It is the American people themselves who are in the driver's seat. Those who have intimated that the President of the United States is trying to drive that team, overlook the simple fact that the President, as Chief Executive, is himself one of the three horses. Two of the horses are pulling in unison today the third is not. The three horses are, of course, the three branches of government-the Congress, the Executive and the Courts. Last Thursday I described the American form of Government as a three horse team provided by the Constitution to the American people so that their field might be plowed. I want to talk with you very simply about the need for present action in this crisis- the need to meet the unanswered challenge of one-third of a Nation ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed. But to the far-sighted it is far-reaching in its possibilities of injury to America. There are no lines of depositors outside closed banks. We are at a crisis in our ability to proceed with that protection. The Courts, however, have cast doubts on the ability of the elected Congress to protect us against catastrophe by meeting squarely our modern social and economic conditions. For in the last three national elections an overwhelming majority of them voted a mandate that the Congress and the President begin the task of providing that protection-not after long years of debate, but now. The American people have learned from the depression. If we learned anything from the depression we will not allow ourselves to run around in new circles of futile discussion and debate, always postponing the day of decision. To complete our program of protection in time, therefore, we cannot delay one moment in making certain that our National Government has power to carry through.įour years ago action did not come until the eleventh hour. It will take time-and plenty of time-to work out our remedies administratively even after legislation is passed. Individual or local or state effort alone cannot protect us in 1937 any better than ten years ago. National laws are needed to complete that program. Today we are only part-way through that program-and recovery is speeding up to a point where the dangers of 1929 are again becoming possible, not this week or month perhaps, but within a year or two. We then began a program of remedying those abuses and inequalities-to give balance and stability to our economic system to make it bomb-proof against the causes of 1929. We also became convinced that the only way to avoid a repetition of those dark days was to have a government with power to prevent and to cure the abuses and the inequalities which had thrown that system out of joint.
In 1933 you and I knew that we must never let our economic system get completely out of joint again- that we could not afford to take the risk of another great depression. In effect, four Justices ruled that the right under a private contract to exact a pound of flesh was more sacred than the main objectives of the Constitution to establish an enduring Nation.
The change of one vote would have thrown all the affairs of this great Nation back into hopeless chaos. Today's recovery proves how right that policy was.īut when, almost two years later, it came before the Supreme Court its constitutionality was upheld only by a five-to-four vote. Soon after, with the authority of the Congress, we asked the Nation to turn over all of its privately held gold, dollar for dollar, to the Government of the United States. We were then in the midst of the great banking crisis. I am reminded of that evening in March, four years ago, when I made my first radio report to you. Tonight, sitting at my desk in the White House, I make my first radio report to the people in my second term of office. For the many messages which have come to me after that speech, and which it is physically impossible to answer individually, I take this means of saying "thank you." Last Thursday I described in detail certain economic problems which everyone admits now face the Nation.
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