Rear-Platform Remarks at Hayfield, Minn

I am glad to come to this section of Minnesota. I have never been on this railroad before. I hope in the next three or four years to come through by automobile and get a better idea of this country.

One of the things we ought to think a lot about in this campaign is what has happened to our national point of view in the last four years. In every section of the United States we have gained the understanding that prosperity in one section of the country is absolutely tied in with prosperity in all the other sections. Even back in the Eastern States and cities, they are beginning to realize that the purchasing power of the farmers of the Northwest will have a big effect on the prosperity of the industry and of the industrial workers of the East. In just the same way, I know you realize that if the factories in the big industrial cities are running full speed, people will have more money to buy the foodstuffs you raise.

I am told by the experts- and it is an interesting fact—that if every family in the United States lived on what might be called a class-A diet, that is the kind of diet that the doctors and dietitians would like us all to have for our own good and our own health, we would have to put 40,000,000 acres more land into production of foodstuffs.

In the last analysis, it comes down to the question of purchasing power. And we have raised the purchasing power in this country from about thirty-eight billion dollars in 1932 to over sixty billion dollars this year. And we have not stopped yet.

It is good to see you all. (A telephone wire was being strung into the train at that moment.) You know, one of the interesting things about trying to campaign and be President at the same time is that in almost every station we come to, there is a telephone message from Washington, and they string a wire through a car window and somebody talks directly from the train with one of the Government Departments, perhaps with the Treasury Department in relation to the stabilization of foreign exchange, or with the State Department in relation to what is going on, perhaps, in far distant lands. Here I am, pretty nearly in the center of the country, and yet I can keep in touch with the Government in Washington almost every hour of the day or night.

(Audience: Are we going to fight?)

I hope we will never fight again as long as you and I are alive. The interesting thing is that while affairs are in pretty dangerous condition in Europe and in other parts of the world, this good-neighbor policy that we have established pretty satisfactorily in this hemisphere, not only with Canada on the north but with all the Republics on the south, seems to be catching hold among the people themselves in other parts of the world. If in the long run the people themselves get it, then those who rule those countries must get it too. So I believe that our foreign policy is really making for peace throughout the world.

Good-bye and good luck.