Address at the lmeson Field Airport, Jacksonville, Florida

Mr. Chairman, General Van Fleet--My Fellow Citizens:

I should first like to take advantage of this opportunity to pay a personal tribute to a great Floridian, General Van Fleet. He was one of the few men who, in World War Two, led a regiment across the beaches and at the moment of victory was a three-star General commanding a corps.

Next, I want to pay my personal tribute to Florida. Here is a place I like to come. I regret sincerely that my visit today can touch only two of your cities, and that only briefly. Had I the opportunity to go through your cities and streets, not only here and in Miami but throughout all the other towns of Florida, I would deem it a very great honor and privilege.

Florida is lucky in one way. Here was the scene of a battleground between a pair of opponents we now have--who are seeking the Presidency and the Vice Presidency respectively. You learned a great deal about them, particularly you learned about each of them from the other, and you learned about the depth of admiration, the great respect, that each had for the other, and about the qualifications that each felt and said that the other one had for the great Office of the Presidency.

Now there is one question that we could answer very quickly then, I think, this afternoon, since you know these things: Do we want this pair in Washington?

Well, that is what you are going to decide on November 6th.

I want to talk to you today a little bit about the problem of making a living.

Now we know that man does not live by bread alone, but we do know that making his daily bread is his preoccupation during his working hours.

We are very, very grateful for the record of prosperity that these past four years has brought to us. Now the opposition not only says this is a false prosperity, they even say it doesn't exist. Just exactly how they expect to make you believe it, I have never been sure--but they have done many things that are puzzling to me. But I must say this very seriously, they paint a false picture of America's economic might, her economic capacity to produce whatever she needs to produce for peace or if a tragedy of war should come, for that.

Now for some reason or other, the opposition has seen fit to paint a picture of gloom at home and doom abroad; and we can examine exactly What has been happening, to see just how much substance there is to this.

I would like to make one observation: If you do play politics with our great prosperity, it is just possible that you could destroy it. That, we shall not let happen.

In 1952 you voted very decisively--very emphatically--for a change.

Now let's see what difference there has been. Now in Washington there is a very big difference. First from Washington, the mess has disappeared. Only the highest standards, not only of law but of ethics are tolerated in the Executive Branch of the Federal government; and that is, cleaning up the mess.

Instead of running in the red, your government is running in the black. Instead of higher taxes, you have lower taxes. Instead of indifference, neglect and waste, you have honest, efficient government. Instead of the black depression our opponents so confidently predicted in 1952--if you were foolish enough to elect any administration except theirs--we have created--you have created--the greatest prosperity in all history.

And so no more do you hear the wail--that 1952 wail: "Don't let them take it away." The standards of 1952 are far back along the path of America's continuing progress. You have record payrolls, and most important of all, you do not have daily casualty lists.

Now there's a very large difference in our beliefs. By their past deeds, or their words, the opposition seems to believe that centralized, paternalistic government is necessary in this country. They minimize the function of the State government, and they seem to think that the ordinary citizen knows how to make a living only if they tell him how.

They seem to think that inflation--the inflation that robs our pocketbooks--is not really so bad. They claim to have a very great concern for those who are living on social security payments--those people who are living on pensions or upon their bonds. Now, my friends, if you pay social security payments today from your payrolls, and they are paid off 20 years from now in twenty-cent dollars, you are the sufferers--not the rich, not the big corporations; you, the people that live on that kind of fixed income.

So let's not have any of this business of inflation, unless we are concerned only with the big man and not their so called "little men."

And finally, they seem to think that fiscal integrity is not nearly so important to a nation as you know it is in your own family. How they get this idea, I am not sure--but they say, I guess you can print dollars; and again we have inflation.

We believe that the strength of a nation is in its people. We believe that it is people that count. It is your desire to work-to venture--to earn more--to own more--to better your position, your family, your community.

That is what makes America tick.

That is what brings our prosperity.

What the government can do is to create the climate in which you can realize and fulfill your ambitions. The government cannot make you prosperous.

And so, because you have had this government that trusts you, and therefore you are trusting them, giving you the confidence to go ahead, you have created an economy that is now racing forward at a level of above four hundred billion dollars a year. And that is without the help--the tragic help of a war.

