Campaign Address, Boston
By President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Recorded October 10, 1940

Mr. Mayor, my friends of New England:

I've had a glorious day here in New England. And I do not need to tell you that I have been glad to come back to my old stamping ground in Boston. There's one thing about this trip that I regret. I have to return to Washington tonight, without getting a chance to go into my two favorite States of Maine and Vermont.

In New York City two nights ago, I showed by the cold print of the Congressional Record how Republican leaders, with their votes and in their speeches, have been playing, and still are playing politics with national defense.

Even during the past three years, when the dangers to all forms of democracy throughout the world have been obvious, the Republican team in the Congress has been acting only as a Party team.

Time after time, Republican leadership refused to see that what this country needs is an all-American team.

Those side-line critics are now saying that we are not doing enough for our national defense. I say to you that we are going full speed ahead!

Our Navy is our outer line of defense.

Almost the very minute that this Administration came into office seven and a half years ago, we began to build the Navy up- to build a bigger Navy.

In those seven years we have raised the total of 193 ships in commission to 337 ships in commission today.

And, in addition to that, we have 19 more ships that are actually under construction today.

In those seven years we raised the personnel of our Navy from 106,000 to 210,000 today.

You good people here in Boston know of the enormous increase of productive work in your Boston Navy Yard. And that is only one of many Navy yards—one of the best. There are now six times as many men employed in our Navy yards as there were in 1933. The private ship-building yards are also humming with activity—building ships for our Navy and for our expanding merchant marine.

The construction of this Navy has been a monumental job. In spite of what some campaign orators may tell you, you cannot buy a battleship from a mail-order catalogue.

We have not only added ships and men to the Navy, we have enormously increased the effectiveness of Naval bases in those outlying territories of ours in the Atlantic and Pacific.

For our objective is to keep any potential attacker as far from our continental shores as we possibly can.

You here in New England know that well, and can well visualize it.

And within the past two months your Government has acquired new naval and air bases in British territory in the Atlantic Ocean; extending all the way from Newfoundland in the north to that part of South America where the Atlantic Ocean begins to get narrow, with Africa not far away.

I repeat: Our objective is to keep any potential attacker as far from our continental shores as we possibly can.

That is the record of the growth of our Navy. In 1933 a weak Navy; in 1940 a strong Navy. Side-line critics may carp in a political campaign. But Americans are mighty proud of that record and Americans will put their country first and partisanship second.

Speaking of partisanship, I remind you—when the Naval Expansion Bill came up in 1938 the vast majority of Republican members of the Congress voted against building any more battleships.

What kind of political shenanigans are these?

Can we trust those people with national defense?

Next, take up the Army: Under normal conditions we have no need for a vast Army in this country. But you and I know that unprecedented dangers require unprecedented action to guard the peace of America against unprecedented threats.

Since that day, a little over a year ago, when Poland was invaded, we have more than doubled the size of our regular Army. Adding to this, the Federalized National Guardsmen, our armed land forces now equal more than 436,000 enlisted men. And yet there are armies overseas that run four and five and six million men.

The officers and men of our Army and National Guard are the finest in the world.

They will be, as you know, the nucleus for the training of the young men who are being called under the Selective Service Act, 800,000 of them in the course of this year out of nearly 17,000,000 registered—in other words, a little less than 5 per cent of the total registration.

General Marshall said to me the other day that the task of training those young men is, for the Army, a "profound privilege."

Campaign orators seek to tear down the morale of the American people when they make false statements about the Army's equipment. I say to you that we are supplying our Army with the best fighting equipment in all the world.

Yes, the Army and the Defense Commission are getting things done with speed and efficiency. More than eight billion dollars of contracts for defense have been let in the past few months.

I am afraid that those campaign orators will pretty soon be under the painful necessity of coming down to Washington later on and eating their words.

I cannot help but feel that the most inexcusable, most unpatriotic misstatement of fact about our Army—a misstatement calculated to worry the mothers of the Nation—is the brazen charge that the men called to training will not be properly housed.

