Franklin D. Roosevelt

Remarks to the Master Farmers Group.

October 25, 1935

It is grand to see you all. I recall way back in. 1928, when I was Governor of the State of New York, making the first awards to Master Farmers. Since then I have attended several of the Master Farmers' banquets, both in New York City and at Cornell University.

The Master Farmers' movement is well worth while. Down here I come in contact with it in other States of the Union; and while we in New York have been perhaps more successful in this movement than in any other State, the idea has taken hold practically all over the United States. Even down in Georgia where a Dutchess County farmer tries to raise a little cotton, we have Master Farmers.

We are making, I think, some real progress. Certainly, conditions in general are better than they were, although we still have, of course, a good way to go.

One interesting thing to me is that the country as a whole is becoming more and more understanding of our general farm problems. It has come to realize that the industrial people in the cities cannot be prosperous unless the farm people of the United States have purchasing power. That is one of the things we have been trying for the last two or three years to get people to understand in cities all over the United States.

One of our problems is to increase the purchasing power of many sections of the country where the purchasing power was extremely low in the old days. We people who come from upstate New York perhaps have very little real realization of what farming means in the agricultural States of the South—that is, the conditions of farm life down there. But the farm population of the South is beginning to better their conditions, to bring them up more approximately to our conditions in the North, which, even today, are infinitely better than they are in the South..

There is another thing we are trying to get away from, in part by experimentation, because we can't always hit it right the first time. We are trying to get away from the tremendous fluctuations in crop values that the country has gone through over the last one hundred and fifty years. I always use an example: If a piece of real estate or a farm or a piece of city property were to fluctuate in value 50 percent one way or 50 percent another way, we regard that as a very extreme fluctuation. If the clothes that we wear were to fluctuate in price 50 percent up or 50 percent down, we would think that was a pretty serious thing. Yet nobody has ever really given much thought to the fact that farm prices do not hesitate to fluctuate 300 percent and 400 percent and 500 percent in a very short period of time. On the basic crops in this country from 1921 to 1933, the price of, let us say, cotton fluctuated from 28 cents a pound down to 41 1/2 cents a pound to the farmer. The price of wheat fluctuated from between $1.30 and $1.40 down to as low as 25 cents or 30 cents a bushel on the farm. Well, 30 cents up to $1.20 is a fluctuation of 400 percent. And so it goes.

That is true of dairy products; and it is true with respect to almost everything that the farm population has produced in our past history. What we are seeking are greater uniformity of price and the avoidance of some of these terrific fluctuations that have made the farm business in this country such a very highly speculative business. The more we can stabilize that business the better it is for the half of the United States which is either directly engaged in agriculture or directly dependent on agriculture.

That is one reason why I am so tremendously keen about the Master Farmers' Organization. You, as Master Farmers, can explain these things; and, because you are Master Farmers, you will be listened to far more readily than a mere politician like me, or professors of economics like Ed (Eastman), for instance. Are you a professor of economics?

MR. EASTMAN: No, sir, I am not.

THE PRESIDENT: Then, like temporary bankers, like Henry Morgenthau, for, I suppose while he is running the Treasury of the United States he might be called a temporary banker.

It is fine to see you all. These grounds, I think they call them the South Grounds of the White House, are open to you and I hope you will go through them and have a very, very good time. I wish I could go out with you myself but I have two or three appointments before I start on the day's mail.

These South Grounds—that is their official name, but we call them the back yard—cover about fourteen or fifteen acres, and they are in substantially the same condition today as they were back in the Civil War days. Before Lincoln's time, the back yard of the White House was not even fenced in except for a rough, wooden fence. Andrew Jackson used to keep his cows and sheep on the lawn.

This winter, when we were doing over the White House kitchens which needed to be brought up to modern standards, we excavated under the front porch of the White House and in doing that we went through a brick wall, and there we found two stone horse-stalls that were put there during the Administration of Andrew Jackson, just a little over a hundred years ago. There was a big stone watering trough with the date and the initials "A. J." That is going to be preserved and taken over to the National Museum as a historic memento of Andrew Jackson. So you see in the old days, the White House was not only a White House but also a farm. I wish it could continue to be a farm today.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Remarks to the Master Farmers Group. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/209310

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