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
We refuse the European solution of using the unemployed to build up
excessive armaments which eventually result in dictatorships and war. We
encourage an American way--through an increase of national income which is
the only way we can be sure will take up the slack. Much progress has been
made; much remains to be done.
We recognize that we must find an answer in terms of work and opportunity.
The unemployment problem today has become very definitely a problem of
youth as well as of age. As each year has gone by hundreds of thousands of
boys and girls have come of working age. They now form an army of unused
youth. They must be an especial concern of democratic Government.
We must continue, above all things, to look for a solution of their special
problem. For they, looking ahead to life, are entitled to action on our
part and not merely to admonitions of optimism or lectures on economic
laws.
Some in our midst have sought to instill a feeling of fear and defeatism in
the minds of the American people about this problem.
To face the task of finding jobs faster than invention can take them
away--is not defeatism. To warble easy platitudes that if we would only go
back to ways that have failed, everything would be all right--is not
courage.
In 1933 we met a problem of real fear and real defeatism. We faced the
facts--with action and not with words alone.
The American people will reject the doctrine of fear, confident that in the
'thirties we have been building soundly a new order of things, different
from the order of the 'twenties. In this dawn of the decade of the
'forties, with our program of social improvement started, we will continue
to carry on the processes of recovery, so as to preserve our gains and
provide jobs at living wages.
There are, of course, many other items of great public interest which could
be enumerated in this message--the continued conservation of our natural
resources, the improvement of health and of education, the extension of
social security to larger groups, the freeing of large areas from
restricted transportation discriminations, the extension of the merit
system and many others.
Our continued progress in the social and economic field is important not
only for the significance of each part of it but for the total effect which
our program of domestic betterment has upon that most valuable asset of a
nation in dangerous times--its national unity.
The permanent security of America in the present crisis does not lie in
armed force alone. What we face is a set of world-wide forces of
disintegration--vicious, ruthless, destructive of all the moral, religious
and political standards which mankind, after centuries of struggle, has
come to cherish most.
In these moral values, in these forces which have made our nation great, we
must actively and practically reassert our faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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