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
They do not want a postwar America which suffers from undernourishment or
slums--or the dole. They want no get-rich-quick era of bogus "prosperity"
which will end for them in selling apples on a street corner, as happened
after the bursting of the boom in 1929.
When you talk with our young men and our young women, you will find they
want to work for themselves and for their families; they consider that they
have the right to work; and they know that after the last war their fathers
did not gain that right.
When you talk with our young men and women, you will find that with the
opportunity for employment they want assurance against the evils of all
major economic hazards--assurance that will extend from the cradle to the
grave. And this great Government can and must provide this assurance.
I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after
the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.
I dissent.
And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become
a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.
I say this now to this Seventy-eighth Congress, because it is wholly
possible that freedom from want--the right of employment, the right of
assurance against life's hazards--will loom very large as a task of America
during the coming two years.
I trust it will not be regarded as an issue--but rather as a task for all of
us to study sympathetically, to work out with a constant regard for the
attainment of the objective, with fairness to all and with injustice to
none.
In this war of survival we must keep before our minds not only the evil
things we fight against but the good things we are fighting for. We fight
to retain a great past--and we fight to gain a greater future.
Let us remember, too, that economic safety for the America of the future is
threatened unless a greater economic stability comes to the rest of the
world. We cannot make America an island in either a military or an economic
sense. Hitlerism, like any other form of crime or disease, can grow from
the evil seeds of economic as well as military feudalism.
Victory in this war is the first and greatest goal before us. Victory in
the peace is the next. That means striving toward the enlargement of the
security of man here and throughout the world--and, finally, striving for
the fourth freedom--freedom from fear.
It is of little account for any of us to talk of essential human needs, of
attaining security, if we run the risk of another World War in ten or
twenty or fifty years. That is just plain common sense. Wars grow in size,
in death and destruction, and in the inevitability of engulfing all
Nations, in inverse ratio to the shrinking size of the world as a result of
the conquest of the air. I shudder to think of what will happen to
humanity, including ourselves, if this war ends in an inconclusive peace,
and another war breaks out when the babies of today have grown to fighting
age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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