May 17, 1951
Madam Chairman, Mr. Attorney General, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:
It is a very great pleasure for me to be here this morning, and I am glad to join in welcoming this conference to Washington. I am strongly in favor of what you are doing here to help the people of this country to become better citizens. The citizen's job is an important one. It is the most important job in this great Republic.
The job of being an American citizen, a citizen of the United States of America, keeps growing more difficult and more important every day. In some countries the important decisions are made by the rulers, and the citizens have to do what they are told. In our country the citizens make the basic decisions, and the officials of the Government have to do what the people tell them--sometimes.
We must make the right decisions. You, as citizens, must make the right decisions. Never was there a time when the right decisions are so necessary as they are at this time.
As the problems before our country become more complicated and more dangerous, our citizens must give greater attention to their job of making the basic decisions. It is your country, as well as mine. It is your responsibility, as well as mine. If you do not assume that responsibility-and you are part of that responsibility--there is nobody to blame but yourselves when things go entirely wrong. There is less margin for error than there used to be making these decisions. Wrong decisions in this day and age may wreck the country--wreck it for all time.
There is a great deal of serious business before the Government of this country now. This business concerns our national defense and our national survival. Important decisions have to be made by the Congress, the President, and the country, and they must be made soon. These decisions ought to be above petty politics, because the welfare of the country depends upon them.
Citizens should understand the facts. You know, the hardest thing in the world to find is a real fact. And the easiest thing to do is to garble and confuse the facts. I repeat, that the easiest thing to do in the world today is to garble and confuse the facts. We have a great deal of that going on right now.
I hope, when you leave this conference, you will take home with you an understanding of the major problems we face, and a sense of urgency about the decisions your Government has to make. If this understanding can be spread among all the citizen groups you represent, I believe these decisions will be made promptly, and I believe they will be made right.
If citizens know the facts, and let their elected representatives know that they want the national interest put above every political interest and every special interest, then there won't be any question about keeping our Nation strong and secure. This is one of the most important things that this conference can do.
We must face up to the major problems, face up to them and solve them--solve them in the interest of all the people and not in the interest of just a favored few.
I would like to outline for you a few of the major problems we have to face.
There is a lot of discussion nowadays about military strategy. That's all right. Military strategy is important, and everybody ought to be concerned about it. And I want to say to you that our Defense Department is headed by the ablest group of men that this or any other country ever had for planning and carrying out its defense policy.
But, there are a lot of other problems that are equally important. We have the hard problems of defense production, the problem of taxes, the problem of stabilization--these are just examples of a few of the problems that we have. Unless we face these problems, we won't be able to have any military strategy at all. And no matter how able our Defense Department men may be, there won't be anything to plan for.
The danger we face is very serious, the most dangerous we have ever faced in all our time. Our country faces the danger of war from an aggressive and imperialist foreign power. Meeting this danger is all-important. And to meet that danger, we should all stand together.
I think that some people fail to realize that this threat is very real. They think there is still time to play petty politics.
That is a terribly dangerous attitude. We must all get together behind the program adequate to meet the perils we face. We must get together now--without waiting and without playing petty politics.
The defense program comes first, that is our first and greatest problem. Our defense program and defense production must come ahead of everything else. If we let our defense program get snarled up, or delayed, or slashed, we would be courting disaster.
The suggestion was made by one Senator the other day, that we ought to cut down the goal for our Armed Forces by half a million men. And this same Senator wants to go for an all-out war in China all by ourselves. At a time like this, such a cut would be foolish--not only foolish it would be most dangerous.
Slashing the size of our Armed Forces would not be economy; it would be an invitation to war.
Let me drive that home. What we are attempting to do now, in the next year and a half, we anticipate may cost about $60 billion--an expenditure over a year and a half which may ward off world war III. One week of all-out war would cost from 10 to 20 times that.
Which is the sanest expenditure?
Do I have to drive that home to you, to say which you think is the sanest expenditure?
