FDR’s Fala
[campaign] speech delivered on 9/23/1944 in Washington, DC:
These Republican leaders have not been content with
attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now
include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my
family doesn't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is
Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction
writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on
the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him - at a cost to
the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars- his Scotch
soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to
hearing malicious falsehoods about myself - such as that old, worm-eaten
chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a
right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.
Well, I think we all recognize the old technique. The
people of this country know the past too well to be deceived into forgetting.
Too much is at stake to forget. There are tasks ahead of us which we must now
complete with the same will and the same skill and intelligence and devotion
that have already led us so far along the road to victory.
There is the task of finishing victoriously this most
terrible of all wars as speedily as possible and with the least cost in lives.
There is the task of setting up international machinery
to assure that the peace, once established, will not again be broken.
And there is the task that we face here at home - the
task of reconverting our economy from the purposes of war to the purposes of
peace.
These peace-building tasks were faced once before, nearly
a generation ago. They were botched by a Republican administration. That must
not happen this time. We will not let it happen this time.
Fortunately, we do not begin from scratch. Much has been
done. Much more is under way. The fruits of victory this time will not be
apples sold on street corners.
Many months ago, this Administration set up the necessary
machinery for an orderly peacetime demobilization. The Congress has passed much
more legislation continuing the agencies needed for demobilization - with
additional powers to carry out their functions.
I know that the American people - business and labor and
agriculture - have the same will to do for peace what they have done for war.
And I know that they can sustain a national income that will assure full
production and full employment under our democratic system of private
enterprise, with Government encouragement and aid whenever and wherever that is
necessary.
The keynote of all that we propose to do in reconversion
can be found in the one word jobs. We shall lease or dispose of our
Government-owned plants and facilities and our surplus war property and land,
on the basis of how they can best be operated by private enterprise to give
jobs to the greatest number.
We shall follow a wage policy that will sustain the
purchasing power of labor - for that means more production and more jobs.
You and I know that the present policies on wages and
prices were conceived to serve the needs of the great masses of the people.
They stopped inflation. They kept prices on a relatively stable level. Through
the demobilization period, policies will be carried out with the same objective
in mind -to serve the needs of the great masses of the people.
This is not the time in which men can be forgotten as
they were in the Republican catastrophe that we inherited. The returning
soldiers, the workers by their machines, the farmers in the field, the miners,
the men and women in offices and shops, do not intend to be forgotten.
No, they know that they are not surplus. Because they
know that they are America. We must set targets and objectives for the future
which will seem impossible - like the airplanes - to those who live in and are
weighted down by the dead past.
We are even now organizing the logistics of the peace,
just as Marshall and King and Arnold, MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Nimitz are
organizing the logistics of this war.
I think that the victory of the American people and their
allies in this war will be far more than a victory against Fascism and reaction
and the dead hand of despotism of the past. The victory of the American people
and their allies in this war will be a victory for democracy. It will
constitute such an affirmation of the strength and power and vitality of
government by the people as history has never before witnessed.
And so, my friends, we have had affirmation of the vitality of
democratic government behind us, that demonstration of its resilience and its
capacity for decision and for action - we have that knowledge of our own
strength and power - we move forward with God's help to the greatest epoch of
free achievement by free men that the world has ever known.
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