Well, here we are together again – after four years – and what years they have been!
You know, I am actually four years older, which is a fact that seems to annoy some
people. In fact, in the mathematical field there are millions of Americans who are
more than eleven years older than when we started in to clear up the mess that was
dumped in our laps in 1933.
We all know that certain people who make it a practice to depreciate the accomplishments
of labor – who even attack labor as unpatriotic – they keep this up usually for
three years and six months in a row. But then, for some strange reason they change
their tune- every four years- just before election day. When votes are at stake,
they suddenly discover that they really love labor and that they are anxious to
protect labor from its old friends.
I got quite a laugh, for example – and I am sure that you did – when I read this
plank in the Republican platform adopted at their National Convention in Chicago
last July: “The Republican Party accepts the purposes of the National Labor Relations
Act, the Wage and Hour Act, the Social Security Act and all other Federal statutes
designed to promote and protect the welfare of American working men and women, and
we promise a fair and just administration of these laws.”
You know, many of the Republican leaders and Congressmen and candidates, who shouted
enthusiastic approval of that plank in that Convention Hall would not even recognize
these progressive laws if they met them in broad daylight. Indeed, they have personally
spent years of effort and energy – and much money – in fighting every one of those
laws in the Congress, and in the press, and in the courts, ever since this Administration
began to advocate them and enact them into legislation. That is a fair example of
their insincerity and of their inconsistency.
The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels.
The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible
for the 1929 crash and the depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible
for all social progress under the New Deal.
Now, imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery – but I am afraid that in this
case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud.
Of course, it is perfectly true that there are enlightened, liberal elements in
the Republican Party, and they have fought hard and honorably to bring the Party
up to date and to get it in step with the forward march of American progress. But
these liberal elements were not able to drive the Old Guard Republicans from their
entrenched positions.
Can the Old Guard pass itself off as the New Deal? I think not.
We have all seen many marvelous stunts in the circus but no performing elephant
could turn a hand-spring without falling flat on his back.
I need not recount to you the centuries of history which have been crowded into
these four years since I saw you last.
There were some – in the Congress and out – who raised their voices against our
preparations for defense – before and after 1939 – objected to them, raised their
voices against them as hysterical war mongering, who cried out against our help
to the Allies as provocative and dangerous. We remember the voices. They would like
to have us forget them now. But in 1940 and 1941- my, it seems a long time ago –
they were loud voices. Happily they were a minority and – fortunately for ourselves,
and for the world – they could not stop America.
There are some politicians who kept their heads buried deep in the sand while the
storms of Europe and Asia were headed Our way, who said that the lend-lease bill
“would bring an end to free government in the United States,” and who said, “only
hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy, or Japan contemplates war on us.”
These very men are now asking the American people to intrust to them the conduct
of our foreign policy and our military policy.
What the Republican leaders are now saying in effect is this: “Oh, just forget what
we used to say, we have changed our minds now – we have been reading the public
opinion polls about these things and now we know what the American people want.”
And they say: “Don’t leave the task of making the peace to those old men who first
urged it and who have already laid the foundations for it, and who have had to fight
all of us inch by inch during the last five years to do it. Why, just turn it all
over to us. We’ll do it so skillfully – that we won’t lose a single isolationist
vote or a single isolationist campaign contribution.”
I think there is one thing that you know: I am too old for that. I cannot talk out
of both sides of my mouth at the same time.
The Government welcomes all sincere supporters of the cause of effective world collaboration
in the making of a lasting peace. Millions of Republicans all over the Nation are
with us – and have been with us – in our unshakable determination to build the solid
structure of peace. And they too will resent this campaign talk by those who first
woke up to the facts of international life a few short months ago when they began
to study the polls of public opinion.
Those who today have the military responsibility for waging this war in all parts
of the globe are not helped by the statements of men who, without responsibility
and without’ the knowledge of the facts, lecture the Chiefs of Staff of the United
States as to the best means of dividing our armed forces and our military resources
between the Atlantic and Pacific, between the Army and the Navy, and among the commanding
generals of the different theaters of war. And I may say that those commanding generals
are making good in a big way.
