I hear some people say, “This is all so complicated.  There are certain advantages in a dictatorship.  It gets rid of labor trouble, of unemployment, of wasted motion and of having to do your own thinking.”

My answer is, “Yes, but it also gets rid of some other things which we Americans intend very definitely to keep—­and we still intend to do our own thinking.”

It will cost us taxes and the voluntary risk of capital to attain some of the practical advantages which other forms of government have acquired.

Dictatorship, however, involves costs which the American people will never pay:  The cost of our spiritual values.  The cost of the blessed right of being able to say what we please.  The cost of freedom of religion.  The cost of seeing our capital confiscated.  The cost of being cast into a concentration camp.  The cost of being afraid to walk down the street with the wrong neighbor.  The cost of having our children brought up, not as free and dignified human beings, but as pawns molded and enslaved by a machine.

If the avoidance of these costs means taxes on my income; if avoiding these costs means taxes on my estate at death, I would bear those taxes willingly as the price of my breathing and my children breathing the free air of a free country, as the price of a living and not a dead world.

Events abroad have made it increasingly clear to the American people that dangers within are less to be feared than dangers from without.  If, therefore, a solution of this problem of idle men and idle capital is the price of preserving our liberty, no formless selfish fears can stand in the way.

Once I prophesied that this generation of Americans had a rendezvous with destiny.  That prophecy comes true.  To us much is given; more is expected.

This generation will “nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. . . .  The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—­a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”

***

State of the Union Address
Franklin D. Roosevelt
January 3, 1940

Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Senate and the House of
Representatives: 

I wish each and every one of you a very happy New Year.

As the Congress reassembles, the impact of war abroad makes it natural to approach “the state of the union” through a discussion of foreign affairs.

But it is important that those who hear and read this message should in no way confuse that approach with any thought that our Government is abandoning, or even overlooking, the great significance of its domestic policies.

The social and economic forces which have been mismanaged abroad until they have resulted in revolution, dictatorship and war are the same as those which we here are struggling to adjust peacefully at home.

You are well aware that dictatorships—­and the philosophy of force that justifies and accompanies dictatorships—­have originated in almost every case in the necessity for drastic action to improve internal conditions in places where democratic action for one reason or another has failed to respond to modern needs and modern demands.