Now, in addition to that defense program of ours, we must work with our allies. We must have friends in this troubled world. Yet some Senators, and some other people, would have us go it alone. In this world of ours in this day, we can't go it alone.
There is a free world, and there is a slave world. We belong to the free world, and we are the head of the free world. We have got to accept that responsibility and carry out that responsibility.
Our defense program has two parts. One part is building up our own Armed Forces and our national strength. The other is helping our allies build up their strength so they can do their share in preventing war and stopping aggression. Both these parts of our defense program are essential to our security.
Unless we help our allies, we might have to face the real danger alone. Unless our allies are strong, the Kremlin might take them over, and the danger of war would increase. Without allies, our defense would be more difficult, and more costly--more costly in dollars, and what is much more important, most costly in lives. There is no economy in slashing our foreign aid program. Penny-pinching now may mean throwing away the lives of our soldiers later on.
One of the reasons we are in this condition is because we did not accept our responsibility immediately after the war was over. In 1945 a universal service law was asked for by the President of the United States. That universal service law passed in 1945 or early in 1946 would have saved billions of dollars now. The people who prevented the enactment of a universal service law in 1945 are trying by every means at their command to prevent it now. We must not let them prevent it, because it is essential to the safety of the world--to our own safety.
We must build our economy for defense. We have the most amazing prosperous economy in the history of the world; and we have got to keep it that way.
Our defense program includes not only increasing our Armed Forces, making planes, tanks, and guns for them and for our allies. It also includes having and keeping a strong economy here at home. We must be able to turn out greater and greater quantities of goods for our armed services, in case we have to meet an all-out attack. We have to have the economic strength to carry our defense program for a long time to come. If we are to be in this position, we need more factories, more electric power, and a higher production of basic materials. We need a sound and efficient civil economy to support our defense production. This means housing for defense workers, and adequate public services to keep the defense production functioning efficiently.
When we talk about cutting nondefense expenditures, we must be sure we don't cut the strength and the support of our defense effort. People who are trying to do this are not helping our country. On the contrary, they are injuring it. If these "pull-backs" have their way, they will ruin our economy, and our country at the same time.
We must have a stabilized economy. Next to our defense program, the most important thing is economic stabilization. Economic stabilization means preventing inflation. This includes price control, wage control, and rent control.
All these controls expire on June 30th, just 6 weeks from now. The Congress is now considering whether these controls should be extended for another 2 years. Of course, they have to be extended. If they are not, our whole economy will be in great danger, and every family in the country will suffer--the inflationary pressures will increase.
Pressures on prices have eased off a little lately, but these pressures will come back stronger than ever in the next few months.
The more defense money we spend, the higher prices will tend to go. It is a dangerous situation we are faced with. Already the defense expenditures for the Army have increased the price of those things which the Army has to buy by more than $530 million. The increased cost of the Navy expenditures for the same purpose would have bought four of the largest air carriers--the most expensive battleships in the world.
By June 30 we will have spent about $19 billion on defense since the attack in Korea a year ago. In the year beginning July 1st our defense spending will probably increase to about $40 billion. If we do not control inflation, that $40 billion will only buy half as much as it would even now. After we have built our defenses up enough to meet the present danger, we hope we won't have to spend at such a high rate, and prices will be easier to hold.
Now, everybody says prices must be held down. Everybody says prices must be held down, but you must hold down everybody's prices but mine--everybody else must take a cut, but be careful don't touch mine. But right now it will take everything we can do to hold these prices down, and if we can hold them down until we get over the hump of our defense program, we will be past the danger point. If we can't, the cost of living will go through the roof. And that will mean ruin for our defense program, and ruin for our strength as a Nation.
Now, if we are going to control prices, the Congress has got to say, and say it in no uncertain terms, that it wants prices controlled. Every special interest in the country is in Washington, or on its way, to lobby for a little exception for itself. And most of them can make out a pretty good case for themselves. There are enough special interest fellows appearing before the Senate Finance Committee to run the hearings well into June.
