This campaign now draws near to a close. The platforms of the two parties defining principles and offering solutions of various national
problems have been presented and are being earnestly considered by our
people.
After four months’ debate it is not the Republican Party which finds
reason for abandonment of any of the principles it has laid down or of
the views it has expressed for solution of the problems before the
country. The principles to which it adheres are rooted deeply in the
foundations of our national life and the solutions which it proposed
are based on experience with government and a consciousness that it
may have the responsibility for placing those solutions into action.
In my acceptance speech I endeavored to outline the spirit and ideals
with which I would propose to carry that platform into administration.
Tonight, I will not deal with the multitude of issues which have been
already well canvassed, I propose rather to discuss some of those more
fundamental principles and ideals upon which I believe the Government of
the United States should be conducted.
Before I enter upon that discussion of principles I wish to lay before
you the proof of progress under Republican rule. In doing this I do not
need to review its seventy years of constructive history. That history
shows that the Republican party has ever been a party of progress. It
has reflected the spirit of the American people. We are a progressive
people. Our history of 150 years in the greatest epic of human
progress. Tonight to demonstrate the constructive character of our
Party, I need only briefly picture the advance of fundamental progress
during the past seven and a half years since we took over the Government
amidst the ruin of war.
First of all, let me deal with the material side. I do this because
upon the well-being, comfort and security of the American home do we
build up the moral and spiritual virtues as well as the finer flowers of
civilization and the wider satisfactions of life.
As a nation we came out of the war with great losses. We made no
profits from it. The apparent increases in wages were fictitious. We
were poorer as a nation when we emerged from it. Yet during these last
eight years we have recovered from these losses and increased our
national income by over one-third even if we discount the inflation of
the dollar. While some individuals have grown rich, yet that there has
been a wide diffusion of our gain in wealth and income is marked by a
hundred proofs. I know of no better test of the improved conditions of
the average family than the combined increase of life and industrial
insurance, building and loan assets, and savings deposits. These are
the financial agents of the average man. These alone have in seven
years increased by nearly 100 per cent to the gigantic sum of over 50
billions of dollars, or nearly one-six of our whole national wealth. In
addition to these evidences of larger savings our people are steadily
increasing their spending for higher standards of living. Today there
are almost 9 automobiles for each 10 families, where seven and a half
years ago only enough automobiles were running to average less than 4
for each 10 families. The slogan of progress is changing from the full
dinner pail to the full garage. Our people have more to eat, better
things to wear, and better homes. We have even gained in elbow room in
our homes, for the increase of residential floor space is over 25 per
cent with less than 10 per cent increase in our number of people. We
have increased the security of his job to every man and woman. We have
decreased the fear of old age, the fear of poverty, the fear of
unemployment and these are fears which have always been amongst the
greatest calamities of human kind.
All this progress means far more than greater creature comforts. It
finds a thousand interpretations into a greater and fuller life. In all
this we have steadily reduced the sweat in human labor. A score of new
helps save the drudgery of the home. In seven years we have added 25
per cent more electric power to the elbow of every worker, and farther
promoted him from a carrier of burdens to a director of machines. Our
hours of labor are lessened; our leisure has increased. We have
expanded our parks and playgrounds. We have nearly doubled our
attendance at games. We pour into outdoor recreation in every
direction. The visitors at our national parks have trebled and we have
so increased the number of sportsmen fishing in our streams and lakes
that the longer time between bites is becoming a political issue. In
these seven and one-half years the radio has brought music and laughter,
education and political discussion to almost every fireside.
Springing from our prosperity with its greater freedom, its vast
endowment of scientific research and the greater resources with which to
care for public health, we have according to our insurance actuaries
during this short period since the war lengthened the span of life by
nearly eight years. We have reduced infant mortality, we have vastly
decreased the days of illness and suffering in the life of every man and
woman. We have improved the facilities for the care of the crippled and
helpless and deranged.
From our increasing resources we have expanded our educational system in
eight years from an outlay of 1,200 millions to 2,700 millions of
dollars. The education of our youth has become almost the largest and
certainly our most important activity. From our ability to free youth
from toil we have increased the attendance in our grade schools by 14
per cent, in our high schools by 80 per cent, and in institutions of
higher learning by 95 per cent. Today we have more youth in these
institutions of higher learning twice over than all the rest of the
world put together. We have made progress in literature, art and in
public taste.
