US Presidency
1937

I saw CCC boys and WPA workers building pleuropneumonia and small ponds and terraces to raise the water table and make it possible for farms and villages to remain in safety where they now are. I saw the harnessing of the turbulent Missouri, a muddy stream, with the topsoil of many states. And I saw barges on new channels carrying produce and freight athwart the Nation. Let me give you two simple illustrations of why Government projects of this type have a national importance for the whole country, and not merely a local importance. In the Boise Valley in Idaho I saw a district which had been recently irrigated to enormous fertility so that a family can now make a pretty good living from forty acres of its land. Many of the families, who are making good in that valley today, moved there from a thousand miles away.