Franklin D. Roosevelt

Greeting to Labor's Non-Partisan League.

August 03, 1936

My dear Major Berry:

It gives me very real pleasure to extend a word of greeting through you to Labor's Non-Partisan League upon the occasion of the meeting of its State chairmen in Washington.

I am certain that you and your associates are coming to Washington to join in a thorough consideration of the vital issues of the time and to consider how best to cooperate in the great task of promoting national progress and of enlarging the sphere of human rights through democracy of opportunity. It is fully realized by all of us that you are gathering to support a political cause, but that merely makes it the more certain that you are determined to enlarge the scope of human welfare in our Nation.

I should like to have you know that I am sincerely proud that you are gathering in support of my candidacy. This could not be the case if you did not know, out of the experience of the past three years, that the present Administration has endeavored to promote the ideal of justice for the great masses of America's wage earners and to make that ideal a reality.

We all know that our country has been going through profound changes and that these changes have necessitated special reconsideration of the problems of the wage earners and the farmers. Automatic machinery, the device of corporate ownership and management, the monumental accumulations of capital—these are some of the factors that have made it necessary for our country and its Government to look at men and measures from a new point of view, seeking new means for the restoration of equality of opportunity.

During the past three years we have endeavored to correct through legislation certain of the evils in our economic system. We have sought to put a stop to certain economic practices which did not promote the general welfare. Some of the laws which were enacted were declared invalid by the Supreme Court. It is a notable fact that it was not the wage earners who cheered when those laws were declared invalid. I greet you in the faith that future history will show, as past history has so repeatedly and so effectively shown, that a return to reactionary practices is ever short lived. Having tasted the benefits of liberation, men and women do not for long forego those benefits. I have implicit faith that we shall find our way to progress through law. Your support is a priceless contribution toward continued faith in that outcome.

What is of vast importance at this critical time is the fact that we have a common heritage of principle and that we are bound, with millions of our fellow Americans, in a common determination to preserve human freedom and enlarge its sphere and to prevent forever a return to that despotism which comes from unlicensed power to control and manipulate the resources of our Nation, and the destiny of human lives.

In extending to all who attend your meeting my hearty felicitations I am heartened by the conviction that we are all working for the same ideal—the restoration and preservation of human liberty and human rights.

Very sincerely yours,

Major George L. Berry,

President, Labor's Non-Partisan League,

Washington, D. C.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Greeting to Labor's Non-Partisan League. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208995

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