Franklin D. Roosevelt Speeches: Annual Message to Congress 1935

The New Deal

January 4, 1935

The Constitution wisely provides that the Chief Executive shall report to the Congress on the state of the Union, for through you, the chosen legislative representatives, our citizens everywhere may fairly judge the progress of our governing.  I am confident that today, in the light of the events of the past two years, you do not consider it merely a trite phrase when I tell you that I am truly glad to greet you and that I look forward to common counsel, to useful cooperation, and to genuine friendships between us.

We have undertaken a new order of things; yet we progress to it under the framework and in the spirit and intent of the American Constitution.  We have proceeded throughout the nation a measurable distance on the road toward this new order.  Materially, I can report to you substantial benefits to our agricultural population, increased industrial activity, and profits to our merchants.  Of equal moment, there is evident a restoration of that spirit of confidence and faith which marks the American character.  Let him, who, for speculative profit or partisan purpose, without just warrant would seek to disturb or dispel this assurance, take heed before he assumes responsibility for any act which slows our onward steps.

Throughout the world, change is the order of the day.  In every nation economic problems, long in the making, have brought crises of many kinds for which the masters of old practice and theory were unprepared.  In most nations social justice, no longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal, and ancient governments are beginning to heed the call.

Thus, the American people do not stand alone in the world in their desire for change.  We seek it through tested liberal traditions, through processes which retain all of the deep essentials of that republican form of representative government first given to a troubled world by the United States.

As the various parts in the program begun in the Extraordinary Session of the 73rd Congress shape themselves in practical administration, the unity of our program reveals itself to the nation.  The outlines of the new economic order, rising from the disintegration of the old, are apparent.  We test what we have done as our measures take root in the living texture of life.  We see where we have built wisely and where we can do still better.

The attempt to make a distinction between recovery and reform is a narrowly conceived effort to substitute the appearance of reality for reality itself.  When a man is convalescing from illness, wisdom dictates not only cure of the symptoms, but also removal of their cause.

It is important to recognize that while we seek to outlaw specific abuses, the American objective of today has an infinitely deeper, finer and more lasting purpose than mere repression.  Thinking people in almost every country of the world have come to realize certain fundamental difficulties with which civilization must reckon.  Rapid changes -- the machine age, the advent of universal and rapid communication and many other new factors -- have brought new problems.  Succeeding generations have attempted to keep pace by reforming in piecemeal fashion this or that attendant abuse.  As a result, evils overlap and reform becomes confused and frustrated.  We lose sight, from time to time, of our ultimate human objectives.

Let us, for a moment, strip from our simple purpose the confusion that results from a multiplicity of detail and from millions of written and spoken words.

We find our population suffering from old inequalities, little changed by past sporadic remedies.  In spite of our efforts and in spite of our talk, we have not weeded out the over privileged and we have not effectively lifted up the underprivileged.  Both of these manifestations of injustice have retarded happiness.  No wise man has any intention of destroying what is known as the profit motive because by the profit motive we mean the right by work to earn a decent livelihood for ourselves and for our families.

We have, however, a clear mandate from the people, that Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well.  In building toward this end we do not destroy ambition, nor do we seek to divide our wealth into equal shares on stated occasions.  We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others.  But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him and his a proper security, a reasonable leisure, and a decent living throughout life, is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

I recall to your attention my message to the Congress last June in which I said: "among our objectives I place the security of the men, women and children of the nation first.”  That remains our first and continuing task; and in a very real sense every major legislative enactment of this Congress should be a component part of it.

In defining immediate factors which enter into our quest, I have spoken to the Congress and the people of three great divisions:

1.  The security of a livelihood through the better use of the national resources of the land in which we live.

2.  The security against the major hazards and vicissitudes of life. 

3.  The security of decent homes.

I am now ready to submit to the Congress a broad program designed ultimately to establish all three of these factors of security -- a program which because of many lost years will take many future years to fulfill.

A study of our national resources, more comprehensive than any previously made, shows the vast amount of necessary and practicable work which needs to be done for the development and preservation of our natural wealth for the enjoyment and advantage of our people in generations to come.  The sound use of land and water is far more comprehensive than the mere planting of trees, building of dams, distributing of electricity or retirement of sub-marginal land.  It recognizes that stranded populations, either in the country or the city, cannot have security under the conditions that now surround them.

To this end we are ready to begin to meet this problem -- the intelligent care of population throughout our nation, in accordance with an intelligent distribution of the means of livelihood for that population.  A definite program for putting people to work, of which I shall speak in a moment, is a component part of this greater program of security of livelihood through the better use of our national resources.

