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the dam, because President Truman also takes office when a rampage is getting started on the American home front.
Roosevelt took drastic action, because those were drastic days back at the beginning of the 1930 s. We felt it was better to spend money than to have riots, chaos, and then Fascism. Money was worth something only if it could be used to hold America together, to keep America sound. He achieved that.
The dangers facing Truman on the home front are not as great as those Roosevelt had to meet. But the issues Roosevelt met head on and solved to some extent were experiences that many Americans have not forgotten.
The man who said America can produce fifty thousand aircraft a year — and was scoffed at for saying it — also wanted jobs for sixty million Americans.
So do the American people who were friends of Roosevelt.
For in twelve years, Roosevelt taught the majority of the American people that the so-called good old days were something to be avoided, because those were the days of depressions, of being told, "Sorry, no job today," of workers fighting to gain the very minimum of rights.
President Truman is considered something of a conservative. But he is also rated as a firm supporter of the Roosevelt program.
How well he carries out that program, and how much he deviates from it, will depend not only on his own character and strength, but also on the men who surround him.
June, 1945
SPECIFIC PROBLEMS AHEAD
For all of the promises being made about unity, we have to expect that the political cat and dog fights will continue.
Then, too, the problems of gradual reconversion of American industry to peacetime are great. In that process, special groups are going to exert all their power to gain special advantages.
The assault on prices and wages, on priorities for materials, on rationing will gain new momentum with Germany defeated. And that assault comes at a time when the power of the agency officials to resist it, seems to be growing weaker.
President Truman may strengthen the agencies by appointing some new men and taking to himself some new advisers. Of course, it would be natural for President Truman to feel his way around for a time, to build up the nation's confidence in him. But as against that, events are moving fast, and decisions have to be made because so many events cannot wait.
That fact in itself imposes a great burden on President Truman, who must make critical decisions while he is still studying the chart handed to him by Mr. Roosevelt. And that imposes also a great duty on the American people to help President Truman guide us on the road toward victory, and then a stable and secure world of equity and freedom.
That is what Franklin Roosevelt worked and fought for. And that is what he died for, confident that wc would carry on the fight.