THE PRESIDENCY: Journey of Husbandry

By the time he reached Des Moines for his meeting with Alf Landon (see col. 3), President Roosevelt had seen the worst of the Drought. Rolling East next day into the mild Drought belt, he stopped at Hannibal, Mo. to help dedicate a Mark Twain Memorial bridge across the Mississippi. At Springfield, Ill. for Drought talks with Illinois officials, a telephone talk with Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau gave him occasion to declare: “The obligations of the Government—of the United States—are on a sounder basis of credit than ever before in history.”

Proceeding to Indianapolis, the President spent two hours motoring over the city to look at WPA projects and visit the State Fair, three hours at the Indianapolis Athletic Club for luncheon and a Drought conference with the Governors and Senators of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan. The fact that he did not get the GOPresidential nomination enabled Michigan’s Senator Vandenberg to be less circumspect than Alf Landon had been at Des Moines. Before entering the conference, Senator Vandenberg remarked: “It’s been dry in Michigan, but we only knew casually it was a Drought until this trip.” Emerging, he reported on results: “We accomplished a mutual exchange of congenialities.” Heading for Nebraska, the Michigan Senator was primed to speak on the following topic: “If the Drought is a calamity, what is Secretary Wallace?”

From Indianapolis, the President sped back to Washington, there sped to a White House microphone to report to the nation on his tour. Studiously pedestrian in its “nonpolitical” approach to Drought, Franklin Roosevelt’s first fireside talk of 1936 took on some of the verve of his previous radio heart-to-hearts when he turned to re-employment and his favorite theme of economic freedom. Said he: “My friends!* I have been on a journey of husbandry. . . . I saw drought devastation in nine states. I talked with families who had lost their wheat crop, lost their corn crop, lost their livestock, lost the water in their well, lost their garden and come through to the end of the summer without one dollar of cash resources, facing the winter without feed or food—facing a planting season without seed to put in the ground. . . .

“Yet I would not have you think for a single minute that there is permanent disaster in these Drought regions, or that the picture I saw meant depopulating these areas. No cracked earth, no blistering sun, no burning wind, no grasshoppers are a permanent match for the indomitable American farmers and stockmen and their wives and children. . . .

“We have the option, in the case of families who need actual subsistence, of putting them on the dole or putting them to work. They do not want to go on the dole, and they are 1,000 per cent right. We agree, therefore, that we must put them to work—work for a decent wage. . . .

“We face the question of what kind of work they ought to do. … Thousands of ponds or small reservoirs have been built. . . . Thousands of wells have been drilled or deepened; community lakes have been created and irrigation projects are being pushed. … In the Middle West . . . work projects run more to soil-erosion control and the building of farm-to-market roads.

“Spending ‘like this is not waste. It would spell future waste if we did not spend for such things now. . . . On my entire trip, though I asked the question dozens of times, I heard no complaint against the character of a single works relief project. . . .

“I am glad to say that re-employment in industry is proceeding fairly rapidly. Government spending was in large part responsible for keeping industry going and putting it in a position to make this re-employment possible. . . .

“Until this Administration we had no free employment service, except in a few States and cities. . . . In 1933 the United States Employment Service was created— a co-operative state and Federal enterprise . . . for registering the occupations and the skills of workers and for actually finding jobs for these registered workers in private industry. . . . We have developed a nationwide service with 700 district offices, and 1,000 branch offices. . . .

“Last spring I expressed the hope that employers would realize their deep responsibility to take men off the relief rolls and give them jobs in private enterprise. Subsequently I was told by many employers that they were not satisfied with the information available concerning the skill and experience of the workers on the relief rolls. On Aug. 25 I allocated a relatively small sum* to the Employment Service for the purpose of getting better and more recent information. . . .

“Tonight I am announcing the allocation of two and a half million dollars more to enable the Employment Service to make an even more intensive search. . . .

“Tomorrow is Labor Day. Labor Day in this country has never been a class holiday. . . . There are those who fail to read both the signs of the times and American history. They would try to refuse the worker any effective power to bargain collectively, to earn a decent livelihood and to acquire security. It is those short-sighted ones, not Labor, who threaten this country with that class dissension which in other countries has led to dictatorship and the establishment of fear and hatred as the dominant emotions in human life. . . .

“The Fourth of July commemorates our political freedom. Labor Day symbolizes our determination to achieve an economic freedom for the average man which will give his political freedom reality.”

*This familiar opening of all Roosevelt broadcasts does not appear in the printed texts of the President’s speeches. *$1,500,000.