I do not need to recite more figures and more evidence. There is not a
person within the sound of my voice that does not know the profound
progress which our country has made in this period. Every man and woman
knows that their comfort, their hopes and their confidence for the
future are higher this day than they were seven and one-half years ago.
Your city has been an outstanding beneficiary of this great progress.
With its suburbs it has, during the last seven and a half years grown by
over a million and a half of people, until it has become the largest
metropolitan district of all the world. Here you have made abundant
opportunity not only for the youth of the land but for the immigrant
from foreign shores. This city is the commercial center of the United
States. It is the commercial agent of the American people. It is a
great organism of specialized skill and leadership in finance, industry
and commerce, which reaches every spot in our country. Its progress and
its beauty are the pride of the whole American people. It leads our
nation in the largest size of its benevolences, in art, in music,
literature and drama. It has come to have a greater voice, than any
other city in the United States.
But when all is said and done the very life, progress and prosperity of
this city is wholly dependent on the prosperity of the 110,000,000
people who dwell in our mountains and valleys across the 3,000 miles to
the Pacific Ocean. Every activity of this city is sensitive to every
evil and every favorable tide that sweeps this great nation of ours. Be
there a slackening of industry in any part of the country it affects New
York far more than the rest of the country. In a time of depression
one-quarter of all the unemployed in the United States can be numbered
in this city. In a time of prosperity the citizens of the great
interior of our country pour into your city for business and
entertainment at the rate of 200,000 a day. In fact so much is this
city the reflex of the varied interests of our country that the concern
of every one of your citizens for national stability, for national
prosperity and for national progress is far greater than any other
single part of our country.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PROGRESS
It detracts nothing from the character and energy of the American
people, it minimizes in no degree the quality of their accomplishments
to say that the policies of the Republican Party have played a large
part in the building of this progress of these last seven and one-half
years. I can say with emphasis that without the wise policies which the
Republican Party has brought into action in this period, no such
progress would have been possible.
The first responsibility of the Republican Administration was to renew
the march of progress from its collapse by the war. That task involved
the restoration of confidence in the future and the liberation and
stimulation of the constructive energies of our people. It is not my
purpose to enter upon a detailed recitation of the history of the great
constructive measures of the past seven and a half years.
It is sufficient to remind you of the restoration of employment to the
millions who walked your streets in idleness to remind you of the
creation of the budget system; the reduction of six billions of national
debt which gave the impulse of that vast sum returned to industry and
commerce; the four sequent reductions of taxes and thereby the lift to
the living of every family; the enactment of an adequate protective
tariff and immigration laws which have raised and safeguarded our wages
from floods of goods or labor from foreign countries; the creation of
credit facilities and many aids to agriculture; the building up of
foreign trade; the care of veterans, the development of aviation, of
radio, of our inland waterways, our highways; the expansion of
scientific research, of welfare activities, safer highways, safer mines,
outdoor recreation, in better homes, in public health and the care of
children. Nor do I need remind you that Government today deals with an
economic and social system vastly more intricate and delicately adjusted
than ever before. It now must be kept in perfect tune if we would not,
through dislocation, have a breakdown in employment and in standards of
living of our people. The Government has come to more and more touch
this delicate web at a thousand points. Yearly the relations of
Government to national prosperity becomes more and more intimate. It
has only by keen large vision and cooperation by the Government that
stability in business and stability in employment has been maintained
during this past seven and a half years. Never has there been a period
when the Federal Government has given such aid and impulse to the
progress of our people, not alone to economic progress but to
development of those agencies which make for moral and spiritual
progress.
But in addition to this great record of contributions of the Republican
Party to progress, there has been a further fundamental contribution —
a contribution perhaps more important than all the others — and that is
the resistance of the Republican Party to every attempt to inject the
Government into business in competition with its citizens.