Closely related to the broad problem of livelihood is that of security against the major hazards of life.  Here also, a comprehensive survey of what has been attempted or accomplished in many nations and in many States proves to me that the time has come for action by the national government.  I shall send to you, in a few days, definite recommendations based on these studies.  These recommendations will cover the broad subjects of unemployment insurance and old age insurance, of benefits for children, for mothers, for the handicapped, for maternity care and for other aspects of dependency and illness where a beginning can now be made.

The third factor -- better homes for our people -- has also been the subject of experimentation and study.  Here, too, the first practical steps can be made through the proposals which I shall suggest in relation to giving work to the unemployed.

Whatever we plan and whatever we do should be in the light of these three clear objectives of security.  We cannot afford to lose valuable time in haphazard public policies which cannot find a place in the broad outlines of these major purposes.  In that spirit I come to an immediate issue made for us by hard and inescapable circumstance -- the task of putting people to work.  In the spring of 1933 the issue of destitution seemed to stand apart; today, in the light of our experience and our new national policy, we find we can put people to work in ways which conform to, initiate and carry forward the broad principles of that policy.

The first objectives of emergency legislation of 1933 were to relieve destitution, to make it possible for industry to operate in a more rational and orderly fashion, and to put behind industrial recovery the impulse of large expenditures in government undertakings.  The purpose of the National Industrial Recovery Act to provide work for more people succeeded in a substantial manner within the first few months of its life, and the Act has continued to maintain employment gains and greatly improved working conditions in industry.

The program of public works provided for in the Recovery Act launched the Federal Government into a task for which there was little time to make preparation and little American experience to follow.  Great employment has been given and is being given by these works.

More than two billions of dollars have also been expended in direct relief to the destitute.  Local agencies of necessity determined the recipients of this form of relief.  With inevitable exceptions the funds were spent by them with reasonable efficiency and as a result actual want of food and clothing in the great majority of cases has been overcome.

But the stark fact before us is that great numbers still remain unemployed. 

A large proportion of these unemployed and their dependents have been forced on the relief rolls.  The burden on the Federal Government has grown with great rapidity.  We have here a human as well as an economic problem.  When humane considerations are concerned, Americans give them precedence.  The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre.  To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.  It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy.  It is in violation of the traditions of America.  Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers.

The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in the public parks.  We must preserve not only the bodies of the unemployed from destitution but also their self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.  This decision brings me to the problem of what the government should do with approximately five million unemployed now on the relief rolls.

About one million and a half of these belong to the group which in the past was dependent upon local welfare efforts.  Most of them are unable for one reason or another to maintain themselves independently -- for the most part, through no fault of their own.  Such people, in the days before the great depression, were cared for by local efforts -- by States, by counties, by towns, by cities, by churches and by private welfare agencies.  It is my thought that in the future they must be cared for as they were before.  I stand ready through my own personal efforts, and through the public influence of the office that I hold, to help these local agencies to get the means necessary to assume this burden.

The security legislation which I shall propose to the Congress will, I am confident, be of assistance to local effort in the care of this type of cases.  Local responsibility can and will be resumed, for, after all, common sense tells us that the wealth necessary for this task existed and still exists in the local community, and the dictates of sound administration require that this responsibility be in the first instance a local one.

There are, however, an additional three and one half million employable people who are on relief.  With them the problem is different and the responsibility is different.  This group was the victim of a nation-wide depression caused by conditions which were not local but national.  The Federal Government is the only governmental agency with sufficient power and credit to meet this situation.  We have assumed this task and we shall not shrink from it in the future.  It is a duty dictated by every intelligent consideration of national policy to ask you to make it possible for the United States to give employment to all of these three and one half million employable people now on relief, pending their absorption in a rising tide of private employment.

It is my thought that with the exception of certain of the normal public building operations of the government, all emergency public works shall be united in a single new and greatly enlarged plan. 

With the establishment of this new system we can supersede the Federal Emergency Relief Administration with a coordinated authority which will be charged with the orderly liquidation of our present relief activities and the substitution of a national chart for the giving of work.

This new program of emergency public employment should be governed by a number of practical principles.

1. All work undertaken should be useful -- not just for a day, or a year, but useful in the sense that it affords permanent improvement in living conditions or that it creates future new wealth for the nation.

