The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt | Page 8

do something about the physical needs of hundreds of thousands
who were in dire straits at that very moment. Municipal and state aid
were being stretched to the limit. We appropriated half a billion dollars
to supplement their efforts and in addition, as you know, we have put
300,000 young men into practical and useful work in our forests and to
prevent flood and soil erosion. The wages they earn are going in greater
part to the support of the nearly one million people who constitute their
families.
In this same classification we can properly place the great public works
program running to a total of over three billion dollars--to be used for
highways and ships and flood prevention and inland navigation and
thousands of self-sustaining state and municipal improvements. Two
points should be made clear in the allotting and administration of these
projects--first, we are using the utmost care to choose labor-creating,
quick-acting, useful projects, avoiding the smell of the pork barrel; and
secondly, we are hoping that at least half of the money will come back
to the government from projects which will pay for themselves over a
period of years.
Thus far I have spoken primarily of the foundation stones--the

measures that were necessary to reestablish credit and to head people in
the opposite direction by preventing distress and providing as much
work as possible through governmental agencies. Now I come to the
links which will build us a more lasting prosperity. I have said that we
cannot attain that in a nation half boom and half broke. If all of our
people have work and fair wages and fair profits, they can buy the
products of their neighbors and business is good. But if you take away
the wages and the profits of half of them, business is only half as good.
It doesn't help much if the fortunate half is very prosperous--the best
way is for everybody to be reasonably prosperous.
For many years the two great barriers to a normal prosperity have been
low farm prices and the creeping paralysis of unemployment. These
factors have cut the purchasing power of the country in half. I promised
action. Congress did its part when it passed the Farm and the Industrial
Recovery Acts. Today we are putting these two acts to work and they
will work if people understand their plain objectives.
First the Farm Act: It is based on the fact that the purchasing power of
nearly half our population depends on adequate prices for farm
products. We have been producing more of some crops than we
consume or can sell in a depressed world market. The cure is not to
produce so much. Without our help the farmers cannot get together and
cut production, and the Farm Bill gives them a method of bringing their
production down to a reasonable level and of obtaining reasonable
prices for their crops. I have clearly stated that this method is in a sense
experimental, but so far as we have gone we have reason to believe that
it will produce good results.
It is obvious that if we can greatly increase the purchasing power of the
tens of millions of our people who make a living from farming and the
distribution of farm crops, we will greatly increase the consumption of
those goods which are turned out by industry.
That brings me to the final step--bringing back industry along sound
lines.
Last Autumn, on several occasions, I expressed my faith that we can
make possible by democratic self-discipline in industry general
increases in wages and shortening of hours sufficient to enable industry
to pay its own workers enough to let those workers buy and use the
things that their labor produces. This can be done only if we permit and

encourage cooperative action in industry because it is obvious that
without united action a few selfish men in each competitive group will
pay starvation wages and insist on long hours of work. Others in that
group must either follow suit or close up shop. We have seen the result
of action of that kind in the continuing descent into the economic Hell
of the past four years.
There is a clear way to reverse that process: If all employers in each
competitive group agree to pay their workers the same wages--
reasonable wages--and require the same hours--reasonable hours-- then
higher wages and shorter hours will hurt no employer. Moreover, such
action is better for the employer than unemployment and low wages,
because it makes more buyers for his product. That is the simple idea
which is the very heart of the Industrial Recovery Act.
On the basis of this simple principle of everybody doing things together,
we are starting out on this nationwide attack on unemployment. It will
succeed