Reading Eagle (September 21, 1940)
NO DICTATOR DARES TO FACE ‘REALLY FREE ELECTION’, F.D.R. SAYS
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Ballots Seen Safeguarding Government
Asserts This Is No Time For Any Man to Ignore Society’s Problems
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Hyde Park, N.Y., Sept. 21 (AP) –
President Roosevelt and members of his family gathered today at his boyhood home for an informal observance of the 86th birthday of his mother, Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt.
The matriarch of the Hyde Park house was on the front portico when her son arrived last night from Philadelphia, where he had pointed to free elections as a guarantee of “the complete and enduring safety of our form of government.”
He said in an address at the University of Pennsylvania:
As long as periodic free elections survive, no set of people can permanently control the government. No dictator in history has ever dared to run the gauntlet of a really free election.
Degree Conferred
Mr. Roosevelt spoke at exercises at which the university observed its 200th birthday and awarded him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
In his address, Mr. Roosevelt referred to the present as a period of “relapse” in the history of world civilization and said:
This is no time for any man to withdraw into some ivory tower and proclaim the right to hold himself aloof from the problems and the agonies of his secrecy.
The times call for a bold belief that the world can be changed by man’s endeavor, and that this endeavor can lead to something new.
He toyed with the idea that there could be any political connotations to his address, while leaving it to his listeners to make up their own minds on that point.
Alumni and students of the university, filling every seat in the Quaker City convention hall, heard the chief executive voice regret that there were demands “in certain quarters” to return control of the government to “those few who because of business ability or economic omniscience” are supposed to be “just a touch above the average of our citizens.”
Gives Them Credit
We should give them all credit for pure intention and high ideals. Nevertheless, their type of political thinking could easily lead to government by selfish seekers for power and riches and glory and to a subsequent abolition of free elections that would keep them in power.
In Nazi Germany, the President asserted, a minority group which placed loudly professed emphasis on “their own purity of purpose” came into power, and the rights of free elections and the free choice of government heads were “suddenly wiped out.”
America had forged many instruments of social justice, the chief executive said, to meet new conditions in industry, agriculture, finance and labor which were threatening “our internal security.”
These many instruments are the means which our own generation have adopted to overcome the threats to economic democracy in our land – threats which in other lands led quickly to political despotism.