Franklin D. Roosevelt

Greeting by Telephone to the Bi-Centennial Celebration of Sainte Genevieve, Missouri.

August 22, 1935

The history of the town of Sainte Genevieve eloquently testifies to the fortitude of those pioneers who built their homes on the western bank of the Mississippi and wrested minerals from the hills, furs from the forest, and a plentiful harvest from the plain; who merged their varied nationalities in a mighty effort to carve an American Nation out of the Western wilderness.

We admire that Christian courage which refused to be daunted by Indian depredations and massacres, by a gradual change in the course of the Mississippi threatening the destruction of the settlement, or by the disastrous flood of 1785. In due course, through the rugged efforts of your predecessors, the hostile Indians were pacified; and the restless Mississippi, far from annihilating the community, provoked a providential removal of the church and other buildings to a better site where the village could expand and flourish.

These triumphs over affliction are characteristic of the spirit of our early Americans. Although the problems which confront us today are of a different sort, I am confident that you have not lost the stalwart qualities of frontier days.

It is with a full appreciation of your past that, on this occasion of your Bi-Centennial Celebration, I extend to you my hearty wishes for a happy and prosperous future.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Greeting by Telephone to the Bi-Centennial Celebration of Sainte Genevieve, Missouri. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/209038

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