FDR

This is the most important action in the reinforcement of our national defense that has been taken since the Louisiana Purchase.

I think that was employed too.

Then, as now, considerations of safety from overseas attack were fundamental.

The value to the Western Hemisphere of these outposts of security is beyond calculation.

For these reasons I have taken advantage of the present opportunity to acquire them.

The right to bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda are gifts-generously given and gladly received.

These are real places.

No quid pro quo on those at all.

Of course there was no mutuality in the Monroe Doctrine.

That goes back before you and me.

We are all members of the same body. We are all Americans.

We are seeking the preparedness of America, not against the threat of war or conquest alone, but in order that preparedness be built to assure American peace.

We must prepare in a thousand ways.

We are living under governments that are proving their devotion to national parks.

It is therefore, good for our safety to develop further and to use the natural resources and the man power of this region.

This Chickamauga Dam ... is helping to give to all of us human control of the watershed of the Tennessee River.

Our vital task of conservation is to preserve the freedom that our forefathers won in this land.

In this Park, we shall conserve these trees, the pine, the red-bud, the dogwood, the azalea, the rhododendron, the trout and the thrush for the happiness of the American people.

No citizen has lost a single one of these human liberties that we prize so highly in this democracy.

If we are to survive, we cannot be soft in a world in which there are dangers that threaten Americans—dangers far more deadly than were those that the frontiersmen had to face.

The pioneers survived by fighting their own fight and by, standing together as one man in the face of danger.

The earth has been so shrunk by the airplane and the radio that Europe is closer to America today than was one side of these mountains to the other side when the pioneers toiled through the primeval forest.

Today you and I are seeing the progress that we have made, that we are still making.

It is good and right that we should conserve these mountain heights of the old frontier for the benefit of the American people.

That way of life is menaced.