Address at St. Paul, Minnesota

Senator Shipstead, Chief Justice Devaney, my friends of Minnesota:

May I first of all tell you of the great thrill that I have had during the past two hours in driving through St. Paul and Minneapolis at the wonderful reception that you have given me?

As most of you know, I had planned to visit Minnesota on my trip of inspection to the drought areas the end of August. The untimely death of the Secretary of War kept me away. It was at that time also that this State suffered a very great loss in the passing of a virile, magnetic and liberal American leader, Floyd Olson. He had been my friend for many years. I miss him greatly today.

Much water has run over the dam since those days in 1932 when, as Governor of New York, I was the guest of Governor Olson in this very building, the day that he presided at a great gathering in this city. During these more than four years, one of our most important national achievements has been the strides that we have made everywhere in thinking in national terms. And if I remember it, sitting in Governor Olson's office with him, occupying at his insistence his Governor's chair, that was what we were talking about in those days—making America safe in national terms. As a result of those four years America has never been so united as it is today.

In Iowa and in southern Minnesota on one or two occasions I have used the example that the great industrial centers of the East have come to realize that their prosperity is dependent on the prosperity of the farmers of the West. We have come to understand that the agricultural prosperity of the Northwest is directly affected also by the agricultural prosperity and the city prosperity of all the rest of the country. I have farms—two of them—one in New York and the other in Georgia. Georgia will buy Minnesota flour if Georgia gets a decent price for its cotton. Minnesota will buy overalls made of Georgia cotton if Minnesota gets a decent price for its wheat.

People in the manufacturing cities will find more employment at better wages if the farm families of the Nation have the wherewithal to purchase manufactured goods. And the farmers of the Nation will sell larger crops at better prices if the industrial workers in the cities have more money to buy dairy products, vegetables, fruit, pork and beef.

These are lessons, national lessons, that seem very obvious to us today, and yet it is not so very long ago that we had no policy at all about them.

In our local and sectional relationships also- relationships between the different farm regions and between city and country-we have in these four years come to recognize the closeness of the interdependence and the usefulness of the cooperative ideal.

Minnesota is a good place to talk about farm cooperatives. Here dairy and live-stock farmers have pioneered and pointed the way. Here and in Wisconsin have been built the greatest cooperative organizations in the Nation for processing and marketing dairy products.

When three and a half years ago the Administration undertook to meet the desperate and long-neglected needs of agriculture, we turned to the cooperative idea, and called to Washington representatives of the great cooperatives and other farm organizations to work out a program with us.

The Triple A itself had as its foundation and its essence the cooperative idea. Administered locally by community committees selected by the farmers themselves, it was a picture of economic democracy in action. I pay my tribute—with the rest of the Nation- to the patriotic zeal of the committees of farmers who did so much through their earnest cooperation for our adjustment and conservation program. The farmers of America will not forget what' they have done, and what they are doing.

This Administration, from the very start, came to the support of the cooperative ideal by vigorous action. That support has continued. That support will continue.

It established a central bank for cooperatives with twelve regional banks to aid in marketing and purchasing.

It held out the helping hand of credit to production credit associations to enable farmers to finance production through their own banks.

The Triple A worked directly with the cooperatives in their marketing agreement program. By loans to cooperatives we helped to bring the comforts of electricity to many farms of the Nation.

We did not stop at merely lending money. When farm prices were threatened, the Administration held them up by purchasing surplus products through farm cooperatives for distribution to hundreds of thousands of families faced with hunger in our great cities.

Nevertheless, while the Federal Government can help through its resources—and you know the many ways in which we have used national resources to help localities—we in Washington have recognized that cooperation and cooperatives must come from the people themselves. Government can see to it that the rules of the game are fair as between cooperative enterprise and other enterprise. But the initiative, the management itself, must spring and carry on from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.

This Administration is determined to continue in active support of the ever-growing farm cooperative movement.

I am happy in the strengthening of this movement at home. But, my friends, let us remember that the same spirit of cooperation is an essential part of our relations with the other Nations of the world. It is this realistic factual appreciation of the benefits of cooperation that lies behind our consistent and successful efforts to reestablish foreign markets for our farm products.

You will remember back three and a half years ago, in the spring of 1933, our American foreign trade had fallen off to about a third of its former value. That was what I inherited.

Let us go back to fundamentals once more. The very word "trade" means articles of commerce flowing in two directions. It is not a one-way street. At last we have come to understand this in our domestic trade within our own borders. For instance, no single State can produce either crops or merchandise and continue indefinitely to sell them to other States for money alone. Eventually, they have to be paid for in other products as well.

Foreign trade is just like that. There cannot be a revival of foreign exports without a revival of foreign imports—unless, of course, we do as we did between 1920 and 1930 —lend our money to foreign Nations to enable them to buy our own farm and industrial products.

But I have a suspicion that America has learned her lesson once and for all about that kind of frenzied finance.

The Secretary of State of the United States has spoken in Minnesota clearly and unequivocally in regard to the trade agreements that have been made with fourteen foreign countries for mutual trade advantage. He pointed out to you the chapter and verse of the statistical record which shows what these agreements have accomplished to increase the trade and income not only of the industrial workers, but of the farmers of the Nation. It was not a question of winning or losing any treaty. Mutual advantage has been the successful objective; and our exports during the first half of this year, as compared with last year, have increased by one hundred and thirty-two million dollars.

To Canada, our neighbor on the north, the twenty-four million dollars of our increased exports during the first six months have included exports not only of manufactured articles but also of agricultural products. American industry and American agriculture are both benefiting by increased general trade. The figures prove it; and our growing consumption and better farm prices prove it.

I wish every American—city dweller and farmer alike- could fasten this home truth in his memory: When the Nations of the world, including America, had jacked their tariffs to the highest point and enacted embargoes and imposed quotas, farm prices throughout the world were at their lowest, and world trade had almost ceased to exist.

Today, under the leadership of the United States, other Nations of the world are coming to recognize that home truth. Back in 1932, although there was a tariff on wheat of forty-two cents a bushel, you all know that the wheat which you produced up here in the Northwest was selling as low as thirty cents a bushel. There were no farm imports then to worry about; but low prices were plenty to worry about.

Within the past two weeks splendid progress has been made in giving a greater stability to foreign exchange. Within that same time there have been lifted many quotas and embargoes including those on important American agricultural export products.

But, my friends, the increasing restoration of trade, the increase in industry, the increase in employment—they all serve more than a mere economic end. For three years we have had faith that it would turn us and other Nations away from the paths of economic strife which lead to war and toward economic cooperation which leads to international peace.

Peace cannot be attained in this old world of ours just by getting sentimental about it. Peace depends upon the acceptance of the principle and practice of the good neighbor. That practice is founded on the Golden Rule, and must be fortified by cooperation of every kind between Nations.

Peace makes money; peace saves money for everybody. A prosperous world has no permanent room in it for dictatorship or for war. In striving for peace, I am confident that the American people seek it with their hearts and with their heads as well. Enlightened self-interest is justification for what we do.

Confident in the practical wisdom of the ends we seek, with full faith that it will serve in a practical way for peace on earth and good-will between men and Nations, we shall continue on our way.