FDR

Therefore, I have asked the Congress to pass legislation under which the President would be specifically authorized to stabilize the cost of living, including the price of all farm commodities.

I have told the Congress that the administration cannot hold the actual cost of food and clothing down to the present level beyond October first.

If we wait for two or three or four or six months it may well be too late.

Overall stabilization of prices, and salaries, wages and profits is necessary to the continued increasing production of planes and tanks and ships and guns.

That would mean that the purchasing power of every dollar that you have in your pay envelope, or in the bank, or included in your insurance policy or your pension, would be reduced to about eighty centsą worth.

The cost of the war, paid by taxpayers, will jump beyond all present calculations.

Prices and wages will go up so rapidly that the entire production program will be endangered.

But I give you the solemn assurance that failure to solve this problem here at home--and to solve it now--will make more difficult the winning of this war.

I think that also is an essential justice and a practical necessity.

Our experience with the control of other prices during the past few months has brought out one important fact--the rising cost of living can be controlled, providing that all elements making up the cost of living are controlled at the same…

I think that would be essential justice and a practical necessity.

But it is obvious to all of us that if the cost of food continues to go up, as it is doing at present, the wage earner, particularly in the lower brackets, will have a right to an increase in his wages.

This act of favoritism for one particular group in the community increased the cost of food to everybody--not only to the workers in the city or in the munitions plants, and their families, but also to the families of the farmers…

But have not those men a right to be counting on us?

As the pilots of his squadron left the ready room to man their planes, Lieutenant Powers said to them, "Remember, the folks back home are counting on us.

But they are still and forever individuals--free individuals.

As we here at home contemplate our own duties, our own responsibilities, let us think and think hard of the example which is being set for us by our fighting men.

And, to an ever-increasing extent, our soldiers, sailors and marines are fighting with great bravery and great skill on far distant fronts to make sure that we shall remain safe.

The ruins of London and Coventry and other cities are today the proudest monuments to British heroism.

Indeed, it was the fortitude of the common people of Britain under fire which enabled that island to stand and prevented Hitler from winning the war in 1940.

Never in the memory of man has there been a war in which the courage, the endurance and the loyalty of civilians played so vital a part.

I know that they will gladly embrace this economy and equality of sacrifice, satisfied that it is necessary for the most vital and compelling motive in all their lives--winning through to victory.

And, above all, it shall not be imperiled by the handful of noisy traitors--betrayers of America, betrayers of Christianity itself-- would-be dictators who in their hearts and souls have yielded to Hitlerism and would have this Republic do…

It must not be impeded by a few bogus patriots who use the sacred freedom of the press to echo the sentiments of the propagandists in Tokyo and Berlin.

It must not be impeded by self-styled experts either in economics or military problems who know neither true figures nor geography itself.