Address at Omaha, Nebraska

Mrs. Hitchcock, Governor Cochran, Mr. Mayor, you my friends of Nebraska and neighboring States:

I am glad to come back to Nebraska after an absence of only a few weeks; and I am especially glad to come for the firsttime to this marvelous Aksarben Coliseum, and to receive your greetings.

First of all, a word to you as Nebraskans. I hope that this word will be heard by the citizens of the other forty-seven States, because I know that what I am going to say represents the conviction of the great majority of those who are devoted to good government, clean government, representative government.

On this platform sits a man whose reputation for many years has been known in every community—a man old in years but young in heart—a man who through all these years has had no boss but his own conscience—the Senior Senator from the State of Nebraska, given to the Nation by the people of Nebraska—George W. Norris.

Outside of my own State of New York, I have consistently refrained from taking part in elections in any other State.

But Senator Norris' name has been entered as a candidate for Senator from Nebraska. And to my rule of non-participation in State elections I have made- and so long as he lives I always will make- one magnificently justified exception.

George Norris' candidacy transcends State and party lines. In our national history we have had few elder statesmen who like him have preserved the aspirations of youth as they accumulated the wisdom of years. He is one of the major prophets of America.

Help this great American to continue an historic career of service.

Nebraska will be doing a great service not only to itself, but to every other State in the Union and to the Nation as a whole, if it places this great American above partisanship, and keeps George Norris in the Senate of the United States.

I want to take you back four years, to 1932. In that year, when I was a candidate for the Presidency, I pledged my Administration to a farm policy that would help the farmer. Tonight every man and woman on an American farm, east or west, who has read today's market reports knows that we have done what we said we would do.

What needed to be done?

You remember that in March, 1933, after twelve lean years, farm income was disappearing and farm prices had sunk to a bankruptcy level.

In 1932 America's farm population was the greatest in our history, and yet the farmers' income was the lowest for the quarter century for which we have records. Farmers represented 25 percent of the Nation's population—but they got only 7 1/2 percent of the national income.

The spectre of foreclosure stalked the farmer's plow.

American agriculture was on the road to pauperism.

When the World War ended, the Nations of Europe whom we had been feeding went back to farming for themselves. Our farmers were left holding the bag— a bag that bulged with vast quantities of wheat and corn and cotton for which the market had disappeared.

That was the farmer's plight. What did Republican leadership do about it?

The best that it could offer was the Farm Board, a contraption that set an all-time high for extravagant futility. It met the problem of unsalable and unexplorable surpluses by piling up bigger surpluses.

To finish the job, the Republican Smoot-Hawley tariff robbed the farmer of his last chance for a foreign market.

We found that this conspicuous failure of Government to help the farmer had created—by March 4, 1933— a state of mind in the Nation which, itself, seemed to bar the way out for the farmer's difficulties. There was a defeatist attitude- a conviction that the farmer could not be helped, that all efforts were foredoomed to failure, that any party which dared to substitute action for talk would get its political fingers burned.

Along with this defeatism there was the belief that money spent on the farm problem was money wasted—that the only excuse for spending it was to keep the farmer in line—to buy political peace.

That was what had happened to American agriculture when this Administration came into office.

That was the debris of twelve years of failure which we had to clear away before we could begin to lay the basis for a permanent agricultural prosperity.

Tonight you know that the ground has been cleared of that debris. After twelve years in which he has been harassed and weighed down by the burdens of each succeeding day, the farmer at last has begun to get into the clear, so that he can begin again to take thought for tomorrow.

Back of what we did was the conviction that the agricultural problem is not a problem for the farmer alone—that it is a problem for the Nation as a whole. That is the way we attacked it.

And the Nation is now going along with the farmer. Now for the first time in this industrial period of our history, the American people understand that there is a definite bond between agriculture and industry, that the money we have used for the restoration of American agriculture has been an investment in the restoration of American industry, an underwriting for the wages of American labor, a stimulus for profits in American business.

The defeatist attitude has at last itself been defeated.

