State of the Union AddressesRoosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
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State of the Union Addresses
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
In the many methods of attack with which we met these problems, you and I,
by mutual understanding and by determination to cooperate, helped to make
democracy succeed by refusing to permit unnecessary disagreement to arise
between two of our branches of Government. That spirit of cooperation was
able to solve difficulties of extraordinary magnitude and ramification with
few important errors, and at a cost cheap when measured by the immediate
necessities and the eventual results.
I look forward to a continuance of that cooperation in the next four years.
I look forward also to a continuance of the basis of that cooperation--
mutual respect for each other's proper sphere of functioning in a democracy
which is working well, and a common-sense realization of the need for play
in the joints of the machine.
On that basis, it is within the right of the Congress to determine which of
the many new activities shall be continued or abandoned, increased or
curtailed.
On that same basis, the President alone has the responsibility for their
administration. I find that this task of Executive management has reached
the point where our administrative machinery needs comprehensive
overhauling. I shall, therefore, shortly address the Congress more fully in
regard to modernizing and improving the Executive branch of the
Government.
That cooperation of the past four years between the Congress and the
President has aimed at the fulfillment of a twofold policy: first, economic
recovery through many kinds of assistance to agriculture, industry and
banking; and, second, deliberate improvement in the personal security and
opportunity of the great mass of our people.
The recovery we sought was not to be merely temporary. It was to be a
recovery protected from the causes of previous disasters. With that aim in
view--to prevent a future similar crisis--you and I joined in a series of
enactments--safe banking and sound currency, the guarantee of bank deposits,
protection for the investor in securities, the removal of the threat of
agricultural surpluses, insistence on collective bargaining, the outlawing
of sweat shops, child labor and unfair trade practices, and the beginnings
of security for the aged and the worker.
Nor was the recovery we sought merely a purposeless whirring of machinery.
It is important, of course, that every man and woman in the country be able
to find work, that every factory run, that business and farming as a whole
earn profits. But Government in a democratic Nation does not exist solely,
or even primarily, for that purpose.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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