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must never give up that I must never let the greater interest of all the people down,
merely because that might be for the moment the easiest personal way out.
I believe that we have been right in the course we have charted. To abandon our purpose
of building a greater, a more stable and a more tolerant America would be to miss the
tide and perhaps to miss the port. I propose to sail ahead. I feel sure that your hopes and
your help are with me. For to reach a port, we must sail sail, not lie at anchor, sail, not
drift.
June 24, 1938.
Our government, happily, is a democracy. As part of the democratic process, your
President is again taking an opportunity to report on the progress of national affairs, to
report to the real rulers of this country the voting public.
The Seventy-Fifth Congress, elected in November, 1936, on a platform
uncompromisingly liberal, has adjourned. Barring unforeseen events, there will be no
session until the new Congress, to be elected in November, assembles next January.
On the one hand, the Seventy-Fifth Congress has left many things undone.
For example, it refused to provide more businesslike machinery for running the
Executive Branch of the government. The Congress also failed to meet my suggestion
that it take the far-reaching steps necessary to put the railroads of the country back on
their feet.
But, on the other hand, the Congress, striving to carry out the platform on which most of
its members were elected, achieved more for the future good of the country than any
Congress did between the end of the World War and the spring of 1933.
I mention tonight only the more important of these achievements.
(1) It improved still further our agricultural laws to give the farmer a fairer share of the
national income, to preserve our soil, to provide an all-weather granary, to help the farm
tenant towards independence, to find new uses for farm products, and to begin crop
insurance.
(2) After many requests on my part the Congress passed a Fair Labor Standards Act,
commonly called the Wages and Hours Bill. That act applying to products in interstate
commerce ends child labor, sets a floor below wages and a ceiling over hours of labor.
Except perhaps for the Social Security Act, it is the most far- reaching, the most far-
sighted program for the benefit of workers ever adopted here or in any other country.
Without question it starts us toward a better standard of living and increases purchasing
power to buy the products of farm and factory.
Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, who has
been turning his employees over to the government relief rolls in order to preserve his
company's undistributed reserves, tell you using his stockholders' money to pay the
postage for his personal opinions that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a
disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and
therefore for the nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business
executives most heartily disagree.
(3) The Congress has provided a fact-finding Commission to find a path through the
jungle of contradictory theories about the wise business practices to find the necessary
facts for any intelligent legislation on monopoly, on price-fixing and on the relationship
between big business and medium-sized business and little business. Different from a
great part of the world, we in America persist in our belief in individual enterprise and in
the profit motive; but we realize we must continually seek improved practices to insure
the continuance of reasonable profits, together with scientific progress, individual
initiative, opportunities for the little fellow, fair prices, decent wages and continuing
employment.
(4) The Congress has coordinated the supervision of commercial aviation and air mail
by establishing a new Civil Aeronautics Authority; and it has placed all postmasters
under the civil service for the first time in our national history.
(5) The Congress set up the United States Housing Authority to help finance large-scale
slum clearance and provide low rent housing for the low income groups in our cities.
And by improving the Federal Housing Act, the Congress made it easier for private
capital to build modest homes and low rental dwellings.
(6) The Congress has properly reduced taxes on small corporate enterprises, and has
made it easier for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make credit available to all
business. I think the bankers of the country can fairly be expected to participate in loans
where the government, through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, offers to take a
fair portion of the risk.
(7) The Congress has provided additional funds for the Works Progress Administration,
the Public Works Administration, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Civilian
Conservation Corps and other agencies, in order to take care of what we hope is a
temporary additional number of unemployed at this time and to encourage production of
every kind by private enterprise.
All these things together I call our program for the national defense of our economic
system. It is a program of balanced action of moving on all fronts at once in intelligent
recognition that all of our economic problems, of every group, and of every section of
the country are essentially one problem.
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