2. Compensation on emergency public projects should be in the form of security payments which should be larger than the amount now received as a relief dole, but at the same time not so large as to encourage the rejection of opportunities for private employment or the leaving of private employment to engage in government work.

3. Projects should be undertaken on which a large percentage of direct labor can be used.

4. Preference should be given to those projects which will be self-liquidating in the sense that there is a reasonable expectation that the government will get its money back at some future time.

5. The projects undertaken should be selected and planned so as to compete as little as possible with private enterprises.  This suggests that if it were not for the necessity of giving useful work to the unemployed now on relief, these projects in most instances would not now be undertaken.

6. The planning of projects would seek to assure work during the coming fiscal year to the individuals now on relief, or until such time as private employment is available.  In order to make adjustment to increasing private employment, work should be planned with a view to tapering it off in proportion to the speed with which the emergency workers are offered positions with private employers.

7. Effort should be made to locate projects where they will serve the greatest unemployment needs as shown by present relief rolls, and the broad program of the National Resources Board should be freely used for guidance in selection.  Our ultimate objective being the enrichment of human lives, the government has the primary duty to use its emergency expenditures as much as possible to serve those who cannot secure the advantages of private capital….

The work itself will cover a wide field including clearance of slums, which for adequate reasons cannot be undertaken by private capital; in rural housing of several kinds, where, again, private capital is unable to function; in rural electrification; in the reforestation of the great watersheds of the nation; in an intensified program to prevent soil erosion and to reclaim blighted areas; in improving existing road systems and in constructing national highways designed to handle modern traffic; in the elimination of grade crossings; in the extension and enlargement of the successful work of the Civilian Conservation Corps; in non-Federal works, mostly self-liquidating and highly useful to local divisions of government; and on many other projects which the nation needs and cannot afford to neglect.

This is the method which I propose to you in order that we may better meet this present-day problem of unemployment.  Its greatest advantage is that it fits logically and usefully into the long-range permanent policy of providing the three types of security which constitute as a whole an American plan for the betterment of the future of the American people.

I shall consult with you from time to time concerning other measures of national importance.  Among the subjects that lie immediately before us are the consolidation of Federal Regulatory Administration over all forms of transportation, the renewal and clarification of the general purposes of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the strengthening of our facilities for the prevention, detection and treatment of crime and criminals, the restoration of sound conditions in the public utilities field through abolition of the evil features of holding companies, the gradual tapering off of the emergency credit activities of government, and improvement in our taxation forms and methods.

We have already begun to feel the bracing effect upon our economic system of a restored agriculture.  The hundreds of millions of additional income that farmers are receiving are finding their way into the channels of trade.  The farmers' share of the national income is slowly rising.  The economic facts justify the widespread opinion of those engaged in agriculture that our provisions for maintaining a balanced production give at this time the most adequate remedy for an old and vexing problem.  For the present, and especially in view of abnormal world conditions, agricultural adjustment with certain necessary improvements in methods should continue….

I cannot with candor tell you that general international relationships outside the borders of the United States are improved.  On the surface of things many old jealousies are resurrected, old passions aroused; new strivings for armament and power, in more than one land, rear their ugly heads.  I hope that calm counsel and constructive leadership will provide the steadying influence and the time necessary for the coming of new and more practical forms of representative government throughout the world wherein privilege and power will occupy a lesser place and world welfare a greater.

I believe, however, that our own peaceful and neighborly attitude toward other nations is coming to be understood and appreciated.  The maintenance of international peace is a matter in which we are deeply and unselfishly concerned.  Evidence of our persistent and undeniable desire to prevent armed conflict has recently been more than once afforded.

There is no ground for apprehension that our relations with any nation will be otherwise than peaceful.  Nor is there ground for doubt that the people of most nations seek relief from the threat and burden attaching to the false theory that extravagant armament cannot be reduced and limited by international accord.

The ledger of the past year shows many more gains than losses.  Let us not forget that, in addition to saving millions from utter destitution, child labor has been for the moment outlawed, thousands of homes saved to their owners and most important of all, the morale of the nation has been restored.  Viewing the year 1934 as a whole, you and I can agree that we have a generous measure of reasons for giving thanks.

It is not empty optimism that moves me to a strong hope in the coming year.  We can, if we will, make 1935 a genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.  Beyond the material recovery, I sense a spiritual recovery as well.  The people of America are turning as never before to those permanent values that are not limited to the physical objectives of life.  There are growing signs of this on every hand.  In the face of these spiritual impulses we are sensible of the Divine Providence to which nations turn now, as always, for guidance and fostering care.