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"Why Bother With The Crippled Child?"

Creator: Franklin D. Roosevelt (author)
Date: 1927
Publication: The Crippled Child
Publisher: National Society for Crippled Children of the United States of America
Source: National Library of Medicine, General Collection

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Mr. Toastmaster, and I think that I am almost getting to the point where I will say Fellow-Workers. You are going to be very glad, I think, that I am taking a train tonight. I came here with the idea of having plenty of time to write out with some care my few remarks for this evening, and the result has been that I have made two speeches already. This isn't going to be a third; it is just going to be a heart-to-heart talk.

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The topic on which I said I would speak some months ago -- "Why bother with the crippled child?" was intended to bring some ideas, not to this kind of an audience at all, but to the average audience that doesn't know anything about it. Here, I am very much of an amateur talking to a lot of people who know a great deal more about the subject than I do; but because of that, perhaps I can put it this way: you all know so much about the subject of the crippled child, as do the people in any given line of business or occupation, that you are very apt to forget that everybody else in the world doesn't know just as much about it as you do.

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We workers have still got the task, in this nation, of selling our wares. We have still got the task of talking to the business men and women of the nation, to the taxpayers of the nation, proving our point as to why all this is worth while.

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Sometimes we have to be business like. Sometimes we have to talk in terms of dollars and cents. It is a hard thing to do in a subject like this, and yet I find in talking to people throughout this country about the problem of the crippled child, and, I might add, of the crippled adult, too, they often do not see anything but the appeal to the heart. They get that. It is fine that they do, and it is right that we should emphasize that as well, but, back of it all, we have got to live in this day and generation, this time of practicality, and put things down in figures.

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When you come down to that, there are many in our midst who want to know why; what good it is to spend all this time, and all these taxes, and all these gifts to bring back cripples. We have had figures presented at this gathering -- an estimate of 400,000 crippled children in North America. I take it that that is a fairly accurate guess. If there are that many crippled children, how many more crippled adults are there who are getting around a little, many of them still hidden, many of them still to be found.

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I was talking to one of the government employees, a Washington statistician on the census last year, and he told that in his judgment there were three-quarters of a million Americans, men, and children, who were incapacitated, physically crippled and unable, from the economic point of view, to pull their own weight in the boat.

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I said to him "If that is so, how many more people are out of useful production, to come back to the hard-hearted point of view of dollars and cents, people who are looking after this three-quarters of a million Americans?"

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He said, "Well, at least one to every three. The total would come up to more than a million. It would be pretty nearly one per cent of the total population of the country, cripples or those caring for them."

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We will take the next step. How much should the earning capacity be? Many of them are children not of earning age; others, and many of them, are capable of earning something. The older ones are capable of making a good return for their labor, and if you take a snap judgment figure of, say $1,000 a year earning capacity, and that isn't so very high in these days of so-called prosperity, a million people at a thousand dollars apiece a year works out at a billion dollars; that is $1,000,000,000 taken out of production. There is a figure for some of us to shoot at some of our rich friends -- $1,000,000,000. What is the interest on it? Well, at 5 per cent, it is $50,000,000 a year. Wouldn't it be nice if we people could have the spending of the interest on that billion dollars? Just think what could happen in our work if we So had the use of $50,000,000 a year.

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Yes, we are young. As I said over the radio, we have only just begun our work. We still have to solve the problems of how and when and where. After we have done the principal part of restoring these people, we want to know how we can then go about making them into useful citizens. That is being solved as the days go by. We are finding new uses for people without arms, for people who can't walk with ease. The interesting thing to me about it is, and I think you will bear me out when I assert to the public of this country, that the mind, the mental capacity of the average cripple is not below the average. It isn't even just the average; I believe it is above the average.

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What is the most important thing we can do outside of our own work? Education -- not education of the children, but education of the United States, and, heaven only knows, the United States needs education, and they need it not in one part of the country or another part of the country but all over. There is one man in this land who, next to "Daddy" Allen, has done more for crippled children than anybody else -- Henry Ford. He has brought the rural districts into touch with the rest of the world. It all ties in together. it isn't just one problem; it isn't the problem of the clinics and hospitals and all the other details of our work; it is a problem which is associated with all the other social problems of the country. The best way I can explain it is by telling you of a conference that I held down in Atlanta, Georgia, last year. It was a conference with some of the leading state officials, and the question before this group was two-fold, education and good roads. Curiously enough for Georgia, the conference came to a unanimous decision! Their decision was that before they could get a better system of education throughout the state, they would have to build their roads; they would have to get the people out of their own localities and mixing with rest of mankind.

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