Remarks at Atwood Stadium, Flint, Mich.

My friends of Flint:

I read in the papers that this economic recovery we see about us is not real. I have read lots of things in the papers and so have you. For example, I read the other day that some of our friends on the other side of the fence are telling us that other Nations are better off than we are. Well, I do not believe it; and I do not think you do either.

All we need to do is to take a look across the ocean to discover whether we are doing better on this side than some other Nations are. Believe me, there are a lot of people on the other side, who wish they lived here. We are not boasting about it; we are not moved by any braggadocio about it. Our policies in the last few years, including, incidentally, our recent policy of establishing reciprocal trade agreements with other Nations, have paved the way for a greater lasting security and good-will among Nations. I truly believe, in spite of the dark spectacle in some lands, that this generation and this Government have the best opportunity in a long time to take the lead in outlawing war as a relic of caveman days.

When some Republican spokesmen say that others are better off than we are, you and I know that they are only taking the counsel of desperation. They know that our policies are breaking a rift in the clouds of international doubt and anxiety. I call it true Americanism to set the world on its way to tranquillity.

My friends, the Republican leaders profess to be the custodians of the American system; and yet they find fault with everything that you and I know makes America the envy of the world in this good year of 1936.

I am thinking of Flint as it was in January, or February, or March of 1933, and Flint was not the only city that faced conditions of desperation. Faced with that widespread suffering from unemployment, this Administration, as you know, has followed a fixed policy—a policy that does not believe in the dole, on the ground that temporary charity without work results in a breakdown of self-respect. We did not believe in the dole then, and we do not believe in it today.

We do believe in work and, so far as it is necessary in this land, we will continue to provide work. So long as men and women need to be saved from starvation, we will continue to provide work, because these men and women need to be saved also from disintegration of morale. The millions of unemployed Americans lost many things in the depression, but there is one thing which we tried to see to it that they did not lose—they did not lose their self-respect.

And so we have come through the worst economic crisis in our history, and we have kept our morale. Money spent to do that was money soundly invested. We faced that choice in 1933; and it was a test of what I call straight economic thinking and good economic statesmanship, even if some professors did not agree with us.

We could have gone into the relief problem by spending, let us say, a dollar for a dole. That dollar for a dole would have kept unemployed men just alive—just in a state of suspended animation. Or we could think beyond our noses and spend, say, a dollar and a half on work instead of a dollar on a dole. That extra half dollar would maintain the normal relationships of the unemployed with their families and their grocers, and their merchants, and so on down the line. They could later slip back into normal industry in a normal way.

Yes, we chose to spend money in order to save men. But who can measure in dollars and cents what the self-respect and the morale of a people mean to their Nation? They must be measured, rather, in terms of the preservation of the families and the normal life of America.

But work relief has done more than that. In these many communities throughout the land, it has helped the unemployed to make a contribution of social value to the life of the Nation. Across the entire country a far-reaching series of structures has been built by the working unemployed—and I see a W.P.A. sign right out there by the gate—structures which for generations to come will contribute to the well-being and permanent happiness of the Nation.

Remember that no project has been adopted by the Federal Government except on recommendation of the local community itself. You people of Michigan initiated the projects in Michigan. And the people of the other States also told us which projects they wanted in their States. In the vast majority of cases your advice was good. This year you and I have noticed that the projects which are being criticized are never the projects in the community in which the critic lives. They are generally a thousand miles away.

You can look in your own towns, your own counties all through America, to see for yourselves what this work relief program has done—in schools and roads and pavements and reforestation and flood prevention and sanitation and in fifty or a hundred different types of undertakings that have no peacetime parallel in all of our history.

I am sorry not to meet an old friend of mine here- that there has passed on to the great Beyond General Guy Wilson whom I met in 1918 up on the Marne.

I am glad to have had this chance to come to Flint today. I am glad that things are so much better than they were a short four years ago.

My friends, all I can tell you very simply but very much from the heart, is that I am striving and shall continue to strive to bring a better balanced economy to the United States of America.