In 1930 we had peace, but no prosperity. In the next decade-the forties--we had a great deal of prosperity, but we had no peace. Now we have both--the creation of you--working with your government.

So today we have more than 66 million Americans gainfully employed. And only today--since I started on this trip from Washington--I have received information, soon to be released in detail, that employment for the month of October is up over last month, and up a million over October of last year. That, my friends, makes it the biggest October in our entire history.

And on top of that, let us compare it for just one moment with October of 1952.

There are today four million, 300 thousand more jobs, with people gainfully employed in them, than there were four years ago. Real wages are at an all-time high. And by real wages, I mean after you have paid your taxes, after you have paid for any rise in the living costs, your real wages are still up 8.5 percent. And there is certainly nothing false about that kind of prosperity. You are not on a treadmill, with the cost of living going up just as fast as wage increases--as they used to do.

Now you make the gain. And so these real wages make more work--cars, houses, churches, schools, vacations, more ball games, more concerts, more savings--more of everything that every human being wants for himself and his family.

Never before in history have our working men and women enjoyed-all at the same time--increasing wages and decreasing income tax returns, and such a remarkably stable cost of living.

So there is a story, my friends--more production, more jobs, more income--a prosperity never before so great, never before so widely shared.

This makes it truly a people's prosperity.

Now this prosperity has been achieved by you, working in a favorable climate, fostered by your Administration.

Now, what did we do to bring this about?

Well, we promised to end the Korean War. And we did.

We promised to free the economy of stifling controls on wages and prices. And we did. And do you remember the dire predictions when we removed controls in 1953? The so-called economists of the opposition predicted great runaway inflation, to be followed by depression, with all America practically out of work.

On the contrary! There has been real prosperity, most widely shared than it has been--ever--in our history.

And then we promised to balance the budget. And we did that. And paid something on our debts. And, my friends, when a national debt has reached the astounding total of 275 billion dollars, to pay a little bit on the debt looks like it is a very, very wise thing to do.

And when we cut taxes in 1954--as we promised to do--we cut taxes so that it benefited every man, woman and child in the United States--two-thirds of that 7-billion-dollar tax cut going directly to individuals.

And we promised integrity and thrift and efficiency in government. And we delivered on that promise.

We promised to take the government out of competition with private business. We have made great strides in doing so, with special benefit to small business.

Now we promised, also, to lift from our working men and women some of the anxieties of life. We are proud of the expansion of social security benefits, of broadening unemployment insurance, of strengthened health programs, and many other things done to provide more security and care for the old, the infirm, or the unemployed.

Government can have and has had a heart--as well as a head.

I am quite sure you will not let the prophets of expediency tell you anything different. You can refer them to the list of facts piled up in these last four years.

What I have said, my friends, is not to be taken as indicating that we are at all satisfied with what has been done. The job of improving and building America will never be finished.

We can--and there are programs afoot--increase our prosperity, particularly extend it to those who are not yet sharing fully in it. Certain areas, and particular parts of our farm industry have been particularly affected, and the programs devised by your government are carrying the fair share of that prosperity to those areas.

Then there are other sections of chronic unemployment. This is due to the changes in our economic scene. For example, in the coal industry, as coal falls off in use, something replaces it--there results unemployment. In the shifting of industries from north to south or east to west, unemployment comes about. There are broad programs now afoot to make certain that these difficulties are overcome, with the help of the government, and people can be fully employed again.

Low-income families, whether they be in the city or on the farm, or whether it be clearing of slums and helping in soil conservation--we are attacking all of these problems, with the help of the people affected themselves.

Now, my friends, literally thousands of letters come into the White House per week. At this time of year, particularly of an election year, these have mostly to do with some phase of our political contest. Lately, I notice that the letters coming into the White House have been--a majority of them--from young people, many of them from GIs--many of them from GIs with whom I served.

This question appears, directly or indirectly, in almost all of those letters:

What kind of America are we headed for? What kind of America are we and our children to have?

