The oath of office was administered
on the East Portico of the Capitol by Chief Justice Charles Evans
Hughes.
***
When four years ago we met to inaugurate a President, the
Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We
dedicated ourselves to the fulfillment of a vision--to speed the
time when there would be for all the people that security and
peace essential to the pursuit of happiness. We of the Republic
pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith
those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless and
unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those
first things first.
Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we
recognized a deeper need--the need to find through government the
instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the
ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts
at their solution without the aid of government had left us
baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable
to create those moral controls over the services of science which
are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a
ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find
practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish
men.
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