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
War costs money. So far, we have hardly even begun to pay for it. We have
devoted only 15 percent of our national income to national defense. As will
appear in my Budget Message tomorrow, our war program for the coming fiscal
year will cost 56 billion dollars or, in other words, more than half of the
estimated annual national income. That means taxes and bonds and bonds and
taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other non-essentials. In a word, it
means an "all-out" war by individual effort and family effort in a united
country.
Only this all-out scale of production will hasten the ultimate all-out
victory. Speed will count. Lost ground can always be regained--lost time
never. Speed will save lives; speed will save this Nation which is in
peril; speed will save our freedom and our civilization--and slowness has
never been an American characteristic.
As the United States goes into its full stride, we must always be on guard
against misconceptions which will arise, some of them naturally, or which
will be planted among us by our enemies.
We must guard against complacency. We must not underrate the enemy. He is
powerful and cunning--and cruel and ruthless. He will stop at nothing that
gives him a chance to kill and to destroy. He has trained his people to
believe that their highest perfection is achieved by waging war. For many
years he has prepared for this very conflict--planning, and plotting, and
training, arming, and fighting. We have already tasted defeat. We may
suffer further setbacks. We must face the fact of a hard war, a long war, a
bloody war, a costly war.
We must, on the other hand, guard against defeatism. That has been one of
the chief weapons of Hitler's propaganda machine--used time and again with
deadly results. It will not be used successfully on the American people.
We must guard against divisions among ourselves and among all the other
United Nations. We must be particularly vigilant against racial
discrimination in any of its ugly forms. Hitler will try again to breed
mistrust and suspicion between one individual and another, one group and
another, one race and another, one Government and another. He will try to
use the same technique of falsehood and rumor-mongering with which he
divided France from Britain. He is trying to do this with us even now. But
he will find a unity of will and purpose against him, which will persevere
until the destruction of all his black designs upon the freedom and safety
of the people of the world.
We cannot wage this war in a defensive spirit. As our power and our
resources are fully mobilized, we shall carry the attack against the
enemy--we shall hit him and hit him again wherever and whenever we can reach
him.
We must keep him far from our shores, for we intend to bring this battle to
him on his own home grounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account