After the war, when the Republican Party assumed administration of the
country, we were faced with the problem of determination of the very
nature of our national life. Over 150 years we have builded up a form
of self-government and we had builded up a social system which is
peculiarly our own. It differs fundamentally from all others in the
world. It is the American system. It is just as definite and positive
a political and social system as has ever been developed on earth. It
is founded upon the conception that self-government can be preserved
only by decentralization of Government in the State and by fixing local
responsibility; but further than this, it is founded upon the social
conception that only through ordered liberty, freedom and equal
opportunity to the individual will his initiative and enterprise drive
the march of progress.
During the war we necessarily turned to the Government to solve every
difficult economic problem — the Government having absorbed every
energy of our people to war there was no other solution. For the
preservation of the State the Government became a centralized despotism
which undertook responsibilities, assumed powers, exercised rights, and
took over the business of citizens. To large degree we regimented our
whole people temporarily into a socialistic state. However justified it
was in time of war if continued in peace time it would destroy not only
our system but progress and freedom in our own country and throughout
the world. When the war closed the most vital of all issues was whether
Governments should continue war ownership and operation of many
instrumentalities of production and distribution. We were challenged
with the choice of the American system cf2 rugged individualismcf0 or the
choice of a European system of diametrically opposed doctrines —
doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these
ideas meant the destruction of self-government through centralization of
government; it meant the undermining of initiative and enterprise upon
which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness.
The Democratic administration cooperated with the Republican Party to
demobilize many of her activities and the Republican Party from the
beginning of its period of power resolutely turned its face away from
these ideas and these war practices, back to our fundamental conception
of the state and the rights and responsibilities of the individual.
Thereby it restored confidence and hope in the American people, it freed
and stimulated enterprise, it restored the Government to its position as
an umpire instead of a player in the economic game. For these reasons
the American people have gone forward in progress while the rest of the
world is halting and some countries have even gone backwards. If anyone
will study the causes which retarded recuperation of Europe, he will
find much of it due to the stifling of private initiative on one hand,
and overloading of the Government with business on the other.
I regret, however, to say that there has been revived in this campaign a
proposal which would be a long step to the abandonment of our American
system, to turn to the idea of government in business. Because we are
faced with difficulty and doubt over certain national problems which we
are faced — that is prohibition, farm relief and electrical power —
our opponents propose that we must to some degree thrust government into
these businesses and in effect adopt state socialism as a solution.
There is, therefore submitted to the American people the question —
Shall we depart from the American system and start upon a new road. And
I wish to emphasize this question on this occasion. I wish to make
clear my position on the principles involved for they go to the very
roots of American life in every act of our Government. I should like to
state to you the effect of the extension of government into business
upon our system of self government and our economic system. But even
more important is the effect upon the average man. That is the effect
on the very basis of liberty and freedom not only to those left outside
the fold of expanded bureaucracy but to those embraced within it.
When the Federal Government undertakes a business, the state governments
are at once deprived of control and taxation of that business; when the
state government undertakes a business it at once deprived the
municipalities of taxation and control of that business. Business
requires centralization; self government requires decentralization. Our
government to succeed in business must become in effect a despotism.
There is thus at once an insidious destruction of self government.
Moreover there is a limit to human capacity in administration.
Particularly is there a limit to the capacity of legislative bodies to
supervise governmental activities. Every time the Federal Government
goes into business 530 Senators and Congressmen become the Board of
Directors of that business. Every time a state government goes into
business 100 or 200 state senators and assemblymen become directors of
that business. Even if they were supermen, no bodies of such numbers
can competently direct that type of human activities which requires
instant decision and action. No such body can deal adequately with all
sections of the country. And yet if we would preserve government by the
people we must preserve the authority of our legislators over the
activities of our Government. We have trouble enough with log rolling
in legislative bodies today. It originates naturally from desires of
citizens to advance their particular section or to secure some necessary
service. It would be multiplied a thousand-fold were the Federal and
state governments in these businesses.
The effect upon our economic progress would be even worse. Business
progressiveness is dependent on competition. New methods and new ideas
are the outgrowth of the spirit of adventure of individual initiative
and of individual enterprise. Without adventure there is no progress.
No government administration can rightly speculate and take risks with
taxpayers’ money. But even more important than this — leadership in
business must be through the sheer rise of ability and character. That
rise can take place only in the free atmosphere of competition.
