Radio address by President Roosevelt on Election eve from Hyde Park. November 4, 1938. He said, in part, “I have changed my mind about the nature of some problems of democratic government over the past few years as I have had more and more experience with them. I had never realized how much my way of thinking had changed until the other day when I was watching the finishing touches being put on a simple cottage I have recently built—a little cottage which, by the way, is not in any sense of the word a “dream house.” Just watching the building go up made me realize that there was a time not so long ago when I used to think about problems of government as if they were the same kind of problems as building a house—definite and compact and capable of completion within a given time.

Now I know well that the comparison is not a good one. Once you build a house you always have it. On the other hand, a social or an economic gain is a different matter. A social or an economic gain made by one Administration, for instance, may, and often does, evaporate into thin air under the next Administration.”