When I addressed you four years ago, I said, “I know that America will never be
disappointed in its expectation that labor will always continue to do its share
of the job we now face and do it patriotically and effectively and unselfishly.”
Today we know that America has not been disappointed. In his Order of the Day when
the Allied armies first landed in Normandy two months ago, General Eisenhower said:
“Our home fronts have given us overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions
of war.”
The country knows that there is a breed of cats, luckily not too numerous, called
labor-baiters. I know that there are labor baiters among the opposition who, instead
of calling attention to the achievements of labor in this war, prefer to pick on
the occasional strikes that have occurred – strikes that have been condemned by
every responsible national labor leader. I ought to say, parenthetically, all but
one. And that one labor leader, incidentally, is certainly not conspicuous among
my supporters.
Labor-baiters forget that at our peak American labor and management have turned
out airplanes at the rate of 109,000 a year; tanks – 57,000 a year; combat vessels
– 573 a year; landing vessels, to get the troops ashore – 31,000 a year; cargo ships
– 19 million tons a year – and Henry Kaiser is here tonight, I am glad to say; and
small arms ammunition- oh, I can’t understand it, I don’t believe you can either
– 23 billion rounds a year.
But a strike is news, and generally appears in shrieking headlines – and, of course,
they say labor is always to blame. The fact is that since Pearl Harbor only one-tenth
of one percent of man-hours have been lost by strikes. Can you beat that?
But, you know, even those candidates who burst out in election-year affection for
social legislation and for labor in general, still think that you ought to be good
boys and stay out of politics. And above all, they hate to see any working man or
woman contribute a dollar bill to any wicked political party. Of course, it is all
right for large financiers and industrialists and monopolists to contribute tens
of thousands of dollars – but their solicitude for that dollar which the men and
women in the ranks of labor contribute is always very touching.
They are, of course, perfectly willing to let you vote – unless you happen to be
a soldier or a sailor overseas, or a merchant seaman carrying the munitions of war.
In that case they have made it pretty hard for you to vote at all – for there are
some political candidates who think that they may have a chance of election, if
only the total vote is small enough.
And while I am on the subject of voting, let me urge every American citizen – man
and woman- to use your sacred privilege of voting, no matter which candidate you
expect to support. Our millions of soldiers and sailors and merchant seamen have
been handicapped or prevented from voting by those politicians and candidates who
think that they stand to lose by such votes. You here at home have the freedom of
the ballot. Irrespective of party, you should register and vote this November. I
think that is a matter of plain good citizenship.
Words come easily, but they do not change the record. You are, most of you, old
enough to remember what things were like for labor in 1932.
You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures
of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the “Hoovervilles,” and the
young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless future; the closed
factories and mines and mills; the ruined and abandoned farms; the stalled railroads
and the empty docks; the blank despair of a whole Nation–and the utter impotence
of the Federal Government.
You remember the long, hard road, with its gains and its setbacks, which we have
traveled together ever since those days. Now there are some politicians who do not
remember that far back, and there are some who remember but find it convenient to
forget. No, the record is not to be washed away that easily.
The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a very interesting
thing, because it is foreign. They have imported the propaganda technique invented
by the dictators abroad. Remember, a number of years ago, there was a book, Mein
Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book
– and it was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan. According to that technique,
you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic
nature would make it more credible – if only you keep repeating it over and over
and over again.
Well, let us take some simple illustrations that come to mind. For example, although
I rubbed my eyes when I read it, we have been told that it was not a Republican
depression, but a Democratic depression from which this Nation was saved in 1933
– that this Administration this one today – is responsible for all the suffering
and misery that the history books and the American people have always thought had
been brought about during the twelve ill-fated years when the Republican party was
in power.
Now, there is an old and somewhat lugubrious adage which says: “Never speak of rope
in the house of a man who has been hanged.” In the same way, if I were a Republican
leader speaking to a mixed audience, the last word in the whole dictionary that
I think I would use is that word “depression.”
You know, they pop up all the time. For another example, I learned – much to my
amazement – that the policy of this Administration was to keep men in the Army when
the war was over, because there might be no jobs for them in civil life.