Competition is closed by bureaucracy. Certainly political choice is a
feeble basis for choice of leaders to conduct a business.
There is no better example of the practical incompetence of government
to conduct business than the history of our railways. Our railways in
the year before being freed from Government operation were not able to
meet the demands for transportation. Eight years later we find our them
under private enterprise, transporting 15 per cent more goods and
meeting every demand for service. Rates have been reduced by 15 per
cent and net earnings increased from less than 1 per cent on their
valuation to about 5 per cent. Wages of employees have improved by 13
per cent. The wages of railway employees are 2 per cent above pre-war.
The wages of Government employees are today . . . will check their
figure definitely tomorrow but probably about 70% per cent above pre-
war. That should be a sufficient sermon upon the efficiency of
Government operation.
But we can examine this question from the point of view of the person
who gets a Government job and is admitted into the new bureaucracy.
Upon that subject let me quote from a speech of that great leader of
labor, Samuel Gompers, delivered in Montreal in 1920, a few years before
his death. He said:
«I believe there is no man to whom I would take second position in my
loyalty to the Republic of the United States, and yet I would not give
it more power over the individual citizenship of our country. . . .
«It is a question of whether it shall be Government ownership or private
ownership under control. . . . If I were in the minority of one in this
convention, I would want to cast my vote so that the men of labor shall
not willingly enslave themselves to Government authority in their
industrial effort for freedom. . . .
«Let the future tell the story of who is right or who is wrong; who has
stood for freedom and who has been willing to submit their fate
industrially to the Government.»
I would amplify Mr. Gompers’ statement. These great bodies of
Government employees would either comprise political machines at the
disposal of the party in power, or alternatively to prevent this the
Government by stringent civil-service rules must debar its employees
from their full rights as free men. If it would keep employees out of
politics, its rules must strip them of all right to expression of
opinion. It is easy to conceive that they might become so large a body
as by their votes to dictate to the Government and their political
rights need be further reduced. It must strip them of the liberty to
bargain for their own wages, for no Government employee can strike
against his Government and thus the whole people. It makes a
legislative body with all its political currents their final employer.
That bargaining does not rest upon economic need or economic strength
but on political potency.
But what of those who are outside the bureaucracy? What is the effect
upon their lives of the Government on business and these hundreds of
thousands more officials?
At once their opportunities in life are limited because a large area of
activities are removed from their participation. Further the Government
does not tolerate amongst its customers the freedom of competitive
reprisals to which private corporations are subject. Bureaucracy does
not spread the spirit of independence; it spreads the spirit of
submission into our daily life, penetrates the temper of our people; not
with the habit of powerful resistance to wrong, but with the habit of
timid acceptance of the irresistible might.
Bureaucracy is ever desirous of spreading its influence and its power.
You cannot give to a government the mastery of the daily working life of
a people without at the same time giving it mastery of the peoples’
souls and thoughts. Every expansion of government means that government
in order to protect itself from political consequences of its errors and
wrongs is driven onward and onward without peace to greater and greater
control of the country’s press and platform. Free speech does not live
many hours after free industry and free commerce die.
It is false liberalism that interprets itself into the Government
operation of business. The bureaucratization of our country would
poison the very roots of liberalism that is free speech, free assembly,
free press, political equality and equality of opportunity. It is the
road, not to more liberty, but to less liberty. Liberalism should be
found not striving to spread bureaucracy, but striving to set bounds to
it. True liberalism seeks freedom first in the confident belief that
without freedom the pursuit of all other blessings and benefits is vain.
That belief is the foundation of all American progress, political as
well as economic.
Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit, a force proceeding from the
deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrificed if political
freedom is to be preserved. Even if governmental conduct of business
could give us more efficiency instead of giving us decreased efficiency,
the fundamental objection to it would remain unaltered and unabated. It
would destroy political equality. It would cramp and cripple mental and
spiritual energies of our people. It would dry up the spirit of liberty
and progress. It would extinguish equality of opportunity, and for
these reasons fundamentally and primarily it must be resisted. For a
hundred and fifty years liberalism has found its true spirit in the
American system, not in the European systems.
