Press Release, Speech of President Harry S. Truman, Greenfield, Indiana

IMMEDIATE RELEASE IMMEDIATE RELEASE REAR PLATFORM REMARKS OF THE PRESIDENT AT GREENFIELD, INDIANA, OCTOBER 12, 1948 TRONKS 9:12 A.M., C.S.T. NATIONAL ARCHIVES Mr. Chairman, I appreciate most highly that introduction in this wonderful city of Greenfield. And I am particularly happy to have the book from the young lady on the rooster. In 1892, when Grover Cleveland was reelected President of the United States, my father decorated a rooster weather vane with all the colors of the American flag, and that flag flew from that rooster as a sign of victory in 1892 and nearly all through Cleveland's Administration. I can remember that because I was years old then -- I don't mind admitting it. It's a particular pleasure for me to be here in Greenfield today. Middle-Westerners like myself all look upon your town as a sort of shrine because we feel that your own great poet, James Whitcomb Riley, belongs to all of us. I understand his birthday was just a week ago and that October 7th was made an official holiday in Indiana in 1915. There wa.3 a lot of down-to-earth common sense in Whitcomb Riley's poems, and we could use more of that in the world today. I don't think there is a kid in the country that doesn't know Orphan Annie, and I don't think there is a boy in the country who doesn't long for the "old swimmin' hole." And when you read Whitcomb Riley you read just what we people in the Middle-West- think and act and do. He gives us a turn that no ther poet in the country has ever given. The natural tendency on the part of all of us is to think of the old times as the best. We tend to forget the hard times, and remember the good times. We always remember the good things and hardly ever do we remember the things that caused us trouble -- and some of us want to live in the past. You can't do that. You've got to go for- ward with civilization. You've got to follow the clock around. The clock never runs backward. You can't turn the world around the other way and bring it back. You've got to go forward with it. You and I can remember that there were long periods of time in the so-called "good old days" when the times were bad for Indiana farmers and Indiana townspeople. All of you remember the great depression and what that meant to the American farmer. In order to pull the farmer out of the hole he was in after 12 years of Republican rule President Roosevelt started a number of programs designed to help the farmer and make a better living for him -- rural electrification, soil conservation, The Farm Tenant Purchase Program, the Farm Price Support Program, the school lunch program, and many others. All these Democratic programs played their part in raising our farms to the tremendous prosperity they enjoy today. You know, the farmers, like everybody else when things are easy for him, he tends to neglect his political duties. He becomes fat and lazy and won't go to the polls on election day. He did that in 1946 -- and look what he got. The Republican Congress began immediately to try to turn the clock back, and the first one they took a whack at was the farmer. Prosperity is a good thing. It makes a better life possible for all farm families, and as a result, the rwhole country is better off. Farmers and laborers and businessmen can all be prosperous together -- and that's the Democratic principle. We want to make everybody have a fair share of the national income. It was a hard uphill fight to secure these great farm programs and to achieve prosperity for American farmers. There was determined Republican opposition to the Democratic efforts to get the necessary laws on the books. (OVER)