Rear-Platform Remarks at Oelwein, Iowa

My friends, I am very glad to come through here today. I have never been in this part of the State before, and it was about time for me to come here.

You know, I find it terribly hard after four years to start in making political speeches again. One reason is that for the last four years I have been so engrossed in trying to bring things back, and that goes far beyond the mere lines of party politics.

There is one mighty nice thing about these trips, and that is that, so far as I can tell in going along the railroad, the expressions on the faces of the railroad men make me know that they are now all right. After all, we are all tied in together economically, and that is the lesson I am preaching. We shall not have successful railroads, we shall not have more employment on the railroads, unless the farmers are prosperous; and the farmers cannot be prosperous unless the city dwellers have enough money and enough work to buy what the farmers produce.

And so it goes all the way through the whole scale of human endeavor. The small merchants cannot sell their goods either to the farm population or to the city population unless there is buying power. What we have been trying to do in the past four years, from the point of view of economics, has had a comparatively simple objective—getting people work and producing buying power for them.

As I go through the country this year, in comparison with 1932, I see an enormous difference—an enormous difference in the prosperity of the country as a whole and in every part of it that I have visited.

I am not making one kind of speech in the East and another kind of speech in the West. I am not making one kind of speech to farm people and another kind of speech to industrial workers. In the last four years we have gained a great knowledge of the interdependence of every part of the Nation with every other part. If the men and women who work in clothing factories in the City of New York are out of a job, they do not buy so much pork. That kind of example goes for every known product of the land.

I am especially glad that the railroads are getting back on their feet again. Of course the Government has had some share in getting them back on their feet again. We loaned them a lot of money, and they are repaying it. It was a good investment. In just the same way, the Government has helped to get the banks back on their feet; we loaned them some money, and it was a good investment.

And so my friends- this is not a prepared speech—I just want to talk to you as one neighbor to another. I don't pretend to be a farmer; I happen to be by profession a lawyer. But I have farmed the best part of my life, up on the Hudson River and down in the State of Georgia, so I do know about some of the problems of agriculture in the United States. Every day that I go through this country I try to learn more about it; and that is going to stand me in good stead whether or not I go back to the White House for the next four years. And, incidentally, I get a tremendous kick out of it.

It is good to see you all.