Remarks at Natrona Airport, Casper, Wyoming

Mr. Chairman, Governor Rogers, and my fellow Americans:

I am on a very simple trip today, although of some length, with a group from the Department of the Interior and from Agriculture, and with local officers and representatives of those departments. We are making a circuit through Colorado, touched Utah, into Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas, to see if we can learn a little bit more about the great interests of these regions, particularly in the agricultural and reclamation areas.

Now I say that because I want to apologize to any group of Americans such as this, for having no particular or specific message to bring to you. I do thank you most earnestly--most profoundly--for doing me the honor of coming out and giving me a chance to meet some of you once again; because I hope some of you will remember a cold morning, right here on this spot, I think, about 2 years ago, when I stood here with a big crowd under different circumstances.

But I think that then I promised you that, should you send me to Washington, I was going to do my best to pick a Cabinet that would do its best, to pick administrators that would do their best, to look at the United States as a whole, to find out those things that are good for 160 million Americans, not to be swayed too much just by the interests of any one group, any one class, any one section. And it is in pursuance of such promises as those that we are here.

What is good for the agriculture and the agricultural interests of the United States, for the natural resources of the United States, is good for all of us, not only now but extending on into the future. Thus we discharge not only part of our debt to the people of today by having our officials and administrators learn about the needs of people in particular areas and relating them to the needs of the whole nation, but we are likewise--as I see it--doing part of our duty to our children and those yet to come.

All of us who are true Americans are certainly interested in those things. Here in this great livestock-producing area, we have just had the opportunity a few moments ago to fly over some of the great reservoirs, on the way up from the Echo Park dam area, to see those great supplies of water that are helping you stabilize the livestock industry and to become a more prosperous, stable industry in that area.

We don't look upon that as something that is important merry to you. Of course, you must be prosperous, else how are we going to get the money to run the Government? But, unless the United States is prosperous, unless each individual feels that glorious right within himself, to do for himself and his family what he can, to get the spiritual uplift of working as hard as he knows how, for himself, and for his neighbors, then the United States is going backward.

What we are thinking about, therefore, is not merely whether you can have a second car. It is whether you can satisfy the great and proper ambitions that reside within yourselves, the ambitions to make of yourselves a true, fine citizen of this great country--so that all of us may work toward a world peace, so that we may pass on to those who come after us a world that has made at least some little step toward the kind of place, the kind of living in which each of us, each under his own religious faith, in his own belief in America, can make of himself what he should like to be.

The nearer we approach that, the nearer we approach perfection for America. And that is why we are here--trying to learn, not merely to make speeches. Anyway, you know that speeches in themselves are nothing. But if they do help us reveal one to the other something of what we believe in this great country, then indeed they are valuable.

And for myself, the chance to mingle once again with the people that I have known in this western country from babyhood, to say good morning, to see your faces, is a very great privilege.

For one--and there's a number here who can testify to. the truth this morning--for one who spends far too much of his time in Washington, this is truly something.

Thank you again for coming out--and goodbye.