I do not wish to be misunderstood in this statement. I am defining a
general policy! It does not mean that our government is to part with
one iota of its national resources without complete protection to the
public interest. I have already stated that where the government is
engaged in public works for purposes of flood control, of navigation, of
irrigation, of scientific research or national defense that, or in
pioneering a new art, it will at times necessarily produce power or
commodities as a by-product. But they must be by-products, not the
major purpose.
Nor do I wish to be misinterpreted as believing that the United States
is free-for-all and the devil-take-the-hindmost. The very essence of
equality of opportunity is that there shall be no domination by any
group or trust or combination in this republic, whether it be business
or political. It demands economic justice as well as political and
social justice. It is no system to laissez faire.
There is but one consideration in testing these proposals — that is
public interest. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who advocate
these methods of solving our problems. I believe they will give equal
credit to our honesty. If I believed that the adoption of such
proposals would decrease taxes, cure abuses or corruption, would produce
better service, decrease rates or benefit employees; If I believed they
would bring economic equality, would stimulate endeavor, would encourage
invention and support individual initiative, would provide equality of
opportunity; If I believed that these proposals would not wreck our
democracy but would strengthen the foundations of social and spiritual
progress in America — or if they would do a few of these things — then
I would not hesitate to accept these proposals, stupendous as they are,
even though such acceptance would result in the governmental operation
of all our power and the buying and selling of the products of our farms
or any other product. But it is not true that such benefits would
result to the public. The contrary would be true.
I feel deeply on this subject because during the war I had some
practical experience with governmental operation and control. I have
witnessed not only at home but abroad the many failures of government in
business. I have seen its tyrannies, its injustices, its undermining of
the very instincts which carry our people forward to progress. I have
witnessed the lack of advance, the lowered standards of living, the
depressed spirits of people working under such a system. My objection
is based not upon theory or upon a failure to recognize wrong or abuse
but because I know that the adoption of such methods would strike at the
very roots of American life and would destroy the very basis of American
progress.
Our people have the right to know whether we can continue to solve our
great problems without abandonment of our American system. I know we
can. We have demonstrated that our system is responsive enough to meet
any new and intricate development in our economic and business life. We
have demonstrated that we can maintain our democracy as master in its
own house and that we can preserve equality of opportunity and
individual freedom.
In the last fifty years we have discovered that mass production will
produce articles for us at half the cost that obtained previously. We
have seen the resultant growth of large units of production and
distribution. This is big business. Business must be bigger for our
tools are bigger, our country is bigger. We build a single dynamo of a
hundred thousand horsepower. Even fifteen years ago that would have
been a big business all by itself. Yet today advance in production
requires that we set ten of these units together.
Our great problem is to make certain that while we maintain the fullest
use of the large units of business yet that they shall be held
subordinate to the public interest. The American people from bitter
experience have a rightful fear that these great units might be used to
dominate our industrial life and by illegal and unethical practices
destroy equality of opportunity. Years ago the Republican
Administration established the principle that such evils could be
corrected by regulation. It developed methods by which abuses could be
prevented and yet the full value of economic advance retained for the
public. It insisted that when great public utilities were clothed with
the security of part monopoly, whether it be railways, power plants,
telephones or what not, then there must be the fullest and most complete
control of rates, services, and finances by governmental agencies.
These businesses must be conducted with glass pockets. In the
development of our great production industry, the Republican Party
insisted upon the enactment of a law that not only would maintain
competition but would destroy conspiracies to dominate and limit the
equality of opportunity amongst our people.
One of the great problems of government is to determine to what extent
the Government itself shall interfere with commerce and industry and how
much it shall leave to individual exertion. It is just as important
that business keep out of government as that government keep out of
business. No system is perfect. We have had abuses in the conduct of
business that every good citizen resents. But I insist that the results
show our system better than any other and retains the essentials of
freedom.
As a result of our distinctly American system our country has become the
land of opportunity to those born without inheritance not merely because
of the wealth of its resources and industry but because of this freedom
of initiative and enterprise. Russia has natural resources equal to
ours. Her people are equally industrious but she has not had the
blessings of 150 years of our form of government and of our social
system. The wisdom of our forefathers in their conception that progress
must be the sum of the progress of free individuals has been reenforced
by all of the great leaders of the country since that day. Jackson,
Lincoln, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Coolidge have stood
unalterably for these principles. By adherence to the principles of
decentralization, self-government, ordered liberty, and opportunity and
freedom to the individual our American experiment has yielded a degree
of well-being unparalleled in all the world. It has come nearer to the
abolition of poverty, to the abolition of fear of want that humanity has
ever reached before. Progress of the past seven years is the proof of
it. It furnishes an answer to those who would ask us to abandon the
system by which this has been accomplished.