The public interest fellows are not being heard because they don't know what's happening. Now, you public interest people better get here and look after your interests!
It will be nice to give these private interest fellows some exceptions, but we can't have such a lot of exceptions and still have effective price control. If we handed out all the exceptions that are asked for, price control would be just like a sieve, and the tide of inflation would pour through it.
I don't think some of these special interest fellows understand what would happen if we had all-out inflation, but when they come down here and ask for special interest, that is what they are asking for: all-out inflation.
Now, you consumers can make a strong demand for price control.
We are not going to be able to hold the cost of living against the tremendous inflationary pressures ahead, unless we have a good, strong price control law, and a good strong rent control law. If you want that kind of law--if you, the consumers of this country, want Congress to provide a strong price control system, you had better see, and you had better write to your Congressman.
Now, you see things in the paper, write to your President--I get 40,000 letters a day, as a result of this or that, or a special occasion, but I am saying to you--I am saying to you right now, you had better let your Congressman know where you stand. You had better see him and tell him about it while you are here. Tell him you want a price control law that will work which doesn't injure anybody. Price control, or any other control, we want an equitable control that will be fair to everybody, the producer, the middleman and the consumer. That is what we are working for.
The special interests and the lobbies will wreck this stabilization program, as sure as you're born, unless the main body of our citizens of this country get busy and do something about it. And that is what I am urging you to do.
We must pay-as-we-go, with a fair tax program. Now this is something that touches the most touchy nerve in the country: the pocketbook nerve.
Another thing that ought to be of special concern to every citizen in this country is our tax program. We have to have more taxes, if we are to pay for our defense program and hold down inflation. Nobody likes to pay more taxes, but we have got to do it because more taxes are essential to the safety and welfare of this country. So far, we have been doing fairly well in paying for our defense program as we go along. But our defense expenditures are going to increase rapidly. We can't keep on paying as we go unless we get the tax money wherewith to do it.
Taxes are not so hard to take if everybody pays his fair share, in accordance with his ability to pay. But, if we let the special groups come in and riddle the tax program with special exemptions, we won't have a good tax program, or a fair tax program. We won't be able to balance the budget, and we won't be able to stop inflation.
I hope you will all realize, and will take home as one of the messages of this conference, that higher taxes are necessary to our defense program and to our survival as a Nation.
Now, I don't think people ought to have any trouble agreeing on the national interest. I think everybody--every citizen--is a patriot, and that he believes that the national interest comes first, and that at a time like this, when some of our young men are fighting and dying to stop Communist aggression, and when so many of our boys face a period of military service to prepare for whatever may lie ahead, it ought to be easy for this country to get together in unity of spirit and action.
It ought to be the easiest thing in the world to agree upon a good defense program, and a good foreign aid program, and a sound program to hold down the cost of living. But it is not easy. It is one of the most difficult things which any President has ever faced. I am going to face it, and with your help I am going to put it over. Now, we must get the facts to the people, and that is hard to do.
One of the main reasons, I think, is that most of our citizens--those who do the fighting, and pay the bills, and keep the country going--are just too occupied to make their voices heard. If they had all the facts, and their representatives in Washington knew how they felt, I don't think we would have so much trouble with these great problems.
That is why the work of this Conference means so much in the present crisis of the world. The future depends on the opinions and the decisions of the American people.
If you can develop ways of keeping our citizens better informed, of helping them to understand the increasing duties of their citizenship, I have no doubt that this country will make the right decisions, and that those decisions will lead the world to a just and lasting peace. And that is what we all want.
NOTE: The President spoke at 11:50 a.m. at the Statler Hotel in Washington. In his opening words he referred to Corma Mowrey, president of the National Education Association, and Attorney General J. Howard McGrath.
The sixth annual meeting of the National Conference on Citizenship was sponsored by the Department of Justice and the National Education Association.