Back of what we did was a second conviction—that a sound farm policy must be a policy run by farmers. Ours is that kind of policy. The farmers of America moved into the Department of Agriculture on the day that Henry Wallace set up shop there. For the very first time, a national farm program was made in conference with, and with the agreement of, the farm leaders of all our farm organizations—a program which came out of the free and open councils of farmers rather than out of the vote-catching schemes of politicians.

With these convictions, this Administration put its hand to the plow. It has not turned, it will not turn, back.

I am going to tell you in just seven sentences what we have done. Every man and woman on an American farm can expand these seven sentences in terms of the recovery that has come to each of them in the last three and a half years.

First, by our Agricultural Adjustment Act, our monetary policy, our soil conservation program, and our assistance to farm cooperatives, we have raised the farmers' net annual income by three and a half billion dollars to a sum three times what it was in 1932.

Second, through the Farm Credit Administration we have saved thousands of homes and farms from foreclosure and have reduced the staggering burden of the farmers' debts.

Third, through reciprocal trade treaties and international currency stabilization, we have begun to recover the farmers' foreign markets in the only way in which they can be recovered and held—by a policy of mutual international advantage which today is bearing fruit in the reopening of markets for American farm products in all of the fourteen countries making these agreements—by a policy which, for example, within the last ten days has brought about lower tariffs in France, Italy and Switzerland for the benefit of our farmers. And, my friends, a growing trade is making for international peace.

Fourth, by our program to revive business, to increase employment, to raise business and professional incomes and the wages of labor, and to increase the purchasing power and consumption of the average American family, we have restored national income, and prepared the way for the steady and longtime expansion of the farmers' home market.

Fifth, by our program of land use and conservation we have ended the policy of immediate glut and eventual waste, and have laid the basis for a permanent plenty.

Sixth, by our program of rural electrification, by our farm-to-market roads, by our aid to rural schools, we have begun to get for the farmer his fair share in the comforts, the advantages, the wider interests and the deeper satisfactions which go to make the good life for himself and for his children.

And seventh, when disastrous drought struck the land in many parts of our country, we rushed immediate and direct relief to the farmers and stockmen to save them from want—a policy that some people call waste, but that you and I call wise.

There is the record. In those seven sentences, the farmer and the farmer's family can measure for themselves the vast difference between the desperation which was theirs in the spring of 1933 and the recovery which is theirs in 1936. From what that record has done and is doing for you, judge for yourselves our determination and our capacity to carry this program through.

After having neglected a twelve-year opportunity for help to the American farmer, as his condition got worse and worse, what does Republican leadership now offer?

First of all, it would scrap the present program, which it has condemned as a"subterfuge" and a "stop-gap." It would junk the farmers' organization to carry it out. It would end the farmers' program of cooperation, and send them back to the "free competition"—or "rugged individualism" if you will—that wrecked them in 1932.

Next, it would substitute a system of tariff equivalent payments, not for any permanent contribution to farm wealth or national income, but merely as a cash hand-out—in other words, a dole. These payments, under their plan, would be made only to the producers of exportable farm crops—specifically hogs, wheat, cotton and tobacco. Dairymen, cattlemen, sugar growers and producers of other varieties of crops of which there normally is no exportable surplus would be left out.

What about the effect of such a scheme? Would it serve to protect farmers from price collapse under a burden of surpluses? Would it guard them in the future against a disaster like 1932?

No plan could lead the Nation back faster to such a crisis.

The proposed plan of the Republican leaders is a straight subsidy of unlimited farm production. In a year or two of normal weather, it would pile surplus on top of surplus, driving prices down and down and down. It is the Federal Farm Board all over again, and it means nine cents for corn again as it did in 1932.

Finally, to make the parallel with 1932 letter perfect, the Republican leaders now propose to repeal the Reciprocal Tariff Act, and go back to the old Smoot-Hawley tariff policy. Once again, as in 1932, the farmers would have price-crushing surpluses at home, and no place abroad to sell them.

What about the cost? It would run to one and a half and possibly even two billion dollars every year. This vast sum would be spent not to save agriculture, but to wreck it and with it to wreck the Nation.

