Franklin D. Roosevelt Quotes
… we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land
Roosevelt thought like Jefferson that it was not desirable to have a large proportion of the population residing in cities, and one of the more successful aspects of the New Deal with the improvement of conditions in rural America. Despite that, the trend to the cities was inexorable in America with the rest of the world following that trend.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1945, 32nd President of the United States (Democrat, NY), First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Moses became the greatest “builder” the world had ever known. The Bridges and tunnels into New York, the highways in the city and Long Island, the development of Fire Island and the World Trade Center were all his work. Babbitt was a very large building and construction contractor. The Cold War was ongoing and his reference to civilian defense was an absurd notion of the 1950s that building bomb shelters in cities and homes could protect the civilian population in the event of nuclear attack. This was actually an official government position and program.
Howard was one of the first people to recognize the migration from the country to the cities brought about by the Industrial Revolution and then suggest solutions. He advocated planned suburban communities that had some elements of the country, but allowed a density of people to function in an industrial economy. He called them “Garden Cities”. Forest Hills in New York and other American planned communities were much influenced by his thinking as were many other new communities since.
In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this fertility rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35808} and {35809}.
This statement was quite controversial when it was published and remains so. Many libertarians and private sector enthusiasts see giving this power to government is too much and erodes the sanctity of private property. Nonetheless, most local and state government in America subscribes to this point of view thus allowing zoning, city planning, condemnation of private property for public use and the like. In 1976 when it was promulgated, President Ronald Reagan discussed it in his weekly radio address.
Spengler and some others viewed with alarm the urban migration that had come with the industrial revolution. That migration was relatively minor compared to what took place in the remainder of the 20th century. In most developed coutries the rural population has become very small and the urban and suburban totally dominant.
This quotation is notable because it illustrates some of the ideas about cities that were suggested at the time. The growth of the suburbs was the largest of the changes that actually tool place.
In most of the world there has been a continual migration into cities.
Urbanization has often alarmed the power structure. Given the harsher form of urban poverty compared with rural poverty, it was hard for politicians to understand the draw of the cities. They did not then understand the value and importance of greater opportunity, greater privacy and anonymity, more choice and more de facto freedom. Bannerman and many others would have been totally surprised that in the second decade of the 21st century, more than half the people in the entire world were living in cities and suburbs.
English owners of Irish Estates did not get along with the Irish natives very well. They were perceived by most Englishmen as uncivilized, primitive barbarians who were not hard workers or industrious people. Further, England had turned Protestant and made Ireland such, and the Roman Catholic Irishment did not want to have much to do with the English who were occupying their land and robbing them of their religion. So the English estate managers sought to induce English to settle in Ireland.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician who served as the 32nd president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. A member of the Democratic Party, he won a record four presidential elections and became a central figure in world events during the first half of the 20th century. Roosevelt directed the federal government during most of the Great Depression, implementing his New Deal domestic agenda in response to the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. As a dominant leader of his party, he built the New Deal Coalition, which defined modern liberalism in the United States throughout the middle third of the 20th century. His third and fourth terms were dominated by World War II, which ended shortly after he died in office.