Madam Chairman, Mr. Attorney General, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:
It is a very great pleasure for me to be here this morning, and I am glad to join in welcoming this conference to Washington. I am strongly in favor of what you are doing here to help the people of this country to become better citizens. The citizen's job is an important one. It is the most important job in this great Republic.
The job of being an American citizen, a citizen of the United States of America, keeps growing more difficult and more important every day. In some countries the important decisions are made by the rulers, and the citizens have to do what they are told. In our country the citizens make the basic decisions, and the officials of the Government have to do what the people tell them--sometimes.
We must make the right decisions. You, as citizens, must make the right decisions. Never was there a time when the right decisions are so necessary as they are at this time.
As the problems before our country become more complicated and more dangerous, our citizens must give greater attention to their job of making the basic decisions. It is your country, as well as mine. It is your responsibility, as well as mine. If you do not assume that responsibility-and you are part of that responsibility--there is nobody to blame but yourselves when things go entirely wrong. There is less margin for error than there used to be making these decisions. Wrong decisions in this day and age may wreck the country--wreck it for all time.
There is a great deal of serious business before the Government of this country now. This business concerns our national defense and our national survival. Important decisions have to be made by the Congress, the President, and the country, and they must be made soon. These decisions ought to be above petty politics, because the welfare of the country depends upon them.
Citizens should understand the facts. You know, the hardest thing in the world to find is a real fact. And the easiest thing to do is to garble and confuse the facts. I repeat, that the easiest thing to do in the world today is to garble and confuse the facts. We have a great deal of that going on right now.
I hope, when you leave this conference, you will take home with you an understanding of the major problems we face, and a sense of urgency about the decisions your Government has to make. If this understanding can be spread among all the citizen groups you represent, I believe these decisions will be made promptly, and I believe they will be made right.
If citizens know the facts, and let their elected representatives know that they want the national interest put above every political interest and every special interest, then there won't be any question about keeping our Nation strong and secure. This is one of the most important things that this conference can do.
We must face up to the major problems, face up to them and solve them--solve them in the interest of all the people and not in the interest of just a favored few.
I would like to outline for you a few of the major problems we have to face.
There is a lot of discussion nowadays about military strategy. That's all right. Military strategy is important, and everybody ought to be concerned about it. And I want to say to you that our Defense Department is headed by the ablest group of men that this or any other country ever had for planning and carrying out its defense policy.
But, there are a lot of other problems that are equally important. We have the hard problems of defense production, the problem of taxes, the problem of stabilization--these are just examples of a few of the problems that we have. Unless we face these problems, we won't be able to have any military strategy at all. And no matter how able our Defense Department men may be, there won't be anything to plan for.
The danger we face is very serious, the most dangerous we have ever faced in all our time. Our country faces the danger of war from an aggressive and imperialist foreign power. Meeting this danger is all-important. And to meet that danger, we should all stand together.
I think that some people fail to realize that this threat is very real. They think there is still time to play petty politics.
That is a terribly dangerous attitude. We must all get together behind the program adequate to meet the perils we face. We must get together now--without waiting and without playing petty politics.
The defense program comes first, that is our first and greatest problem. Our defense program and defense production must come ahead of everything else. If we let our defense program get snarled up, or delayed, or slashed, we would be courting disaster.
The suggestion was made by one Senator the other day, that we ought to cut down the goal for our Armed Forces by half a million men. And this same Senator wants to go for an all-out war in China all by ourselves. At a time like this, such a cut would be foolish--not only foolish it would be most dangerous.
Slashing the size of our Armed Forces would not be economy; it would be an invitation to war.
Let me drive that home. What we are attempting to do now, in the next year and a half, we anticipate may cost about $60 billion--an expenditure over a year and a half which may ward off world war III. One week of all-out war would cost from 10 to 20 times that.
Which is the sanest expenditure?
Do I have to drive that home to you, to say which you think is the sanest expenditure?
Now, in addition to that defense program of ours, we must work with our allies. We must have friends in this troubled world. Yet some Senators, and some other people, would have us go it alone. In this world of ours in this day, we can't go it alone.
There is a free world, and there is a slave world. We belong to the free world, and we are the head of the free world. We have got to accept that responsibility and carry out that responsibility.
Our defense program has two parts. One part is building up our own Armed Forces and our national strength. The other is helping our allies build up their strength so they can do their share in preventing war and stopping aggression. Both these parts of our defense program are essential to our security.
Unless we help our allies, we might have to face the real danger alone. Unless our allies are strong, the Kremlin might take them over, and the danger of war would increase. Without allies, our defense would be more difficult, and more costly--more costly in dollars, and what is much more important, most costly in lives. There is no economy in slashing our foreign aid program. Penny-pinching now may mean throwing away the lives of our soldiers later on.
One of the reasons we are in this condition is because we did not accept our responsibility immediately after the war was over. In 1945 a universal service law was asked for by the President of the United States. That universal service law passed in 1945 or early in 1946 would have saved billions of dollars now. The people who prevented the enactment of a universal service law in 1945 are trying by every means at their command to prevent it now. We must not let them prevent it, because it is essential to the safety of the world--to our own safety.
We must build our economy for defense. We have the most amazing prosperous economy in the history of the world; and we have got to keep it that way.
Our defense program includes not only increasing our Armed Forces, making planes, tanks, and guns for them and for our allies. It also includes having and keeping a strong economy here at home. We must be able to turn out greater and greater quantities of goods for our armed services, in case we have to meet an all-out attack. We have to have the economic strength to carry our defense program for a long time to come. If we are to be in this position, we need more factories, more electric power, and a higher production of basic materials. We need a sound and efficient civil economy to support our defense production. This means housing for defense workers, and adequate public services to keep the defense production functioning efficiently.
When we talk about cutting nondefense expenditures, we must be sure we don't cut the strength and the support of our defense effort. People who are trying to do this are not helping our country. On the contrary, they are injuring it. If these "pull-backs" have their way, they will ruin our economy, and our country at the same time.
We must have a stabilized economy. Next to our defense program, the most important thing is economic stabilization. Economic stabilization means preventing inflation. This includes price control, wage control, and rent control.
All these controls expire on June 30th, just 6 weeks from now. The Congress is now considering whether these controls should be extended for another 2 years. Of course, they have to be extended. If they are not, our whole economy will be in great danger, and every family in the country will suffer--the inflationary pressures will increase.
Pressures on prices have eased off a little lately, but these pressures will come back stronger than ever in the next few months.
The more defense money we spend, the higher prices will tend to go. It is a dangerous situation we are faced with. Already the defense expenditures for the Army have increased the price of those things which the Army has to buy by more than $530 million. The increased cost of the Navy expenditures for the same purpose would have bought four of the largest air carriers--the most expensive battleships in the world.
By June 30 we will have spent about $19 billion on defense since the attack in Korea a year ago. In the year beginning July 1st our defense spending will probably increase to about $40 billion. If we do not control inflation, that $40 billion will only buy half as much as it would even now. After we have built our defenses up enough to meet the present danger, we hope we won't have to spend at such a high rate, and prices will be easier to hold.
Now, everybody says prices must be held down. Everybody says prices must be held down, but you must hold down everybody's prices but mine--everybody else must take a cut, but be careful don't touch mine. But right now it will take everything we can do to hold these prices down, and if we can hold them down until we get over the hump of our defense program, we will be past the danger point. If we can't, the cost of living will go through the roof. And that will mean ruin for our defense program, and ruin for our strength as a Nation.
Now, if we are going to control prices, the Congress has got to say, and say it in no uncertain terms, that it wants prices controlled. Every special interest in the country is in Washington, or on its way, to lobby for a little exception for itself. And most of them can make out a pretty good case for themselves. There are enough special interest fellows appearing before the Senate Finance Committee to run the hearings well into June.
