilege.

All these measures have two clear purposes: Their first purpose is to

make certain that this Nation’s security is not jeopardized by false

servants. Their second purpose is to clear the atmosphere of that

unreasoned suspicion that accepts rumor and gossip as substitutes for

evidence.

Our people, of course, deserve and demand of their Federal Government

more than security of personnel. They demand, also, efficient and

logical organization, true to constitutional principles.

I have already established a Committee on Government Organization. The

Committee is using as its point of departure the reports of the Hoover

Commission and subsequent studies by several independent agencies. To

achieve the greater efficiency and economy which the Committee analyses

show to be possible, I ask the Congress to extend the present Government

Reorganization Act for a period of 18 months or 2 years beyond its

expiration date of April 1, 1953.

There is more involved here than realigning the wheels and smoothing the

gears of administrative machinery. The Congress rightfully-expects the

Executive to take the initiative in discovering and removing outmoded

functions and eliminating duplication.

One agency, for example, whose head has promised early and vigorous

action to provide greater efficiency is the Post Office. One of the

oldest institutions of our Federal Government, its service should be of

the best. Its employees should merit and receive the high regard and

esteem of the citizens of the Nation. There are today in some areas of

the postal service, both waste and incompetence to be corrected. With

the cooperation of the Congress, and taking advantage of its accumulated

experience in postal affairs, the Postmaster General will institute a

program directed at improving service while at the same time reducing

costs and decreasing deficits.

In all departments, dedication to these basic precepts of security and

efficiency, integrity, and economy can and will produce an

administration deserving of the trust the people have placed in it.

Our people have demanded nothing less than good, efficient government.

They shall get nothing less.

VII.

Vitally important are the water and minerals, public lands and standing

timber, forage and wild-life of this country. A fast-growing population

will have vast future needs in these resources. We must more than match

the substantial achievements in the half-century since President

Theodore Roosevelt awakened the Nation to the problem of conservation.

This calls for a strong Federal program in the field of resource

development. Its major projects should be timed, where possible to

assist in leveling off peaks and valleys in our economic life. Soundly

planned projects already initiated should be carried out. New ones will

be planned for the future.

The best natural resources program for America will not result from

exclusive dependence on Federal bureaucracy. It will involve a

partnership of the States and local communities, private citizens, and

the Federal Government, all working together. This combined effort will

advance the development of the great river valleys of our Nation and the

power that they can generate. Likewise, such a partnership can be

effective in the expansion throughout the Nation of upstream storage;

the sound use of public lands; the wise conservation of minerals; and

the sustained yield of our forests.

There has been much criticism, some of it apparently justified, of the

confusion resulting from overlapping Federal activities in the entire

field of resource-conservation. This matter is being exhaustively

studied and appropriate reorganization plans will be developed.

Most of these particular resource problems pertain to the Department of

the Interior. Another of its major concerns is our country’s island

possessions. Here, one matter deserves attention. The platforms of both

political parties promised immediate statehood to Hawaii. The people of

that Territory have earned that status. Statehood should be granted

promptly with the first election scheduled for 1954.

VIII.

One of the difficult problems which face the new administration is that

of the slow, irregular decline of farm prices. This decline, which has

been going on for almost 2 years, has occurred at a time when most

nonfarm prices and farm costs of production are extraordinarily high.

Present agricultural legislation provides for the mandatory support of

the prices of basic farm commodities at 90 percent of parity. The

Secretary of Agriculture and his associates will, of course, execute the

present act faithfully and thereby seek to mitigate the consequences of

the downturn in farm income.

This price-support legislation will expire at the end of 1954.

So we should begin now to consider what farm legislation we should

develop for 1955 and beyond. Our aim should be economic stability and

full parity of income for American farmers. But we must seek this goal

in ways that minimize governmental interference in the farmers’ affairs,

that permit desirable shifts in production, and that encourage farmers

themselves to use initiative in meeting changing economic conditions.

A continuing study reveals nothing more emphatically than the

complicated nature of this subject. Among other things, it shows that

the prosperity of our agriculture depends directly upon the prosperity

of the whole country--upon the purchasing power of American consumers.

It depends also upon the opportunity to ship abroad large surpluses of

particular commodities, and therefore upon sound economic relationships

between the United States and many foreign countries. It involves

research and scientific investigation, conducted on an extensive scale.

It involves special credit mechanisms and marketing, rural

electrification, soil conservation, and other programs.

The whole complex of agricultural programs and policies will be studied

by a Special Agricultural Advisory Commission, as I know it will by

appropriate committees of the Congress. A nonpartisan group of respected

authorities in the field of agriculture has already been appointed as an

interim advisory group.

The immediate changes needed in agricultural programs are largely

budgetary and administrative in nature. New policies and new programs

must await the completion of the far-reaching studies which have already

been launched.

IX.

The determination of labor policy must be governed not by the vagaries

of political expediency but by the firmest principles and convictions.

Slanted partisan appeals to American workers, spoken as if they were a

group apart, necessitating a special language and treatment, are an

affront to the fullness of their dignity as American citizens.

The truth in matters of labor policy has become obscured in controversy.

The very meaning of economic freedom as it affects labor has become

confused. This misunderstanding has provided a climate of opinion

favoring the growth of governmental paternalism in labor relations. This

tendency, if left uncorrected, could end only by producing a

bureaucratic despotism. Economic freedom is, in fact, the requisite of

greater prosperity for every American who earns his own living.

In the field of labor legislation, only a law that merits the respect

and support of both labor and management can help reduce the loss of

wages and of production through strikes and stoppages, and thus add to

the total economic strength of our Nation.

We have now had 5 years’ experience with the Labor Management Act of

1947, commonly known as the Taft-Hartley Act. That experience has shown

the need for some corrective action, and we should promptly proceed to

amend that act.

I know that the Congress is already proceeding with renewed studies of

this subject. Meanwhile, the Department of Labor is at once beginning

work to devise further specific recommendations for your consideration.

In the careful working out of legislation, I know you will give

thoughtful consideration--as will we in the executive branch--to the

views of labor, and of management, and of the general public. In this

process, it is only human that each of us should bring forward the

arguments of self-interest. But if all conduct their arguments in the

overpowering light of national interest--which is enlightened

self-interest--we shall get the right answers. I profoundly hope that

every citizen of our country will follow with understanding your

progress in this work. The welfare of all of us is involved.

Especially must we remember that the institutions of trade unionism and

collective bargaining are monuments to the freedom that must prevail in

our industrial life. They have a century of honorable achievement behind

them. Our faith in them is proven, firm, and final.

Government can do a great deal to aid the settlement of labor disputes

without allowing itself to be employed as an ally of either side. Its

proper role in industrial strife is to encourage the processes of

mediation and conciliation. These processes can successfully be directed

only by a government free from the taint of any suspicion that it is

partial or punitive.

The administration intends to strengthen and to improve the services

which the Department of Labor can render to the worker and to the whole

national community. This Department was created--just 40 years ago--to

serve the entire Nation. It must aid, for example, employers and

employees alike in improving training programs that will develop skilled

and competent workers. It must enjoy the confidence and respect of labor

and industry in order to play a significant role in the planning of

America’s economic future. To that end, I am authorizing the Department

of Labor to establish promptly a tripartite advisory committee

consisting of representatives of employers, labor, and the public.

X.

Our civil and social rights form a central part of the heritage we are

striving to defend on all fronts and with all our strength. I believe

with all my heart that our vigilant guarding of these rights is a sacred

obligation binding upon every citizen. To be true to one’s own freedom

is, in essence, to honor and respect the freedom of all others.