Rear-Platform Remarks at Florence, Kansas

My friends, I have been out through these parts many times before, as you know. In every State I have been in, which includes not only the agricultural States but the industrial States as well, things seem to be coming back. People, on the whole, are a lot better of[ than they were four years ago.

There is no panacea either of mind or medicine that the Nation can take that will cure it of all its ills overnight. But, as you know, we in Washington have been trying to build up a great many things all through the country that needed to be built up, realizing that the industrial workers in the cities cannot be prosperous unless the farmers are prosperous too. You can see the results by watching the railroads. The old strings of empty cars on the sidings that we used to see from 1929 to 1933 are almost all out at work, going up and down the line, full of various kinds of products.

At the same time, we have worked for a greater security for the people. One of our basic troubles in the past was found in the fluctuation of prices. Some time ago, I got a chart showing the prices which raw materials of all kinds brought between 1920 and 1933. That was a period of about thirteen years, and the line indicating prices was a zigzag line that went up and down and up and down. The farmer, the miner, the producer of industrial goods could never know what he was going to get because of this fluctuation. And so we have been trying to work out what might be called a more ordered economy, a more stable price level.

To use a simple example: if you borrowed or loaned a thousand dollars this year, we have tried to see to it that by 1940 when you pay the money back or get the money back, you will pay or receive the same kind of a thousand dollars that you handled originally instead of dealing in debts which had to be paid, for instance, as occurred not so long ago, with dollars worth three times as many bushels of wheat as when they were incurred. There were many hundreds of thousands of debts that were incurred when wheat was selling at a dollar a bushel but fell due when wheat was selling at 33 cents, so that it took just three times as many bushels of wheat to pay them off. That just is not right; and so we are trying to work for a better balance of price levels in order to prevent its recurrence. It is going to take a number of years to do; but I think the people of this country want stability and security in their economy, so that they will know from day to day, from year to year, that the future is not going to leave them objects of charity.

It is a big task that we have before us. I do not pretend to be the final word as to whether we are going to accomplish it or not; but I do know that in these past four years we have been getting somewhere, and I am determined that we will continue to get somewhere farther in the next four years.