MikhailT/lj-speech huggingface dataset:
They are essential factors in a rounded program for national recovery.
by a sound and rational ordering of its various elements and wise provisions for the protection of the weak against the strong.
Never since my inauguration in March, 1933, have I felt so unmistakably the atmosphere of recovery.
But it is more than the recovery of the material basis of our individual lives.
It is the recovery of confidence in our democratic processes and institutions.
We have survived all of the arduous burdens and the threatening dangers of a great economic calamity.
We have in the darkest moments of our national trials retained our faith in our own ability to master our destiny.
Fear is vanishing and confidence is growing on every side,
renewed faith in the vast possibilities of human beings to improve their material and spiritual status
through the instrumentality of the democratic form of government.
That faith is receiving its just reward.
For that we can be thankful to the God who watches over America.
The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Franklin D Roosevelt, Section 9.
March 9, 1937. Part one.
Last Thursday I described in detail certain economic problems which everyone admits now face the nation.
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."
Tonight, sitting at my desk in the White House, I make my first radio report to the people in my second term of office.
I am reminded of that evening in March, four years ago, when I made my first radio report to you.
We were then in the midst of the great banking crisis.
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.
Today's recovery proves how right that policy was.
But when, almost two years later, it came before the Supreme Court its constitutionality was upheld only by a five-to-four vote.
The change of one vote would have thrown all the affairs of this great Nation back into hopeless chaos.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
National laws are needed to complete that program.
Individual or local or state effort alone cannot protect us in 1937 any better than ten years ago.
It will take time -- and plenty of time -- to work out our remedies administratively even after legislation is passed.
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.
Four years ago action did not come until the eleventh hour.
It was almost too late.
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.
The American people have learned from the depression.
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 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.
We are at a crisis in our ability to proceed with that protection.
It is a quiet crisis. There are no lines of depositors outside closed banks.
But to the far-sighted it is far-reaching in its possibilities of injury to America.
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.
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.
The three horses are, of course, the three branches of government -- the Congress, the Executive and the courts.
Two of the horses are pulling in unison today; the third is not.
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.
It is the American people themselves who are in the driver's seat.
It is the American people themselves who want the furrow plowed.
It is the American people themselves who expect the third horse to pull in unison with the other two.
I hope that you have re-read the Constitution of the United States in these past few weeks.
Like the Bible, it ought to be read again and again.
It is an easy document to understand when you remember that it was called into being
because the Articles of Confederation under which the original thirteen States tried to operate after the Revolution
showed the need of a national government with power enough to handle national problems.
In its Preamble, the Constitution states that it was intended to form a more perfect Union and promote the general welfare;
and the powers given to the Congress to carry out those purposes can be best described by saying
that they were all the powers needed to meet each and every problem which then had a national character
and which could not be met by merely local action.
But the framers went further.
Having in mind that in succeeding generations many other problems then undreamed of would become national problems
they gave to the Congress the ample broad powers "to levy taxes
and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.
That, my friends, is what I honestly believe
to have been the clear and underlying purpose of the patriots who wrote a federal constitution to create a national government
with national power, intended as they said, "to form a more perfect union
for ourselves and our posterity.
For nearly twenty years there was no conflict between the Congress and the Court.
Congress passed a statute which, in 1803, the Court said violated an express provision of the Constitution.
The Court claimed the power to declare it unconstitutional and did so declare it.
But a little later the Court itself admitted
that it was an extraordinary power to exercise and through Mr. Justice Washington laid down this limitation upon it:
It is but a decent respect due to the wisdom, the integrity and the patriotism of the legislative body,
by which any law is passed,
to presume in favor of its validity until its violation of the Constitution is proved beyond all reasonable doubt.
But since the rise of the modern movement for social and economic progress through legislation,
the Court has more and more often and more and more boldly
asserted a power to veto laws passed by the Congress and state legislatures in complete disregard of this original limitation.
In the last four years the sound rule of giving statutes the benefit of all reasonable doubt has been cast aside.
The Court has been acting not as a judicial body, but as a policy-making body.
When the Congress has sought to stabilize national agriculture, to improve the conditions of labor,
to safeguard business against unfair competition,
to protect our national resources, and in many other ways, to serve our clearly national needs,
the majority of the Court has been assuming the power to pass on the wisdom of these acts of the Congress
and to approve or disapprove the public policy written into these laws.
That is not only my accusation.
It is the accusation of most distinguished justices of the present Supreme Court.
I have not the time to quote to you all the language used by dissenting justices in many of these cases.
But in the case holding the Railroad Retirement Act unconstitutional, for instance,
Chief Justice Hughes said in a dissenting opinion that the majority opinion was "a departure from sound principles,"
and placed "an unwarranted limitation upon the commerce clause."
And three other justices agreed with him.
In the case of holding the A.A.A. unconstitutional,
Justice Stone said of the majority opinion that it was a "tortured construction of the Constitution."
And two other justices agreed with him.