FDR

The future of the world demands it and we have each of us pledged ourselves to the best joint efforts to this end.

To you, the people of this country, all of us, the Members of the Congress and the members of this administration, owe a profound debt of gratitude.

Every ounce of strength and every resource at our command we have devoted to the end of justifying your confidence.

Long before inauguration day I became convinced that individual effort and local effort and even disjointed federal effort had failed and of necessity would fail and, therefore, that a rounded leadership by the federal government had…

Such leadership, however, had its beginning in preserving and strengthening the credit of the United States government, because without that no leadership was a possibility.

It may seem inconsistent for a government to cut down its regular expenses and at the same time to borrow and to spend billions for an emergency.

We have built a granite foundation in a period of confusion.

You and I know of the banking crisis and of the great danger to the savings of our people.

Now I come to the links which will build us a more lasting prosperity.

I have said that we cannot attain that in a nation half boom and half broke.

If all of our people have work and fair wages and fair profits, they can buy the products of their neighbors and business is good.

But if you take away the wages and the profits of half of them, business is only half as good.

It doesn't help much if the fortunate half is very prosperous--the best way is for everybody to be reasonably prosperous.

For many years the two great barriers to a normal prosperity have been low farm prices and the creeping paralysis of unemployment.

First the Farm Act: It is based on the fact that the purchasing power of nearly half our population depends on adequate prices for farm products.

It is obvious that if we can greatly increase the purchasing power of the tens of millions of our people who make a living from farming and the distribution of farm crops, we will greatly increase the consumption of those goods which are…

Last Autumn, on several occasions, I expressed my faith that we can make possible by democratic self-discipline in industry general increases in wages and shortening of hours sufficient to enable industry to pay its own workers enough to…

This can be done only if we permit and encourage cooperative action in industry because it is obvious that without united action a few selfish men in each competitive group will pay starvation wages and insist on long hours of work.

We have seen the result of action of that kind in the continuing descent into the economic Hell of the past four years.

There is a clear way to reverse that process: If all employers in each competitive group agree to pay their workers the same wages-- reasonable wages--and require the same hours--reasonable hours-- then higher wages and shorter hours will…

Moreover, such action is better for the employer than unemployment and low wages, because it makes more buyers for his product.

On the basis of this simple principle of everybody doing things together, we are starting out on this nationwide attack on unemployment.

It will succeed if our people understand it--in the big industries, in the little shops, in the great cities and in the small villages.

It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.

In the Cotton Textile Code and in other agreements already signed, child labor has been abolished.