The public interest fellows are not being heard because they don't know what's happening. Now, you public interest people better get here and look after your interests!
It will be nice to give these private interest fellows some exceptions, but we can't have such a lot of exceptions and still have effective price control. If we handed out all the exceptions that are asked for, price control would be just like a sieve, and the tide of inflation would pour through it.
I don't think some of these special interest fellows understand what would happen if we had all-out inflation, but when they come down here and ask for special interest, that is what they are asking for: all-out inflation.
Now, you consumers can make a strong demand for price control.
We are not going to be able to hold the cost of living against the tremendous inflationary pressures ahead, unless we have a good, strong price control law, and a good strong rent control law. If you want that kind of law--if you, the consumers of this country, want Congress to provide a strong price control system, you had better see, and you had better write to your Congressman.
Now, you see things in the paper, write to your President--I get 40,000 letters a day, as a result of this or that, or a special occasion, but I am saying to you--I am saying to you right now, you had better let your Congressman know where you stand. You had better see him and tell him about it while you are here. Tell him you want a price control law that will work which doesn't injure anybody. Price control, or any other control, we want an equitable control that will be fair to everybody, the producer, the middleman and the consumer. That is what we are working for.
The special interests and the lobbies will wreck this stabilization program, as sure as you're born, unless the main body of our citizens of this country get busy and do something about it. And that is what I am urging you to do.
We must pay-as-we-go, with a fair tax program. Now this is something that touches the most touchy nerve in the country: the pocketbook nerve.
Another thing that ought to be of special concern to every citizen in this country is our tax program. We have to have more taxes, if we are to pay for our defense program and hold down inflation. Nobody likes to pay more taxes, but we have got to do it because more taxes are essential to the safety and welfare of this country. So far, we have been doing fairly well in paying for our defense program as we go along. But our defense expenditures are going to increase rapidly. We can't keep on paying as we go unless we get the tax money wherewith to do it.
Taxes are not so hard to take if everybody pays his fair share, in accordance with his ability to pay. But, if we let the special groups come in and riddle the tax program with special exemptions, we won't have a good tax program, or a fair tax program. We won't be able to balance the budget, and we won't be able to stop inflation.
I hope you will all realize, and will take home as one of the messages of this conference, that higher taxes are necessary to our defense program and to our survival as a Nation.
Now, I don't think people ought to have any trouble agreeing on the national interest. I think everybody--every citizen--is a patriot, and that he believes that the national interest comes first, and that at a time like this, when some of our young men are fighting and dying to stop Communist aggression, and when so many of our boys face a period of military service to prepare for whatever may lie ahead, it ought to be easy for this country to get together in unity of spirit and action.
It ought to be the easiest thing in the world to agree upon a good defense program, and a good foreign aid program, and a sound program to hold down the cost of living. But it is not easy. It is one of the most difficult things which any President has ever faced. I am going to face it, and with your help I am going to put it over. Now, we must get the facts to the people, and that is hard to do.
One of the main reasons, I think, is that most of our citizens--those who do the fighting, and pay the bills, and keep the country going--are just too occupied to make their voices heard. If they had all the facts, and their representatives in Washington knew how they felt, I don't think we would have so much trouble with these great problems.
That is why the work of this Conference means so much in the present crisis of the world. The future depends on the opinions and the decisions of the American people.
If you can develop ways of keeping our citizens better informed, of helping them to understand the increasing duties of their citizenship, I have no doubt that this country will make the right decisions, and that those decisions will lead the world to a just and lasting peace. And that is what we all want.
NOTE: The President spoke at 11:50 a.m. at the Statler Hotel in Washington. In his opening words he referred to Corma Mowrey, president of the National Education Association, and Attorney General J. Howard McGrath.
The sixth annual meeting of the National Conference on Citizenship was sponsored by the Department of Justice and the National Education Association.