Rear-Platform Remarks at Olathe, Kansas

I'm glad to come here, but I wish that I could spend a little bit more time than I am allowed on this trip. I am glad to come to this home town of former Governor Hodges.

I have been tremendously interested in coming through Kansas today to see with my own eyes a lot of things I have been reading in reports back in Washington. I could not get here on the trip to the drought areas. You have had some pretty hard times with your crops in this State; but I take it that conditions here this year are not quite as bad as they were in the western part of the State.

I think you all realize that what we have been trying to do for agriculture in the past three years has been aimed at greater security for the men, women and children on the farms. I think we have got somewhere.

Somebody remarked that our agricultural policy was like that of the automobile makers—a new model for every year. I accept that simile; I think it is a pretty good one. Each year we are making great progress in our national policy toward agriculture.

Of course, it has to be a national policy. It cannot be forty-eight different kinds of policies. And each year, in working toward the ultimate goal of security for agriculture, we not only have changed the laws, but we plan to continue to change them. We are not changing the fundamental objectives; but we are saying, just like the automobile manufacturer, that while the principle of the car is the same as it was twenty years ago, we have got past Model T. While Model-T agriculture may have been all right ten years ago, we do not want it any more. We have got beyond it.

There is no question, also, that our objective of a greater stability of prices for crops is something that the whole Nation not only needs, but wants. Certainly it is important for us not to go back to nine-cent corn and thirty-cent wheat and two-cent hogs. Having put the price level back to a more reasonable figure, we believe that we shall be able to keep it there.

Yes, this year we are planning; and why not? After all, that is one of the things that Government is intended to do, to think not in terms of just this year and the next, but, for the good of the people, to think for many long years ahead.

When you build a schoolhouse—and I know you have built some new schoolhouses in Kansas, some of them with the help of the Federal Government—you are building it, not just for the number of children who will attend school this year, but you are thinking ten and twenty years ahead. You know from experience that the improvements which go on in education have not stopped going on. You know that the improvements have to continue in the future in every single thing we do, just as they have in the past. That is the simplest way of expressing the philosophy that lies behind the kind of government we have been trying to give in the past four years.

One of the important factors in trying to work out a Government program in these past four years has been the fact that we tried to give to the communities every assistance based on what they themselves decided were their needs. Through these years, our whole farm program has been built up with the cooperation of the farmers themselves. We are trying to get the best cross-section of expert opinion we can find.

That has been the basis of what we have been trying to do, and I think in another four years we shall be able to carry the country a good many steps farther toward a greater security and prosperity.

Good-bye and good luck.