Address at Wichita, Kansas

Senator McGill, my friends of Kansas:

I am especially happy to come here at the time of this, your celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the admission of Kansas to the Union.

In my boyhood days, one of my earliest recollections was going about fifteen miles back into Dutchess County, trying to shoot a woodcock. The place I went through was known locally as Kansas, and I often wondered why it was called Kansas. Long years later, in trying to find out the origin of the name, I ran across an old file of a local newspaper and found that in 1857 an enterprising railroad man had come into Dutchess County and had offered a free trip to Kansas to anybody who wanted to go there. That was one of the ways in which Kansas was settled, as you all know. Back there in Dutchess we feel that we have a special link with this State because a great many families, I think three or four dozen, came out here in those early days.

I come back here after four years to find that things have changed a good deal. I have noticed in traveling on the railroad that there is a different type even of tourists. Four years ago there were a lot of tourists who were riding in box cars and on top of trains. Today they are riding in their own automobiles and in Pullmans.

You know, on a day like this it seems a pity to have to mention an election. But we people have a habit once every four years of having a grand fight, and getting over it the day after election. November 3d is exactly three weeks from today and I expect to survive those three weeks.

If later on I shall have to write another book I am going to have a chapter in it about bedtime stories—political bedtime stories. It will be a very amusing chapter. I am going to fill it with whispering ghosts and stalking bogey-men, and I am going to end the chapter by telling how the American men and women on the third of November, 1936, refused to be frightened by fairy tales. You people do not look to me the least bit frightened.

And yet some people have been trying to tell you all kinds of things about what this Administration is seeking to do. They have tried, I am sorry to say, to spread the gospel of fear not only in the factories, which is an old outworn trick, but this year they are even trying to bring fear into the homes and firesides of America.

But I know that the people of this country have not such short memories. They remember only too well the real fear-the justified fear—felt all over the Nation in 1932, to be frightened by this silly false fear which is now being preached. The Republican leaders who are trying to do it, incidentally, happen to be the very ones whose blindness to facts and refusal to act caused the real fear and the real danger of national disaster in 1932.

What this Administration has done since 1933 to clear up the debris which had been left over by twelve years of neglect need not be repeated; you all know it. You know what the "devil-take-the-hindmost" policy of the nineteen-twenties brought down upon our heads. You know that the vast speculative gains of a few were made without any regard to the deep injuries which they were causing to the great masses of our people.

In the spring of 1933, these same speculators pleaded with me for help—help of any kind—just so long as it would save them from bankruptcy. Most people thought that they had learned their lesson. We hoped that they would join with our average citizens in working for some kind of security against a recurrence of those panic years.

Yet here they are- three years later—giving vague lip service to that word "security" and, at the same time, seeking to block, to thwart, and to annul every measure that we have taken to restrain the kind of individualism which hurts the community itself, individualism run amuck.

I use this word "security" not in the narrower sense of old-age pensions and of unemployment insurance, fine as these objectives are. I use it in the broader sense—confidence on the part of men and women willing to carry on normal work, and willing to think of their neighbors as well as themselves, confidence that they will not have to worry about losing their homes, about not having enough to eat, about becoming objects of charity. Add to that one more objective: that all Americans may have full opportunity for education, for reasonable leisure and recreation, for the right to carry on representative Government and for freedom to worship God in their own way.

That philosophy has been the philosophy and the practical objective of your national Administration at Washington. I do not seek to discuss with you the pros and cons of your local government or of your State Government in Kansas. You know more about that than I do. Let me say only, and in very simple terms, that I do not believe that Kansas would have pulled through the difficult problems of the past four years as splendidly as it has, had it not been for Federal cooperation and Federal assistance in many fields of your endeavor.

If you think we were wrong to give this assistance, then, to be logical, you must ask that in the days to come every State in the Union shall set itself up as an individual entity for the solution of all of the problems of all of its inhabitants, save possibly the maintenance of the Army, the Navy and the handling of our foreign affairs.

Our broader interpretation of security and of the methods of procuring it is well illustrated by what you have seen us do. Our endeavors have fallen into three broad classifications.