Either this plan which they advocate in the West, or the curtailment of expenditures which they talk about in the East, would have to be discarded. Both promises cannot possibly be carried out at the same time.

For the first time in many cruel years, we are getting the problem of the business of farming well in hand. Do you now want to turn that problem over to the care of those who did nothing about it in the past? Do you want to turn it over to those who now make inconsistent, campaign-devised, half-baked promises which you and they know they cannot keep?

It has been said that the Administration's farm program changes each year like new models of automobiles. I accept that simile. The automobile of today is the same kind of vehicle, in principle, as it was twenty years ago. But because the automobile manufacturer did not hesitate to pioneer, because he was willing to make yearly changes in his model, the Nation now drives a car that is vastly improved. Farming, too, is the same in principle now as it has always been. But because the farmer has been willing to pioneer, because, with the aid of scientists, economists and engineers he has been willing, year after year, to change, because of these things both the product of the farms and the business of farming have been vastly improved. It is the aim of our policy not only to prevent the return of yesterday's model, but to make tomorrow's model better than today's. Good as it was in the old days, we have passed beyond Model-T farming.

Our long-time policy of prudence and farm progress includes a program of conservation against land wastage and soil impoverishment. From the beginning, such a program has been basic in our plans. On October 25, 1935, months before the action of the Supreme Court on the Triple A, I said publicly that it was the intention of the framers of that Act as it was my intention "to pass from the purely emergency phases necessitated by a grave national crisis to a long-time more permanent plan for American agriculture."

We knew that our soil had been recklessly impoverished by crops which did not pay. Because we stand committed to a philosophy of continuous plenty, we have set ourselves resolutely against waste —waste that comes from unneeded production, waste that imperils the Nation's future by draining away the abundance with which God has enriched our soil.

Increasing production alone in an unlimited way appeals to no person who thinks the problem through. Increasing consumption must go hand in hand with it. Here is a simple figure to mull over. If every family in the United States had enough earning capacity to live on what the doctors and dietitians call a Class-A Diet, we would need foodstuffs from forty million acres more than we are using today. America's diet is better than that of most .other Nations, but from the point of view of better national health, it is still inadequate. I seek to increase purchasing power so that people can pay for more food and better food, and in turn provide a larger and larger domestic market for the farmer.

It is a further part of our long-time farm policy to attack the evil of farm tenancy. In this we have already made a good beginning with lower interest rates and better prices. We are preparing legislation, in cooperation with farm leaders, to submit to the Congress in January to help solve this problem. We cannot, as a Nation, be content until we have reached the ultimate objective of every farm family owning its own farm.

Further, we propose to give to the farmer and to the consumer, a sound plan of crop insurance in kind against extreme fluctuations of supply and of price. No one wins from such fluctuations except the speculator. The farmer and the consumer lose together. That is why crop insurance is a protection for both. At one and' the same time it banishes the consumer's fear of a food shortage and the farmer's fear of a food surplus. Until both are protected, neither is safe. The ultimate interests of the farmer and the consumer of America are the same.

That, my friends, is why I am not making one kind of speech to the farmers out here and another kind of speech to consumers in the big cities of the East. The same speech and the same policy must go for both.

It has taken a lot of education in these last few years, but the city dweller has now come to know that unless the farmer receives fair prices for what he produces, he cannot buy the things that are turned out in the shops and factories of the cities.

And so we plan for the future of agriculture—security for those who have spent their lives in farming; opportunity for real careers for young men and women on the farms; a share for farmers in the good things of life abundant enough to justify and preserve our instinctive faith in the land.

In all our plans we are guided, and will continue to be guided, by the fundamental belief that the American farmer, living on his own land, remains our ideal of self-reliance and of spiritual balance—the source from which the reservoirs of the Nation's strength are constantly renewed. It is from the men and women of our farms, living close to the soil that this Nation, like the Greek giant Antaeus, touches Mother Earth and rises with strength renewed a hundredfold.

We want to perpetuate that ideal, we want to perpetuate it under modern conditions, so that man may be strong in the ancient virtues and yet lay hold of the advantages which science and new knowledge offer to a well-rounded life.