![]() 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. The wages they earn are going in greater part to the support of the nearly one million people who constitute their families. 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. Municipal and State aid were being stretched to the limit. It was a vital necessity to restore purchasing power by reducing the debt and interest charges upon our people, but while we were helping people to save their credit it was at the same time absolutely essential to do something about the physical needs of hundreds of thousands who were in dire straits at that very moment. In addition the Home Loan Act, the Farm Loan Act and the Bankruptcy Act were passed. All of you know the financial steps which have been taken to correct this inequality. For this reason large numbers of people were actually losing possession of and title to their farms and homes. The dollar was a different dollar from the one with which the average debt had been incurred. The problem of the credit of the individual was made more difficult because of another fact. The condition relating to state banks, while not quite so good on a percentage basis, is shoving a steady reduction in the total of frozen deposits - a result much better than we had expected three months ago. Today only about 5 per cent of the deposits in national banks are still tied up. One month later 90 per cent of the deposits in the national banks had been made available to the depositors. On March sixth every national bank was closed. You and I know of the banking crisis and of the great danger to the savings of our people. Then came the part of the problem that concerned the credit of the individual citizens themselves. It is the base of the whole recovery plan. That foundation of the Federal credit stands there broad and sure. We have built a granite foundation in a period of confusion. So you will see that we have kept our credit good. But it is not inconsistent because a large portion of the emergency money has been paid out in the form of sound loans which will be repaid to the Treasury over a period of years and to cover the rest of the emergency money we have imposed taxes to pay the interest and the installments on that part of the debt. It may seem inconsistent for a government to cut down its regular expenses and at the same time to borrow and to spend billions for an emergency. The immediate task was to bring our regular expenses within our revenues. For years the Government had not lived within its income. Such leadership, however, had its beginning in preserving and strengthening the credit of the United States Government, because without that no leadership was a possibility. Long before Inauguration Day I became convinced that individual effort and local effort and even disjointed Federal effort had failed and of necessity would fail and, therefore, that a rounded leadership by the Federal Government had become a necessity both of theory and of fact. I think it will interest you if I set forth the fundamentals of this planning for national recovery and this I am very certain will make it abundantly clear to you that all of the proposals and all of the legislation since the fourth day of March have not been just a collection of haphazard schemes but rather the orderly component parts of a connected and logical whole. Secondly, I wanted a few weeks in which to set up the new administrative organization and to see the first fruits of our careful planning. ![]() After the adjournment of the historical special session of the Congress five weeks ago I purposely refrained from addressing you for two very good reasons.įirst, I think that we all wanted the opportunity of a little quiet thought to examine and assimilate in a mental picture the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.
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