(Proclaiming That an Unlimited National Emergency
Confronts This Country, Which Requires That Its Military, Naval, Air
and Civilian Defenses Be Put on the Basis of Readiness to Repel Any
and All Acts or Threats of Aggression Directed Toward any Part of the
Western Hemisphere.)
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A Proclamation
WHEREAS on September 8, 1939, because of the
outbreak of war in Europe a proclamation was issued declaring a limited
national emergency and directing measures "for the purpose of strengthening
our national defense within the limits of peacetime authorizations",
WHEREAS a succession of events makes plain
that the objectives of the Axis belligerents in such war are not confined
to those avowed at its commencement, but include overthrow throughout
the world of existing democratic order, and a worldwide domination of
peoples and economies through the destruction of all resistance on land
and sea and in the air, AND
WHEREAS indifference on the part of the United
States to the increasing menace would be perilous, and common prudence
requires that for the security of this nation and of this hemisphere
we should pass from peacetime authorizations of military strength to
such a basis as will enable us to cope instantly and decisively with
any attempt at hostile encirclement of this hemisphere, or the establishment
of any base for aggression against it, as well as to repel the threat
of predatory incursion by foreign agents into our territory and society,
NOW, THEREFORE, I, FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, President
of the United States of America, do proclaim that an unlimited national
emergency confronts this country, which requires that its military,
naval, air and civilian defences be put on the basis of readiness to
repel any and all acts or threats of aggression directed toward any
part of the Western Hemisphere.
I call upon all the loyal citizens engaged in production
for defense to give precedence to the needs of the nation to the end
that a system of government that makes private enterprise possible may
survive.
I call upon all our loyal workmen as well as employers
to merge their lesser differences in the larger effort to insure the
survival of the only kind of government which recognizes the rights
of labor or of capital.
I call upon loyal state and local leaders and officials
to cooperate with the civilian defense agencies of the United States
to assure our internal security against foreign directed subversion
and to put every community in order for maximum productive effort and
minimum of waste and unnecessary frictions.
I call upon all loyal citizens to place the nation's
needs first in mind and in action to the end that we may mobilize and
have ready for instant defensive use all of the physical powers, all
of the moral strength and all of the material resources of this nation.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF I have hereunto set my hand and
caused the seal of the United States of America to be affixed.
DONE at the City of Washington this twenty-seventh
day of May, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-one,
and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred
and sixty-fifth.
[SEAL]
FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT.
By the President:
CORDELL HULL
Secretary of State
[Department of State Bulletin, May 31, 1941.]