next day, administered by Chief Justice Edward
White on the East Portico of the Capitol. The specter of war with
Germany hung over the events surrounding the inauguration. A Senate
filibuster on arming American merchant vessels against submarine attacks
had closed the last hours of the Sixty-fourth Congress without passage.
Despite the campaign slogan "He kept us out of war," the President asked
Congress on April 2 to declare war. It was declared on April 6.]

My Fellow Citizens:

The four years which have elapsed since last I stood in this place have
been crowded with counsel and action of the most vital interest and
consequence. Perhaps no equal period in our history has been so fruitful
of important reforms in our economic and industrial life or so full of
significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our political action.
We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order, correct the
grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life, liberate and quicken
the processes of our national genius and energy, and lift our politics
to a broader view of the people's essential interests.

It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall
not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing
influence as the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is
time rather to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present
and the immediate future.

Although we have centered counsel and action with such unusual
concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic
legislation to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, other
matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention--matters
lying outside our own life as a nation and over which we had no control,
but which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn us more and
more irresistibly into their own current and influence.

It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of the
whole world. They have shaken men everywhere with a passion and an
apprehension they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve calm
counsel while the thought of our own people swayed this way and that
under their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We
are of the blood of all the nations that are at war. The currents of our
thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run quick at all seasons
back and forth between us and them. The war inevitably set its mark