First, immediate and direct assistance—including work for the unemployed; help for drought areas; buying of drought stricken cattle; building of ponds and irrigation projects; seed loans; assistance to the youth of the Nation, and dozens of other instances of that kind.

Second, protection against recognized abuses of many kinds-including the battle of the Federal Government against kidnapping, blackmail, bank robberies and other menaces to life and liberty; safeguarding innocent investors against fake securities; the regulation of stock exchanges; regulation of overreaching practices of some utility companies and the establishment of power yard-sticks to force reasonable electric rates; elimination of unsafe banking practices.

Third, the reduction of interest rates; the saving of farms and homes from mortgage foreclosures; the insurance of bank deposits; the loans that have been made to keep railroads going; the assistance given to States, counties and cities, enabling them to build much-needed, useful public works; old-age pensions; unemployment insurance; assistance to rural schools; the C.C.C. camps; farm-to-market roads. These, and many more like them, give you a broad picture of the more permanent and long-range measures, many of which will improve not only your lives, but those of your children as well.

There was at one time a school of thought in this country that would have us believe that those vast numbers of average citizens who do not get to the top of the economic ladder do not deserve the security which Government alone can give them. And in the past, unfortunately, that philosophy has had too large a hand in making our national economic policies. That school of thought left Washington on March 4, 1933.

The farmers of the Nation furnish a very good example of what Government can do, not only in direct help, but also in providing security for the future. From a state of collapse in 1932, agriculture has not only been brought back to life, but has also received the encouragement of Government which enables it to face the future with confidence.

Is there among the many farmers in this audience, a single one who would want to go back to the uncooperative formula—the rugged individualism, the economic freedom of 1932?

Don't you and your wife and your children look forward to a safer, better future today than you did three and a half short years ago?

I have used farming as an illustration of greater security because Kansas is a great farming State. You know, however, that the mining areas and the livestock areas and the industrial areas of the country are likewise receiving their share of a greater security. Every part of the Nation is sharing it together.

Last April in the City of New York I dared to talk farming to a New York City audience. I told them that one of the best things that had come out of these three years was the realization by city dwellers that they could not be prosperous until the farmer was also prosperous. In the same way I have dared to talk to people in great agricultural States about the needs of the industrial workers in the big cities, and how closely their welfare is tied up with the lot of the farmer.

People who are spreading the gospel of fear talk about setting one class against another. They have intimated that farmers belong to one class, industrial workers to another, and business to still another. I deny it. They all belong to the same class, for the very simple reason that none of these occupations can survive without the survival of the others.

The people who talk about these class distinctions are the very ones who are encouraging class antagonism. For they tell one story in the East and another story in the West; they tell one story in the city and another story on the farm. That is not my way, and never will be my way.

Taking it by and large, we are coming through a great national crisis with flying colors. We have not lost our self-respect. We have not changed our form of government. We have a net national debt which, though greater in dollars, is actually less in proportion to the income of the Nation and in proportion to the wealth of the Nation than the national debt was on March 4, 1933.

From the point of view of national income and national wealth, we are better able to bear our debt now than we were then. And, within a year or two, with income increasing and expenditures declining, we shall be able to balance the budget, and start paying down on the debt.

There is one final form of security on which I have not yet touched. In addition to security at home and in the home, we have sought for security from war with other Nations. We have not been content merely to talk about peace. We have done something about it. We are trying to break down the economic barriers, to soften the economic rivalries, to end the economic strife between Nations; for these have been the causes and forerunners of war. We have taken the lead among the Nations of the world in restoring economic peace which is so essential to military peace.

In the whole of the Western Hemisphere, all the way from the North Pole to the South Pole, we have preached, and we have gained recognition of, the doctrine of the good neighbor. We have extended the right hand of fellowship. Many Nations of the earth have taken that outstretched hand. We propose, of course, no interference with the affairs of other Nations. We seek only by force of our own example to spread the gospel of peace throughout the world.

We are gaining peace and security at home. I am confident that I have the support of the American people in seeking peace and security abroad.