Eleanor Roosevelt Speeches

I am very glad to have this opportunity to say a few words to my friends in the United States in the closing days of this campaign. I am a democrat, and as a democrat I believe in the collective wisdom of the people, and I believe that in this campaign they have been following the developments from day to day, and they are making up their minds as to which party and which candidate will give them the best administration in the coming four years. I understand that the women of my own party in my own state are taking a very active part in this campaign, and I can understand that because some of the most important issues are very close to the hearts of the women. The cost of living, the prices, the rise in prices. They really know what that means as they run their houses day by day. And the peace of the world, that means more to the women even than the rise in prices. And then we know that women on the whole have a pool of the things that have been done in the last year of democratic administration. They not only want to keep the social programs, which we call the New Deal program, but they want to see that program increased and improved.

Now I think that in this campaign our democratic candidate, President Truman, has made his position clear. He's made it clear in his record, through his messages to Congress, and in his campaign [unclear term]. He's shown courage, but he needs the people's mandate to help him if he is going to be our president. He must know that they want progressives in the Senate and in the Congress. That means returning those who have had the liberal record in the past. It means electing new people where people have shown that they were un-progressive and did not think first of the good of the people of the country, but thought first of some particular interest. Now, in this campaign, we have our domestic issues. Our foreign policy has been kept a bipartisan policy, but it has been the administration's responsibility in the way it has been carried out. And I think that many people may feel an anxiety, as they look at the record of the last congress, as to what might happen if the people do not go out and vote for progressive liberals who not only want to keep the steps forward that were made in the social field in the last twelve years, but who want to go forward and to make our country the kind of a country to which people turn as an example of what democracy really means.

Working as I do in an international body I am quite aware of the fact that communism challenges democracy, and unless we make our democracy meet the needs of the people, we do not meet that challenge. And so, as we go to the polls in this election I hope that all of us will be thinking, in all of our votes for congressmen, for senator, for president, for local people in our own area, of what those people will stand for and how they will work together to make of our nation the nation in which the people of the world can trust as well as our own people, because we lead in the world today and what we stand for is the hope of the whole world in the future. I still believe in the Democratic Party and its leadership.