Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (127 page)

Give the plunderbund but eight years more of such governmental cooperation, and a combination of power companies will put a few men in control of the public utilities of a mighty empire. Make no mistake about it—that is the great Jacksonian struggle of tomorrow. And with that sinister possibility upon us, the people must determine whether they will entrust their interest to those who believe that governments are strong in proportion as they are made profitable to the powerful or to the Jeffersonians, who believe that governments are created for the service of mankind. Once in possession and entrenched, the plunderbund of the power monopoly cannot be dislodged by the fighting force of a dozen Andrew Jacksons….

We are mobilized to lead the people back to the old paths of constitutional liberty and to the good way. We are going back—back to the old landmarks of liberty and equality when ordinary men had rights that even power respected; when justice, not privilege, was the watchword of the state; when the preamble of the declaration and the bill of rights had meaning; when the nation embraced every section and every class….

Our principles have been written in the triumphs of the people and baptized in the blood of our bravest and our best. Jefferson phrased them, Jackson vitalized them, Wilson applied them, and we go forth to battle for them now.

We face a foe grown arrogant with success. It were infamy to permit the enemy to divide us, or divert us, on the eve of such a battle. Issues are involved that go to the determination of the future of our institutions and our children. The call that comes to us is as sacred as the cause of humanity itself. From the grave at the Hermitage comes the solemn warning that no party ever won or deserved to win that did not organize and fight unitedly for victory—and we shall thus organize and fight. This is a unique campaign….

And we shall win because our cause is just. The predatory forces before us seek a triumph for the sake of the sacking. Their shock troops are the Black Horse Cavalry whose hoofbeats have made hideous music on Pennsylvania Avenue during the last eight years. They are led by money-mad cynics and scoffers—and we go forth to battle for the cause of man. In the presence of such a foe “he who dallies is a dastard and he who doubts is damned.” In this convention we close debate and grasp the sword. The time has come. The battle hour has struck. “Then to your tents, O Israel!”

Two emotions—despair and panic—gripped the nation in the depression winter of 1932–33. One out of four workers could not find a job; world grain prices were at a 300-year low; governors of thirty-eight states had closed the banks. In the preceding summer, the Democratic candidate, in his acceptance speech, had promised “a new deal for the American people” and had won the election in a popular landslide, but in the long interregnum between November and March he had not worked with the defeated President Hoover to help revive the economy or refortify spirits. In Europe, fascism was on the rise, and in the United States, the desire for a “man on horseback” to take charge of a moribund America was a threat—indeed, the strongest applause in the new president’s speech came after the line warning he might call for “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, who moved from the New York governorship to the presidency at age fifty-one, had no dictatorship in mind; instead, he saw the need for a dramatic infusion of confidence with a ringing speech, followed by a great show of government activity, to shake the nation out of its mental as well as economic depression. He had in mind some banking regulation and a mild stimulus, with cuts in federal payrolls offset by increases in relief payments—relatively conservative steps in retrospect, considering the scope of the crisis, but seen as daring at the time.

Working from a draft prepared by Columbia University professor Raymond Moley, one of his “brain trusters,” he wrote out a speech designed to lift spirits. The public had derided his predecessor’s efforts on that score as “Prosperity is just around the corner”; FDR added his scorn
to the failed exhortations, but was not afraid to offer “Plenty is at our doorstep.” The most famous line, about “fear itself,” is sometimes attributed to FDR’s reading of Henry David Thoreau’s “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” and a nearly identical line can be found in Sir Francis Bacon’s works, but Professor Moley told the anthologist in 1966 that the line was submitted by Louis Howe, the gnomic Roosevelt adviser, who saw the phrase in a newspaper ad a few weeks before the inaugural.

The speech opens with an attack on “the money changers” who had been driven from the temple—a biblical allusion to an act by Jesus—which made the bankers and the moneyed class in general the already routed villain, An “action program” is promised, but not specified; a moral lesson is drawn, frowning at the previous decade’s “mad chase of evanescent profits”; a martial call for discipline and sacrifice is made, the metaphor extended with “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack….” Then comes the warning that if this plan doesn’t work, he will ask Congress for greater power to bring “discipline and direction under leadership,” because the people have made him “the present instrument of their wishes.”

The general promise to do something—to stop the drift and reverse direction—coupled with the steel in the speech of the imposition of “discipline” into the chaos, and the vigor of the voice heard on radio, had an electric effect on popular opinion. The bold tone and buoyant delivery encouraged people parched for hope.

***

THIS IS A
day of national consecration.

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty, and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True, they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellowmen.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct
in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This nation asks for action, and action now.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the federal, state, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities, which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.

Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order: there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments, so that there will be an end to speculation with other people’s money; and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.

These are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress, in special session, detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several states.

Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I
shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment.

The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in and parts of the United States—a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.