Remarks at Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Some people wonder why I am here. Last January a good friend of mine came to me and said, "Why, during the next four years, don't you take it easy? Why don't you coast? You climbed up a long, steep grade over the past four years and now, during the next four years you might as well have a good time."

I said to him that I was going to continue during these four years the practice of the last four years, and that, incidentally, in so doing I would have a good time.

I do not want to coast, and the Nation does not want me to coast, with my feet up on the front wheels.

I have thought that it was part of the duty of the Presidency to keep in touch, personal touch, with the Nation. And so this year, since January, I have already made one trip through a number of the Southern states on my way back from catching some fish, and now I am going out to the Coast for the third time since I have been President—not counting campaign trips—going out to take a "look-see," to try to tie together in my own mind the problems of the Nation, in order that I may, at first hand, know as much about the questions that affect all the forty-eight states as possible.

As you know, the greater part of the emergency is over; not all of it, because there are still a great many difficult problems. I want to talk to you, very briefly, about some of the things that the national government has done and is doing.

For example, during the past three or four years, in every part of the country, we have spent a great deal of Federal money in putting people to work. That was the primary objective, but at the same time we have tried our utmost to accomplish useful things. And there is not a State-there are very few communities-in the whole nation that has not benefited by these Federal expenditures, not merely in a temporary way but in a permanent way.

I was thinking this morning of the question of airports. I do not know whether it is thoroughly realized by you here situated on . one of the stations of one of the main transcontinental air lines that the Federal Government has assisted in the building, not of several dozen new airports in the country, not of several hundred, but of many thousands, with the result that the United States is checker-boarded today with airports in every state. That is an accomplishment of the past three or four years.

In the same way, not dozens, or hundreds, but thousands of schools have been built or renovated with a combination of State, local and Federal funds.

We have to come, someday, however, to an end of the greater part of that program; and just the other day, in Washington, we allocated the last of the Federal money for public works projects. This consisted of more schools, more sewer systems, more waterworks and things of that kind, where there was a very clear need for replacement or where the states or the localities had already voted their share of the funds.

I will tell you one amusing story about the allocation for school projects. The Congress told me to confine them to those places where the schools had been burned down or where a new school had to be built to replace a building that was about to tumble down. There came a project from one of the southern states for the building of a new school building and a new library. The school building was to replace one that was about to fall down and we granted that project. But, in the case of the library, they apparently did not already have a library, and it was therefore not a replacement project. With great regret we rejected the application.

The head of the school came to Washington to see me. I told him how sorry I was that we could not spend Federal funds for new buildings no matter how much they were needed, unless they were to replace one that had burned or tumbled down. "But," he said, "Mr. President, our library did burn down." I said, "That's funny, because there is nothing said about that in the application. When was it burned down?" And he replied, "Mr. President, our library was burned in 1864 by General Sherman."

On this trip I am looking at many types of projects. The other day I read in a big newspaper of the Middle West an editorial which took as its text the fact that one of the WPA dams in Kansas had in part been washed out. It meant undoubtedly the loss of a good deal of money. And the editorial pointed out that this was the way the Federal Government was wasting its funds.'

Well, I believe that engineers are human just as I am, and that they do not make a home-run every time they come to the bat.

But the editorial went on, taking that dam as a text, and stated that in the construction of great dams by the Federal Government we are creating millions of kilowatts of power which will never be used by the people.

I think that you and I and most people realize that when you do create power the public will find some useful way to use it.

In the same way, it went on to say that all of these reclamation projects mean a pure waste of money; that to build a project like Casper-Alcova or Grand Coulee would make available unnecessary farm lands; and that there are enough good farms in the United States to take care of all the people who need them for fifty years to come.

You know and I know that that is not so. You, here on this great central highway, know of the number of people and families who have had to leave their homes on their farms in the drought area, some of them in the eastern part of this state, in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, people who could not make a go of it on the poor land—families who were forced to leave their homes to avoid starvation. Those people have come further west, looking for a chance to earn their livelihood, looking for good land and not able to find it.

In the same way, there are thousands of families in the East who are unable to make good on the land they are tilling now, for very obvious reasons. It is land that ought not to be under the plow. For all those families, I believe that it is the duty of the Federal Government and the State Governments to provide land where it is possible to make a living.

I could go on talking about WPA and PWA and the CCC camps. As a matter of fact they have all served a useful purpose. It is now a better country for having spent, for a few years, more than we were taking in in taxes. Do not let anybody deceive you—the Government of the United States is not going broke.

Here I am, trying in this short trip—for it must be short-to get a cross-section point of view, the point of view especially of the rank and file of the American people in this western country. It is part of the duty of the Presidency to represent, insofar as possible, all the people, not just Democrats, but Republicans and others as well, not just rich people, but poor people as well. And I have been trying, very simply, to do the most good for the greatest number.

Out here in the cattle country and the sugar beet country, of course, I am interested in the prosperity of the raisers of cattle and the growers of beets. Perhaps somewhere down in my heart, I am a little bit more interested in the ten men who have a hundred head of cattle apiece, than I am in the one man who has a thousand head of cattle. And perhaps I am a little more interested in the ten men who have a hundred acres of beets than I am in the one man who has a thousand acres of beets. It seems to me that that is one of the orders—one of the necessary things that goes with the Presidency.

In these next few years—four years, eight years, twelve years, twenty years- I am very firmly convinced that the people of the Nation will have, more and more, a national point of view. You people out here, for example, realize far better than you did four years ago that your prosperity is tied up very intimately with the prosperity of the cotton growers of the South and with that of the industrial workers of the East. And, in the same way, those people in the great factories of the East and Middle West, and on the cotton farms of the South, in the corn belt and in the wheat belt, know that their prosperity is affected by your prosperity out here.

That, I believe, will be written in history as the great accomplishment of these years that we are living in now—the welding together of the people of the United States.