Remarks to the National 4-H Conference.

THANK YOU very much. I think, youngsters, that I had better unbutton my coat to show off my insignia.

Actually, it was kind of a real "to-do" on this. We made a great problem of it, because normally I wear a vest and I had to get out of my vest to get into this, so I had to be dressed for the occasion.

I cannot tell you how often I have met with groups of 4-H people. It is always an inspiration to meet with you. I happen to be one of those people who is interested not only in your whole organizational work, your ideals, your slogans and all the rest of it, but so much of the actual work you do. I am a farmer at heart.

And, incidentally, that reminds me of something about your Pennsylvanians here, one day I gave a 4-H boy a heifer if he would get busy and fatten her and put her in a show. I wonder if he had any luck about it. Is he here? No? All right. I had just forgotten all about that. I honestly wanted to see what the little heifer did.

The nice thing about this meeting today is that I understand it is the tenth anniversary of your international program which really constitutes a feature of what I call the People-to-People Program for promoting world peace. Because of that, I am particularly pleased to have you present a peace pipe to me. It connotes for us a symbol of peace. It was a peace between different peoples as well. It was used not only among the Indians themselves in their several tribes--but also between the warring Indians and white men. And finally in the councils and through the councils that they carried out under that spirit, there were arrangements made that if not completely just at that time, have through the years worked for the benefit of both of those peoples.

I think it is for many reasons that the particular program you are now carrying forward bears promise for great fruitfulness in the future. first of all, you are interested in these agricultural pursuits, and so many of the people today that are called the less well-developed or the uncommitted people or the newly-liberated people who have won in recent years their independence--do have the food problem. They are not well fed. Indeed, in some countries we know that the annual income is not over seventy-five dollars a year. How could they be well fed?

You people can do, therefore, not only a great deal in a technical way of showing how the rates of production in this country have been multiplied. When I was a boy visiting in the South, half a bale for an acre as a yearly crop of cotton was a good average, and a bale was miraculous.

Today I saw reports from the Department of Agriculture; last year on certain acreage it was five and a half bales an acre !

We have so greatly increased production per unit that here is something that you people can, by your meetings with our foreign friends here present, and when you visit them abroad, tell them something about the techniques which we have brought about.

And if we can do that, we will do much in pushing still further along the road to mutual understanding which means world peace finally.

It is more than that, though, far more than the technical, here. You 4-H-ers are young. You have not yet acquired so many of the prejudices, the emotional antagonisms that so often prevail in people of my age. It is very hard to get rid of these things. You people are meeting others of your own age in other lands, of other religions, of other races, other colors. But of what importance it is if you are struggling for the same great ideals, principles, aspirations that they are and how helpful we could be to them. Then we would be talking not only from the brain to the brain on the way you can raise more corn or cotton or wheat or hemp, but you would be talking from the heart to the heart. Then there would be, coming directly, better understanding among ourselves, a greater elimination of prejudice and these mutual antagonisms, a relief from the burdens of armament, a use of our resources for the better development of our human resources, and in the long last, better promise of universal, just peace.

I see today not just greater problems for you young people; I say there are greater opportunities today to improve what we have got than any other generation has known. We live with difficulties that seem almost to overwhelm us unless we keep our faith in our God, in ourselves, and in our country, and in the decency of our own convictions with respect to other people, and with them bring this old world to a better level of understanding than it has even known before. And that will be something to live by, to work with, and for, all your lives.

I envy you your youth. I would like to start in right along with you in that kind of job.

Thank you very much. Good to see you and thank you for the pipe.