Franklin D. Roosevelt

Rear-Platform Remarks at Springfield, Ill

October 14, 1936

My friends, it is always an inspiration to come back to the home of Lincoln.

Here I am again, after an absence of only about a month. I am glad to be here standing by the side of my old friend, Governor Horner. And I am glad he has said a word about courage; but the real courage I want to talk about is the courage of the American people. After those years that we went through, we can feel very proud of the way we have come back, with smiling faces and with the determination never to go through that kind of period again.

There are so many things I should like to talk about that I could keep on campaigning for a couple of months. You are here in the heart of a great agricultural community, a great agricultural State. I am telling the people in the East as well as in the West, that the prosperity of the farmers of the Nation makes for the prosperity of the industrial workers in the greater cities. The industrial workers cannot have prosperity unless the farmers do. I think we recognize that in these past three years we have gone a long way toward reestablishing a parity, of reestablishing the purchasing power of the farmers, a purchasing power which started to slip in 1920 and kept on slipping right down to 1933.

We are determined that we will keep on going—working for a balanced economy. We want you people here in Illinois to be prosperous, but we want the people in the South to be prosperous too, also the people out on the Plains and on the Pacific Coast. After all, when you come down to it, down in the South where I have a farm myself— incidentally, I do not make much money on it— if they get a good price for their cotton it means that they can up here. In the same way, if you have more money up here to buy more corn and more hogs and more things produced by you spend you can buy more overalls made out of the cotton of the South. In other words, it is a rounded whole.

We do not want to accept this theory that some economists have that we have to have a continual fluctuation between prosperity and depression. We want to bring prosperity back and make it stay.

All through the country I find evidence of a real understanding of what your Government is trying to do. I find real evidence of their determination to keep on. That is why, on November 3rd, I am looking forward to receiving the news of the vote of the State of Illinois.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rear-Platform Remarks at Springfield, Ill Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/209280

Filed Under

Categories

Attributes

Location

Illinois

Simple Search of Our Archives