We also question the wisdom of extending code requirements suited to the great industrial centers and to large employers, to the great number of small employers in the smaller communities.
FDR
The Public Record
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1933, until his death on April 12, 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he was born in New York and is best known for his leadership during two of the most significant crises in American history: the Great Depression and World War II. Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, a series of programs and reforms aimed at economic recovery and social welfare, which fundamentally reshaped the role of the federal government in American life.
gutenberg.org
But I would point out that the extent and severity of labor disputes during this period has been far less than in any previous, comparable period.
The employer who turns away from impartial agencies of peace, who denies freedom of organization to his employees, or fails to make every reasonable effort at a peaceful solution of their differences, is not fully supporting the recovery…
It is time that we made a clean-cut effort to bring about that united action of management and labor, which is one of the high purposes of the Recovery Act.
But I shall ask both groups to give a fair trial to peaceful methods of adjusting their conflicts of opinion and interest, and to experiment for a reasonable time with measures suitable to civilize our industrial civilization.
To those who say that our expenditures for public works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources.
Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.
But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed.
On the contrary, we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures…
We do not get greatly excited nor is our peace of mind disturbed, whether we be businessmen or workers or farmers, by awesome pronouncements concerning the unconstitutionality of some of our measures of recovery and relief and reform.
We are not frightened by reactionary lawyers or political editors.
In our efforts for recovery we have avoided on the one hand the theory that business should and must be taken over into an all- embracing government.
We have avoided on the other hand the equally untenable theory that it is an interference with liberty to offer reasonable help when private enterprise is in need of help.
The course we have followed fits the American practice of government--a practice of taking action step by step, of regulating only to meet concrete needs--a practice of courageous recognition of change.
I am not for a return to that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few.
I prefer and I am sure you prefer that broader definition of liberty under which we are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.
More and more people, because of clearer thinking and a better understanding, are considering the whole rather than a mere part relating to one section or to one crop, or to one industry, or to an individual private occupation.
That is a tremendous gain for the principles of democracy.
The overwhelming majority of people in this country know how to sift the wheat from the chaff in what they hear and what they read.
They know that the process of the constructive rebuilding of America cannot be done in a day or a year, but that it is being done in spite of the few who seek to confuse them and to profit by their confusion.
I speak, therefore, tonight, to and of the American people as a whole.
In spite of the fact that unemployment remains a serious problem here as in every other nation, we have come to recognize the possibility and the necessity of certain helpful remedial measures.
The first is to make provisions intended to relieve, to minimize, and to prevent future unemployment; the second is to establish the practical means to help those who are unemployed in this present emergency.
The program for social security now pending before the Congress is a necessary part of the future unemployment policy of the government.
While our present and projected expenditures for work relief are wholly within the reasonable limits of our national credit resources, it is obvious that we cannot continue to create governmental deficits for that purpose year after year.
Politicians like FDR