The plain fact is that construction on Army housing is far ahead of schedule to meet all needs, and that by January fifth, next, there will be complete and adequate housing in this Nation for nine hundred and thirty thousand soldiers.

And so I feel that, very simply and very honestly, I can give assurance to the mothers and fathers of America that each and every one of their boys in training will be well housed and well fed.

Throughout that year of training, there will be constant promotion of their health and their well-being.

And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance.

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again:

Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

They are going into training to form a force so strong that, by its very existence, it will keep the threat of war far away from our shores.

The purpose of our defense is defense.

The Republican campaign orators who moan and groan (laughter) about our Army and Navy are even more mournful about our strength in the air. But only last year, 1939, the Republicans in, the Congress were voting in favor of reducing appropriations for the Army Air Corps.

What kind of political shenanigans are these?

Can such people be trusted with national defense?

I stress particularly what every Army and Navy flier tells us-that what counts most in sustained air power is the productive capacity of our airplane and engine factories. That ought to be almost a first-grade lesson.

We are determined to attain a production capacity of 50,000 planes a year in the United States. And day by day we are working and making very rapid progress toward that goal.

You citizens of Seattle who are listening tonight—you have watched the Boeing plant out there grow. It is now producing four times as many planes each month as it was producing a year ago.

You citizens of Southern California can see the great Douglas factories. They have doubled their output in less than a year.

You citizens of Buffalo and St. Louis can see the Curtiss plants in your cities. Their output has jumped to twelve times its level of a year ago.

And, of course, we are training our young men, and training them successfully in sufficient numbers, to fly these planes as soon as they come off the lines.

But planes won't fly without engines. You citizens of Hartford, who hear my words: look across the Connecticut River at the whirring wheels and the beehive of activity which is the Pratt and Whitney plant which I saw today. A year ago that plant was producing airplane engines totaling one hundred thousand horsepower a month. Today that production has been stepped up tenfold, stepped up to one million horsepower a month.

And you citizens of Paterson, New Jersey, you can see the Curtiss-Wright plant which a year ago produced two hundred seventy thousand horsepower a month and this October is producing 859,000 horsepower.

In ten months this Nation has increased our engine output for planes 240 per cent; and I am proud of it.

Remember, too, that we are scattering them all over the country. We are building brand new plants for airplanes and airplane engines in places besides the Pacific Coast and this coast. We are also building them in centers in the Middle West.

Last spring and last winter this great production capacity program was stepped up by orders from overseas. In taking these orders for planes from overseas, we are following and were following hard-headed self-interest.

Building on the foundation provided by these orders, the British on the other side of the ocean are receiving a steady stream of airplanes. After three months of blitzkrieg in the air over there, the strength of the Royal Air Force is actually greater now than when the attack began. And they know and we know that that increase in strength despite battle losses is due in part to the purchases made from American airplane industries.

Tonight I am privileged to make an announcement, using Boston instead of the White House: The British within the past few days have asked for permission to negotiate again with American manufacturers for 12,000 additional planes. I have asked that the request be given most sympathetic consideration by the Priorities Board. I have asked the Priorities Board to give it that consideration—the Board made up of William S. Knudsen, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., and Leon Henderson. When those additional orders are approved, as I hope they will be, they will bring Britain's present orders for military planes from the United States to more than 26,000. They will require still more new plant facilities so that the present program of building planes for military purposes both for the United States and Great Britain will not be interrupted.

Also large additional orders are being negotiated for artillery, for machine guns, for rifles, for tanks with equipment and ammunition. The plant capacity necessary to produce all this military equipment is and will be available to serve the needs of the United States in any emergency.

The productive capacity of the United States which has made it the greatest industrial country in the world, is not failing now. It will make us the strongest air power in the world. And that is not just a campaign promise!

I have been glad in the past two or three days to welcome back to the shores of America that Boston boy, beloved by all of Boston and a lot of other places, my Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joe Kennedy.

Actually on the scene where planes were fighting and bombs were dropping day and night for many months, he has been telling me just what you and I have visualized from afar—that all the smaller independent nations of Europe—Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, Ireland and the others—have lived in terror of the destruction of their independence by Nazi military might.