Remarks at a Luncheon Honoring Representative James H. Maloney in Danbury, Connecticut - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 18, 2000

You know, Roosevelt governed at another magic time. He inherited the Presidency as the youngest man ever to be President, when President McKinley was assassinated shortly after his reelection in 1900 and was inaugurated in 1901, and shortly after that, he was killed. So Teddy Roosevelt inherited the Presidency and did, I think, a very good job with it, in dealing with a time that is probably more like this time in historical terms than any period in the middle, because we were moving from an agricultural to an industrial society, and we had to redefine our sense of national community and what our obligations were to one another. How were we going to take in that huge wave of immigrants that came into America at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century; how were we going to deal with this huge influx of people who couldn't make a living on the farm anymore but wanted to make a living in the factory? But a lot of them were children, and a lot of them were working 12 and 14 or 15 hours a day, a nd there were all kinds of abusive conditions there.

And in the first Roosevelt era, we began to come to grips with our responsibilities to immigrant populations living in difficult situations in the slums, our responsibilities to end child labor in the most abusive labor conditions. And we began to be aware of the capacity of the industrial revolution to damage the environment. And Teddy Roosevelt became our first great environmental President by meeting the challenges of the moment.

And then when--ironically, there was a brief interruption because after he left office, his designated successor, William Howard Taft, was elected, the person he wanted to succeed him, but he turned out not to be a progressive. So Woodrow Wilson got elected, with a little help from Theodore Roosevelt, and we had 8 more years.

But then what we were trying to do was interrupted by war and then by depression and then again by war. And so Franklin Roosevelt had to build this sense of unity out of all this adversity. But in a funny way--I used to talk to my grandfather all the time about the Depression. One thing, it's almost a purging effect, total adversity has on you, because you don't--it's not like you have all the options in the world. You got up in the morning. You tried to figure out how to keep body and soul together, and you know you've got to change something, because if you keep on doing the, same thing, you'll be in the same hole.

However, when things are going very well, your opportunity for error increases because you have lots of options. And that really is what's going on in this election. You've got to decide what you want to do with the most truly astonishing moment of prosperity and social progress and national security in our lifetime. You have to decide.

And people ask me all the time, you know, for a year and a half or 2 years, "Do you really think that Al Gore is going to win?" And I always said, yes, and I always believed it, when the polls weren't nearly as good as they are today, because I knew the underlying conditions of the country were good. I knew that he was a good man. I knew he had played a terrific role in the building of what we have done. But I also knew that he was thinking about what we should do in the future. And when he picked Joe Lieberman to be on the ticket with him, it proved that he was thinking about what we should do in the future.