There is a still further road to progress which is consonant with our
American system — a method that reinforces our individualism by
reducing, not increasing, Government interference in business.
In this country we have developed a higher sense of cooperation than has
ever been known before. This has come partly as the result of
stimulation during the war, partly from the impulses of industry itself.
We have ten thousand examples of this cooperative tendency in the
enormous growth of the associational activities during recent years.
Chambers of commerce, trade associations, professional associations,
labor unions, trade councils, civic associations, farm cooperatives —
these are all so embracing that there is scarcely an individual in our
country who does not belong to one or more of them. They represent
every phase of our national life both on the economic and the welfare
side. They represent a vast ferment toward conscious cooperation.
While some of them are selfish and narrow, the majority of them
recognize a responsibility to the public as well as to their own
interest.
The government in its obligation to the public can through skilled
specialists cooperate with these various associations for the
accomplishment of high public purposes. And this cooperation can take
two distinct directions. The first is in the promotion of constructive
projects of public interest, such as the elimination of waste in
industry, the stabilization of business and development of scientific
research. It can contribute to reducing unemployment and seasonal
employment. It can by organized cooperation assist and promote great
movements for better homes, for child welfare and for recreation.
The second form that this cooperation can take is in the cure of abuses
and the establishment of a higher code of ethics and a more strict
standard in its conduct of business. One test of our economic and
social system is its capacity to cure its own abuses. New abuses and
new relationships to the public interest will occur as long as we
continue to progress. If we are to be wholly dependent upon government
to cure every evil we shall by this very method have created an enlarged
and deadening abuse through the extension of bureaucracy and the clumsy
and incapable handling of delicate economic forces. And much abuse has
been and can be cured by inspiration and cooperation, rather than by
regulation of the government.
Nor is this any idealistic proposal. For the last seven years the
Department of Commerce has carried this into practice in hundreds of
directions and every single accomplishment of this character minimizes
the necessity for government interference with business.
All this is possible because of the cooperative spirit and ability at
team play in the American people. There is here a fundamental relief
from the necessity of extension of the government into every avenue of
business and welfare and therefore a powerful implement for the
promotion of progress.
I wish to say something more on what I believe is the outstanding ideal
in our whole political, economic and social system — that is equality
of opportunity. We have carried this ideal farther into our life than
has any other nation in the world. Equality of opportunity is the right
of every American, rich or poor, foreign or native born, without respect
to race or faith or color, to attain that position in life to which his
ability and character entitle him. We must carry this ideal further
than to economic and political fields alone. The first steps to
equality of opportunity are that there should be no child in America
that has not been born and does not live under sound conditions of
health, that does not have full opportunity for education from the
beginning to the end of our institutions, that is not free from
injurious labor, that does not have stimulation to accomplish to the
fullest of its capacities.
It is a matter for concern to our Government that we shall strengthen
the safeguards to health, that we shall strengthen the bureaus given to
research, that we shall strengthen our educational system at every
point, that we shall develop cooperation by our Federal Government with
state governments and with the voluntary bodies of the country that we
may bring not only better understanding but action in these matters.
Furthermore, equality of opportunity in my vision requires an equal
opportunity to the people in every section of our country. In these
past few years some groups in our country have lagged behind others in
the march of progress. They have not had the same opportunity. I refer
more particularly to those engaged in the textile, coal and in the
agricultural industries. We can assist in solving these problems by
cooperation of our Government. To the agricultural industry we shall
need advance initial capital to assist them, to stabilize and conduct
their own industry. But this proposal is that they shall conduct it
themselves, not by the Government. It is in the interest of our cities
that we shall bring agriculture into full stability and prosperity. I
know you will cooperate gladly in the faith that in the common
prosperity of our country lies its future.
Enviado por Enrique Ibañes