In the foregoing speech by Roosevelt, he makes an important point. Democracy depends not just on vital laws and institutions, but on certain sensibilities. And, as Roosevelt noted, there are two types who represent a shared sensibility critical to a large democracy. They are the farmer and the housewife.

By farmer, I refer, as did Roosevelt, not to the big-business tycoon, but to the relatively small-scale grower. And, by housewife, I mean the woman who devotes the vast portion of adulthood to caring for and living in daily physical proximity to her husband and children.

Farmers and housewives have natural affinities. For one, they both live close to nature. I don’t mean they both live close to the earth or to the outdoors. I mean nature in a larger sense, as the physical world in all its daily cycles of degeneration and regeneration. Children are a part of nature, a rapidly changeable part of it, and a home, with all its cyclical physical needs, is a part of nature as well.

Nature, as we all know, never totally submits. All human beings come up against nature, but there are many occupations today that offer the constant illusion of progress. The farmer and housewife are less prone to this illusion. Hence the tragic view of existence so common to these types, a perspective which is not the same as the gloomy view, but is inherently hopeful within certain honored boundaries.

Both the farmer and the housewife can ill afford to over-value immediacy. They must take the long view. The farmer who thinks only of what his fields will produce this year is an incompetent. The housewife’s work is so long-term, its outcomes aren’t always seen in her lifetime.
 
So what does all this mean for democracy? Farmers and housewives do not usually hold the reigns of power. They are too busy for that sort of thing anyway. However, if they exist in sufficient numbers, their influence is pervasive. It is one of the great restraining forces Tocqueville spoke of so movingly. Not only do they nurture and protect both the human and natural resources of the nation, they provide a vital check on wishful thinking, on mad hopefulness, on head-long optimism and on democracy’s tendency toward activity-for-activity’s sake.

It is cause of very great concern that America has lost so many of its farmers and its housewives. Our nation cannot maintain political harmony and well-being without them.

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