Remarks at the Theodore Roosevelt Centennial Year Conservation Ceremony.

Secretary Benson, Secretary Seaton, Award Winners--fellow Americans

We are celebrating this year the centennial of the birth of Theodore Roosevelt, the father of conservation. In 1904, fifty-four years ago, he planted a tree right over to the south of the East Wing of the White House. He did it to typify his interest in conservation. I believe Secretary Hitchcock was the one who suggested it to him.

Now, fifty-two years later, that tree was lost in a hurricane, in 1956. So it seemed fitting in this centennial year that we should plant a tree of the same general species--an oak--to take the place of the one that he then planted.

I have heard some of the records achieved in conservation under the initial inspiration of Theodore Roosevelt. There was one that I was told about that I believe was not mentioned today, and that is that now we are reforesting at the rate of one billion trees a year.

I have always had trouble in trying to figure out what this amount one billion means--what it means to me. So when they told me this a little while ago, I picked out my pencil and I now calculate that in this country every second throughout the year, night and day, there are more than thirty trees planted.

Well, this at least gives me some idea of what they mean--what people say when they talk in terms of a billion. I can understand thirty a second really easier than I can a billion in a year.

But these achievements in reforesting--the tremendous progress in cutting down our forest fires to less than a half--mark in a fitting way the centennial year of Theodore Roosevelt.

And I think for all of us the record that has been achieved should be not so much a sense of pride as inspiration, the spur for greater achievement. I am quite certain that if all of us--or if each of us--has the energy of that great man and the way he could fight for a cause in which he believed, I am quite certain that this figure will even be re-doubled and in much less time than we have taken up to date.

And so to each of you that participated, my appreciation, my thanks for what you have done in the past, and my hope for still greater achievement in the future.

Thank you very much.