Herbert Hoover photo

The President's News Conference

May 13, 1932

UNITY OF ACTION ON THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY PROGRAM

THE PRESIDENT. In respect to the various conferences we have had in the last day or two, I want to emphasize the fact that our job in the Government is to secure unity of action and to do our part in an unceasing campaign to reestablish confidence. That is fundamental to recovery. But the imperative and immediate step is to balance the budget, and I am sure the Government will stay on the job until that is accomplished.

When our people recover from frozen confidence, then our credit machinery will begin to function once more on a normal basis, and there will be no need to exercise the emergency powers already vested in any of our governmental agencies or the further extensions we are proposing for the Reconstruction Corporation. So that if by unity of action that these extensions of powers are kept within the limits I have proposed, they will not affect the budget, and they do not constitute a drain on the taxpayer. They constitute a temporary mobilization of timid capital for positive and definite purpose of speeding recovery.

I have no particular taste for such emergency action in the Government, but we are fighting economic consequences of over-liquidation and unjustified fear as to the future of the United States. So that the battle is to set our economic machine in motion, and this emergency takes new forms and requires new tactics from time to time. We used such emergency powers to win the war, and we can use them to fight the depression, the misery and suffering from which is just as great as the war itself.

I have no further news at the moment.

Note: President Hoover's two hundred and forty-eighth news conference was held in the White House at 4 p.m. on Friday, May 13, 1932.

On the same day, the White House issued a text of the President's statement about unity of action on the economic recovery program (see Item 159).

Herbert Hoover, The President's News Conference Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/207884

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