The American people have accomplished a miracle.
However, all of our massed effort is none too great to meet the demands of this war. We shall need everything that we have and everything that our Allies have to defeat the Nazis and the Fascists in the coming battles on the continent of Europe, and the Japanese on the continent of Asia and in the islands of the Pacific.
This tremendous forward movement of the United States and the
United Nations cannot be stopped by our enemies.
And equally, it must not be hampered by any one individual or by the leaders of any one group here back home.
I want to make it clear that every American coal miner who has stopped mining coal—no matter how sincere his motives, no matter how legitimate he may believe his grievances to be—every idle miner directly and individually is obstructing our war effort. We have not yet won this war. We will win this war only as we produce and deliver our total American effort on the high seas and on the battle fronts. And that requires unrelenting, uninterrupted effort here on the home front.
A stopping of the coal supply, even for a short time, would involve a gamble with the lives of American soldiers and sailors and the future security of our whole people. It would involve an unwarranted, unnecessary and terribly dangerous gamble with our chances for victory.
Therefore, I say to all miners—and to all Americans everywhere, at home and abroad—the production of coal will not be stopped.
Tonight, I am speaking to the essential patriotism of the miners, and to the patriotism of their wives and children. And I am going to state the true facts of this case as simply and as plainly as I know how.
After the attack at Pearl Harbor, the three great labor organizations—the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Railroad Brotherhoods—gave the positive assurance that there would be no strikes as long as the war lasted. And the President of the United Mine workers of America was a party to that assurance.
That pledge was applauded throughout the country. It was a forcible means of telling the world that we Americans—135,000,000 of us— are united in our determination to fight this total war with our total will and our total power.