Now the answer: Most of it is up to you, and to millions of Americans like you over this land. You have a choice. You can take a chance with your children's future--you can go back to the leadership and the program you turned down in 1952.

Or, you can continue the crusade we launched four years ago: the building of an America that is secure and peaceful--an America of unmatched prosperity and opportunity--an America realizing the golden age of promise.

This is the question that these young people want answered.

Consider what the dimensions and character of that age can be. It can be an America with an annual production approaching the 600-billion-dollar mark in another ten years. It can be an America rising to fill new employment at a rate of one million jobs a year, a total of more than 70 million jobs four years hence--an America whose spreading prosperity will mightily support our efforts to wipe out the last vestiges of poverty and discrimination.

[An airplane goes overhead]: I will abandon the contest for a moment.

It can be an America living at peace with itself, dedicated to the ideals of our founding documents--opportunity--justice-- equality before the law. It can be an America leading the search for a just and lasting peace in the world and--with God's help--succeeding.

Now let me make very clear, my friends: the winning of peace will not be easy. It is going to call for ceaseless work. It will mean sacrifice, not merely in the national sense but often for each of us.

But let us remember the price--the value--that people who have once known liberty and freedom place upon it. We need not go far back in history to our own brave days of the Revolution and since. We look today across the seas, and we see Poland and Hungary--we see people so dedicated to the idea of man's rights, to man's dignity, to his freedom, his liberty, that they are willing to die.

There is a very, very serious lesson for us, that each day we resolve, as we go about our work, that the one thing we will not have to do is compromise with our individual liberty and our national independence.

And because peace is very intimately tied up with this love of liberty, it is essential that America not only foster and sustain this yearning for liberty in our own nation, but that we do it elsewhere.

A free nation does not seek war, because the decisions in a free nation are made by the people that fight the wars.

So it is absolutely to our advantage and in our own interests that we foster this yearning and respect for liberty wherever it appears in the world.

Now, to serve liberty--to serve people--America must be strong, strong in our hearts, in our dedication to ideals--strong in our support of the political concepts handed down to us by our forefathers. We must have this great economic strength growing every day--and continuing to grow.

And we must have military strength. A strong America, my friends, is the hope of our own people, and it is a help to our friends. And just as important, it is particularly valuable that any potential enemy know of our strength, and is thereby deterred from the tragic folly of attacking us.

We know in our own experiences, weakness cannot lead and weakness cannot cooperate. Weakness can merely ask--it can beg--it can seek. But it cannot help.

Strength can help.

So, my friends, we must be concerned about the peace of the world. We must miss no opportunity to use our entire imagination to give to the pursuit of peace our entire dedication. But we can show that concern without being careless.

So I say, at this particular stage of the world's history, where we see a once proud people being trampled down by marching regiments, this is no time to stop the draft--this is no time to stop perfecting our weapons.

And remember, my friends, I don't say and I do not believe we should be seeking to make bigger and stronger and more destructive weapons. Our science is now directed to: how do we use this new science to protect ourselves, to make defense weapons, to make them small and dean, and make them more suitable for military objectives instead of civilian cities.

And so I say, let us make every possible agreement we can to reduce the risks in the world, but let us do it with the proper safeguards.

But finally, every phase of our national effort--our economy-our prosperity-our opportunities for education--everything that we want--depends upon progress in this reach for peace. We must move ever forward. We must not let anything tire us. We must never let anything wear out our patience--no matter how serious the problem. We must simply say, "Then we work the harder."

We must reach a state in the world where you and I--as well as potential opponents--can have confidence that agreements are sound, and we can live with, devoting our efforts and our sweat and our labor to peace--not to war. And this means that as we make a life--as we make this living that we work for day to day, we will also work out a way of life for our nation and--with God's help--for the world.

My friends, I have only one request to make upon you today. What I have been talking about--opportunity--the richness of the heritage of America--the opportunity to help produce peace in the world--is in your hands, in a very definite measure.

If you will exercise the rights--the privileges--as well as discharging the obligations of your citizenship, you will vote, and record your convictions and your opinions.

Of course, if you can vote for the side in which we believe, that is all to the good. But in any event: vote! Be sure you do it, and get everybody else to do it.