Mr. Chairman and my fellow citizens:

In accepting the great honor that you have brought to me, I desire to speak so simply and so plainly that every man and woman in the United States who may hear or read my words cannot misunderstand.

The last 3 years have been a time of unparalleled economic calamity. They have been years of greater suffering and hardship than any which have come to the American people since the aftermath of the Civil War. As we look back over these troubled years we realize that we have passed through two different stages of dislocation and distress.

Before the storm broke we were steadily gaining in prosperity. Our wounds from the war were rapidly healing. Advances in science and invention had opened vast vistas of new progress. Being prosperous, we became optimistic--all of us. From optimism some of us went to overexpansion in anticipation of the future, and from overexpansion to reckless speculation. In the soil poisoned by speculation grew those ugly weeds of waste, exploitation, and abuse of financial power. In this overproduction and speculative mania we marched with the rest of the whole world. Then 3 years ago came retribution by the inevitable worldwide slump in the consumption of goods, in prices, and employment. At that juncture it was the normal penalty for a reckless boom such as we have witnessed a score of times in our national history. Through such depressions we have always passed safely after a relatively short period of losses, of hardship, and of adjustment. We have adopted policies in the Government which were fitting to the situation. Gradually the country began to right itself. Eighteen months ago there was a solid basis for hope that recovery was in sight.

Then, there came to us a new calamity, a blow from abroad of such dangerous character as to strike at the very safety of the Republic. The countries of Europe proved unable to withstand the stress of the depression. The memories of the world had ignored the fact that the insidious diseases left by the Great War had not been cured. The skill and intelligence of millions in Europe had been blotted out by battle, by disease, and by starvation. Stupendous burdens of national debt had been built up. Poisoned springs of political instability lay in the treaties which closed the war. Fear and hates held armament to double those before the great conflict. Governments were fallaciously seeking to build back by enlarged borrowing, by subsidizing industry and employment from taxes that slowly sapped the savings upon which industry and rejuvenated commerce must be built. Under these strains the financial systems of foreign countries crashed one by one.

New blows with decreasing world consumption of goods and from failing financial systems rained upon our people. We are a part of the world the disturbance of whose remotest populations affects our financial system, our employment, our markets, and the prices of our farm products. Thus beginning 18 months ago, the worldwide storm grew rapidly to hurricane force and the greatest economic emergency in all the history of the world. Unexpected, unforeseen, violent shocks with every month brought new dangers and new emergencies to our country. Fear and apprehension gripped the heart of our people in every village and city.

If we look back over the disasters of these 3 years, we find that three-quarter of the population of the globe has suffered from the flames of revolution. Many nations have been subject to constant change and vacillation of government. Others have resorted to dictatorship or tyranny in desperate attempts to preserve some kind of social order.

I may pause for one short illustration of the character of one single destructive force arising from these causes which we have been compelled to meet. That was its effect upon our financial structure. Foreign countries, in the face of their own failures, the failures of their neighbors, not believing that we had either the courage or the ability or the strength to meet this crisis, withdrew from the United States over $2,400 million, including a billion of gold. Our own alarmed citizens withdrew over $1,600 million of currency from our banks into hoarding. These actions, combined with the fears that they generated, caused a shrinkage of credit available for the conduct of industry and commerce by several times even these vast sums. Its visible expression was the failures of banks and business, the demoralization of security and real property values, of the commodity prices, and of employment. And that was but one of the invading forces of destruction that we have been compelled to meet in the last 18 months.

Two courses were open to us. We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic.