# Our Common Country/Chapter 2

We are the great business nation of the world. We shall be able to save that business and prosper it by a fair measure of common sense, and we ought and must do it. We will preserve a willingness to listen to the will of the people, and will construe the desire for a common good fortune to mean the necessary good fortune of business, which is the life-blood of material existence.
American business is not big business. Wilful folly has been in those persons in distended power over our national affairs who have spoken of American business as if it were a large and selfish interest seek​ing special privileges, and who, on that basis, have put their bungling hands upon its throat and tried tinkering and experimenting with it, and abusing it and treating it with suspicion. Let us put an end to holding success to be a crime.
It will be the American people who will do this because American business is everybody's business. Nearly nine-tenths of those who depend for their living and the legitimate fruits of their labors in American manufacturing are the wage-earners. The blow directed at American business, the pulling and hauling of American business by weird economic and social theories, is less menacing, for instance, to the one-tenth who in manufacturing are business executives than it is to the nine-tenths who are our American laborers.
The big business of America is the little business of America. The last available census figures show that more than sixty ​per cent. of our factories were little plants, none of which turned out more than $100,000 of products. Only twenty-five per cent. of our plants were even doing business as corporations. The average number of workers employed was twenty-five. When we come to analyze what we mean by American business we find out that we mean the daily work of the nation, most of it undertaken in the factory and on the farm in small units. We find out that we even mean the business of the home and of the housewife, and that American business is everybody's business. It is more than that. It is the work of every worker, clothes for his back, food for his mouth.
We must face the new task. We have had a fever of high prices and excessive production out of the sacrificed billions of treasure and millions of lives, but the reconstruction must be sober business, founded on unchanging principle. We ​must summon the best abilities of America to put America back on the main road, and to remove the debris of the last eight years, and to keep our industries running, and to restore the proper ratio of prosperity to our American agriculture so that it can again bid for good American standard labor.
If our memory is directed again to 1914, we will recall that world war alone saved us from a disaster in peace. We were sharpening our wits in competition with the world, as the President then expressed it, but we dulled our capacity to buy, then war saved us psychologically and commercially; but to-day we are at peace, actual though not proclaimed, and our problems are the problems of peace.
We must always exact, from ourselves and our business, high, honorable and fair dealing by law, and by law's rigid enforcement when necessary, but we must repeal and wipe out a mass of executive orders ​and laws which, failing to serve effectively that purpose, serve only to leave American business in anxiety, uncertainty and darkness.
We must readjust our tariff, and this time with especial regard for the new economic menace to our American agriculture as well as manufacturing.
We must readjust our internal taxation, especially the excess profits tax, to remove the burdens it imposes upon the will to create and produce, whether that will is the will of the big corporation, of the small corporation, or of the individual.
We must uproot from our national government the yearning to undertake enterprises and experiments which were never intended as the work of our government, which have proved ineffective to a point which sickens us all, and which our government is incapable of performing without wreckage or chaos. Of necessity the ​machinery of government expands as we grow in numbers as a people, but before government expands in bureaucratic control of business its sponsors ought first to demonstrate a capacity to conduct the business of the government. When government itself has a budget of more than three billions a year, in times of peace, it has a business of its own to look after—and it needs looking after—without seeking new fields to conquer until it has proved capacity for the tasks it must perform.
We must, instead of such experiments, establish a closer understanding between American government and American business, so that one may serve the other, and the other obey and seek cooperation.
We must give government cooperation to business, we must protect American business at home, and we must aid and protect it abroad by the upbuilding of our merchant marine, and a restoration of our ​self-respecting measure of American protection to her citizens wherever they may go upon righteous errands.
We must build our economic life into new strength and we must do it so that our prosperity shall not be the prosperity of profiteers nor of special privilege.
We must do it so that abroad we are known not as a nation strutting under a plumage of fine words, but as one that knits friendly and peaceful relations by the shuttle of honorable deeds.
We must do it so that at home our economic life yields opportunity to every man not to have that which he has not earned, whether he be the capitalist or the humblest laborer, but to have a share in prosperity based upon his own merit, capacity and worth—under the eternal spirit of "America First."
American business has suffered from staggering blows because of too much ineffective meddling by government, and ​it is equally true that good government has almost been allowed to die on our hands, because it has not utilized the first sound principles of American business.
The government of the United States, of this nation of ours, which should be an example of American good sense and sound organization, has been allowed to degenerate into an inadequate piece of administrative machinery. While we have heard preaching to all the nations of the earth, which, to put it mildly, has been adequate indeed, the back of our leadership has been turned on the bad example we have set before the world in the conduct of our own affairs. I refer only to the deplorable impairment which has been given our time-tested democratic institutions by robbing our representative government of its place in our republic in order to fatten administrative authority and replace the will of the people by the will of the wilful.
​The government has engaged in prodigal waste. The American people pay. It has kept its overstuffed bureaus and departments, many of which are doing overlapping work, in a prime condition of reckless inefficiency. The American people pay. It has engaged in all kinds of costly bungling experiments of government management and ownership of enterprises which other management could do better. The American people pay. It has allowed worthy federal employees, particularly those who are skilled, such as chemists and agricultural experts, to go so badly paid by the government that they have left the service. The American people have to bear the cost. It has poured forth our national treasure into the yawning emptiness of unpreparedness for war and unpreparedness for peace. It has spent our money and failed to do business, while the prodigal flow went on. The American people have ​paid, and are paying. With a return to sanity we now have another task before us in making the administrative part of our government one in which a people, proud of its abilities in business, can take pride.
We must not let our administrative government crack under the load of its new burdens or those that our future may place upon it. It has been cracking badly. To repair it is the business of every American—not only because of pride, but also because he pays for it, and is entitled to good government without waste.
We have declared for a system of planning our expenditures so that overlapping and leakage and inefficiency shall be revealed before they occur. This national budget plan we must put into force.
We must put our postal service upon a new basis, and extend the merit system in the choice and promotion of federal employees.
​We must not only lop off useless jobs, but we must so reward efficiency and value among our public service employees that we may continue to have their loyalty because we have given decent pay and the expectation of promotion when promotion is earned.
We must conduct a careful scrutiny of our great executive departments to plan so that similar labors shall not be duplicated and so that similar functions shall be grouped and not scattered.
We must go to men who know for advice in administrative improvement; we must have to aid us more men trained in agriculture, more technical men, more men who know business and the practises of commerce and trade.
I look upon the responsibility of an executive as being based first of all upon his ability, together with that of capable men called to execute. An executive officer of any other than government business ​would be discharged if he allowed paralysis and perversion of the functioning of that business, while he and his followers were engaged in addressing advice to the neighbors.
Let them who say that the American people are not awake to these matters take new counsel. The government is the people's business, and they will not see it broken down. The government is the concern of every American—of every man, woman and child. We are shareholders in it and we are looking forward with relief to an end of mismanagement.
This great federal machine has grown up in a century of haphazard expansion, until, as recently described, it resembles "an antiquated central building with a large number of surrounding sheds and cottages, overcrowded with overlapping officials and saturated with methods of organization and administration fully fifty years behind the times."
​An eminent senator once said he could substitute his private business methods for government practises and save hundreds of millions. It was thought to be true when he said it, and we might treble the figures for the saving now.
Here in America we have developed the most proficient and most efficient types of business organization and administration in the world; they have shown the greatest capacity for administrative vision. We mean to call that administrative quality and fitness into the service of the government, and establish an advance in government business, not merely talk about government progress.
Conditions are calling, capabilities await, the needs are urging and we pledge a new order—a business government, with business efficiency, and a business concern for public approval.