Message to Congress on the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project.

To the Congress:

I RECOMMEND authorization of construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project, pursuant to the agreement of March 19, 1941, with Canada, as an integral part of the joint defense of the North American continent.

Production and more production is the keynote of our all-out race for national defense. Electric power and transportation are limiting factors in the production of planes, guns, tanks, and ships.

The enemies of democracy are developing every hydroelectric resource and every waterway from Norway to the Dardanelles. Are we to allow this continent to be out-matched because shortsighted interests oppose the development of one of our greatest resources?

Your action on this project will either make available or withhold 2,200,000 horsepower of low-cost electric power for the joint defense of North America.

Your action on this project will either open or keep bottled up one of the greatest transportation resources ever offered a people.

Both countries need the power. Both face power shortages which threaten to grow more serious as the demands of the defense program multiply with almost incredible rapidity.

Let us remember that it takes tens of thousands of kilowatt hours of electricity to produce the materials that go into a single airplane. Our present aluminum program alone calls for more than ten billion kilowatt-hours a year. It is constantly expanding with the need for more planes to outstrip the aggressors.

Steam power plant construction offers no substitute for St. Lawrence power. No steam plants can provide the large blocks of low-cost electric energy required for certain essential defense industries. Furthermore, we are going to need all our capacity to produce steam power plant equipment to meet the tremendous demands which are growing in other parts of the country and to build power installations to drive our merchant and naval vessels.

Our defense production is a gigantic assembly line. Transportation is its conveyor belt. If raw materials cannot flow freely to our great industrial plants and the products cannot move continuously to the front, defense breaks down. Bottlenecks in transportation are as serious as shortages of power.

Expanding production is going to burden the railroads to the limit. We are expanding their rolling stock as fast as we can, but even the present orders for new cars and locomotives are competing for manufacturing capacity which could otherwise produce tanks and other items of heavy armament.

The Seaway will help prevent transportation bottlenecks. It will provide a great highway to and from important defense production areas. It will cut by more than a thousand miles the stretch of dangerous open water which must be traveled by supplies to Great Britain and strategic North Atlantic bases. It will increase our capacity to build ships.

The Great Lakes today hold many shipways and dry docks, as well as resources of men and materials for shipbuilding. They are bottled up because we have delayed completing the Seaway. If we start the Seaway now, scores of additional merchant ships may be built in coastal yards freed by transferring a portion of the longer-term naval program to the Great Lakes.

The St. Lawrence Project must be expedited. No comparable power, shipbuilding, and transportation facilities can be made available in the time required to construct this project.

In dealing with the present emergency, too many people have underestimated the degree to which our resources will be taxed. We cannot afford to make any more mistakes of that kind.

I am advised that we can build the St. Lawrence Project in four years. Under emergency pressure it may be completed in less time. I should like to agree with the people who say that the country's danger will be over sooner than that. But the course of world events gives no such assurance; and we have no right to take chances with the national safety.

I know of no single project of this nature more important to this country's future in peace or war. Its authorization will demonstrate to the enemies of democracy that, however long the effort, we intend to outstrip them in the race of production. In the modern world, that race determines the rise and fall of Nations.

I hope that authorization will not be delayed.