State of the Union AddressesRoosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
History
State of the Union Addresses
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
About one million and a half of these belong to the group which in the past
was dependent upon local welfare efforts. Most of them are unable for one
reason or another to maintain themselves independently--for the most part,
through no fault of their own. Such people, in the days before the great
depression, were cared for by local efforts--by States, by counties, by
towns, by cities, by churches and by private welfare agencies. It is my
thought that in the future they must be cared for as they were before. I
stand ready through my own personal efforts, and through the public
influence of the office that I hold, to help these local agencies to get
the means necessary to assume this burden.
The security legislation which I shall propose to the Congress will, I am
confident, be of assistance to local effort in the care of this type of
cases. Local responsibility can and will be resumed, for, after all, common
sense tells us that the wealth necessary for this task existed and still
exists in the local community, and the dictates of sound administration
require that this responsibility be in the first instance a local one.
There are, however, an additional three and one half million employable
people who are on relief. With them the problem is different and the
responsibility is different. This group was the victim of a nation-wide
depression caused by conditions which were not local but national. The
Federal Government is the only governmental agency with sufficient power
and credit to meet this situation. We have assumed this task and we shall
not shrink from it in the future. It is a duty dictated by every
intelligent consideration of national policy to ask you to make it possible
for the United States to give employment to all of these three and one half
million employable people now on relief, pending their absorption in a
rising tide of private employment.
It is my thought that with the exception of certain of the normal public
building operations of the Government, all emergency public works shall be
united in a single new and greatly enlarged plan.
With the establishment of this new system we can supersede the Federal
Emergency Relief Administration with a coordinated authority which will be
charged with the orderly liquidation of our present relief activities and
the substitution of a national chart for the giving of work.
This new program of emergency public employment should be governed by a
number of practical principles.
(1) All work undertaken should be useful--not just for a day, or a year,
but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living
conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the Nation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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