Well, the very day that this fantastic charge was first made, a formal plan for
the method of speedy discharge from the Army had already been announced by the War
Department – a plan based on the wishes of the soldiers themselves.
This callous and brazen falsehood about demobilization did, of course, a very simple
thing; it was an effort to stimulate fear among American mothers and wives and sweethearts.
And, incidentally, it was hardly calculated to bolster the morale of our soldiers
and sailors and airmen who are fighting our battles all over the world.
But perhaps the most ridiculous of these campaign falsifications is the one that
this Administration failed to prepare for the war that was coming. I doubt whether
even Goebbels would have tried that one. For even he would never have dared hope
that the voters of America had already forgotten that many of the Republican leaders
in the Congress and outside the Congress tried to thwart and block nearly every
attempt that this Administration made to warn our people and to arm our Nation.
Some of them called our 50,000 airplane program fantastic. Many of those very same
leaders who fought every defense measure that we proposed are still in control of
the Republican party – look at their names – were in control of its National Convention
in Chicago, and would be in control of the machinery of the Congress and of the
Republican party, in the event of a Republican victory this fall.
These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or
on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well,
of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala
does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned
that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that
I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find
him – at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars-
his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed
to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself – such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut
that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent,
to object to libelous statements about my dog.
Well, I think we all recognize the old technique. The people of this country know
the past too well to be deceived into forgetting. Too much is at stake to forget.
There are tasks ahead of us which we must now complete with the same will and the
same skill and intelligence and devotion that have already led us so far along the
road to victory.
There is the task of finishing victoriously this most terrible of all wars as speedily
as possible and with the least cost in lives.
There is the task of setting up international machinery to assure that the peace,
once established, will not again be broken.
And there is the task that we face here at home – the task of reconverting our economy
from the purposes of war to the purposes of peace.
These peace-building tasks were faced once before, nearly a generation ago. They
were botched by a Republican administration. That must not happen this time. We
will not let it happen this time.
Fortunately, we do not begin from scratch. Much has been done. Much more is under
way. The fruits of victory this time will not be apples sold on street corners.
Many months ago, this Administration set up the necessary machinery for an orderly
peacetime demobilization. The Congress has passed much more legislation continuing
the agencies needed for demobilization – with additional powers to carry out their
functions.
I know that the American people – business and labor and agriculture – have the
same will to do for peace what they have done for war. And I know that they can
sustain a national income that will assure full production and full employment under
our democratic system of private enterprise, with Government encouragement and aid
whenever and wherever that is necessary.
The keynote of all that we propose to do in reconversion can be found in the one
word jobs. We shall lease or dispose of our Government-owned plants and facilities
and our surplus war property and land, on the basis of how they can best be operated
by private enterprise to give jobs to the greatest number.
We shall follow a wage policy that will sustain the purchasing power of labor –
for that means more production and more jobs.
You and I know that the present policies on wages and prices were conceived to serve
the needs of the great masses of the people. They stopped inflation. They kept prices
on a relatively stable level. Through the demobilization period, policies will be
carried out with the same objective in mind -to serve the needs of the great masses
of the people.
This is not the time in which men can be forgotten as they were in the Republican
catastrophe that we inherited. The returning soldiers, the workers by their machines,
the farmers in the field, the miners, the men and women in offices and shops, do
not intend to be forgotten.
No, they know that they are not surplus. Because they know that they are America.
We must set targets and objectives for the future which will seem impossible – like
the airplanes – to those who live in and are weighted down by the dead past.
We are even now organizing the logistics of the peace, just as Marshall and King
and Arnold, MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Nimitz are organizing the logistics of this
war.
I think that the victory of the American people and their allies in this war will
be far more than a victory against Fascism and reaction and the dead hand of despotism
of the past. The victory of the American people and their allies in this war will
be a victory for democracy. It will constitute such an affirmation of the strength
and power and vitality of government by the people as history has never before witnessed.
And so, my friends, we have had affirmation of the vitality of democratic government
behind us, that demonstration of its resilience and its capacity for decision and
for action – we have that knowledge of our own strength and power – we move forward
with God’s help to the greatest epoch of free achievement by free men that the world
has ever known.
