DEMOCRATS: Campaign’s Beginning

Two thousand neatly dressed, ham-handed delegates of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Stablemen & Helpers of America crowded into Washington’s Constitution Hall one night last week and sat with eyes glued on the stage. From the side appeared an engrossed little group of men, convoying a towering figure. The audience rose, whistling and roaring. Candidate Roosevelt, sober-faced, in the glare of four white spotlights, still under convoy, crossed the stage.

Brotherhood President Dan Tobin briefly introduced “the man who has most consistently fought for the betterment of working men.” The President smiled, waved down the applause, and began:

“I’m in a sort of quandary tonight. I don’t know whether this is a political speech or not. … I throw myself upon your indulgence and the indulgence of the radio companies, who would in the one case be paid and in the other case not be paid, and I throw myself on the indulgence of the American public. I don’t know.”

Franklin Roosevelt was being either humorous or artful. No better sounding board for a campaign speech to Labor could he have picked than the Teamsters Brotherhood, whose membership is as pugnacious and as pro-New Deal as any in Labor today. The occasion had been engineered by little, red-faced Dan Tobin, recently appointed head of the Democratic National Committee’s Labor Division.

For three-quarters of an hour Franklin Roosevelt stood on the stage of Constitution Hall with arms outstretched and hands grasping the speaker’s stand, his only gesture an occasional toss of his big, grey head. From the hushed hall every now & then broke a deep, spontaneous roar of approval.

Delicately he flicked old sores, lest Labor forget them “You can remember when it was rare indeed for an employer even to consider collective bargaining with his workers,” the President intoned; “when it was common practice to discharge any worker who joined a union.” Carefully he recalled the practices of calling out armed troops to put down strikes, of hiring labor spies, keeping private company arsenals on hand. But those things, he told his listeners, changed with the New Deal.

He painted the picture of the years since 1933, when Labor gained “the untrammeled right, not privilege, to organize and to bargain collectively”; when laws established fair minimum wages, decent maximum hours, outlawed child labor, set up machinery for the mediation of labor disputes.

Said the President: “This progress of the last seven years has been mighty difficult. It has been beset by obstruction and by bitter propaganda from certain minority groups. . . . You will remember that kind of opposition in the campaign of four years ago [from] . . . certain employers, politicians and newspapers—all of whom are nowactive in this campaign.

His promises to Labor, also obliquely put, were no less emphatic. “We must look forward to certain definite things in the near future,” said he. Those things were: 1) broadening of social security; 2 ) unemployment insurance for more workers; 3) an improved old-age-pension system and increased pensions.

Said Franklin Roosevelt: “The people must decide whether to continue the type of government which has fostered the progress to date, or whether to turn it over to those who by their action, if not always by their word, have shown their fundamental opposition to the main objectives toward which we have worked in the past and to which we are definitely committed in the future.”

He gathered into the embrace of his good will A. F. of L., C. I. O. and the Railroad Brotherhoods (causing some observers to guess that Franklin Roosevelt’s next surprise might be an announcement of Labor peace). He reaffirmed the principle of conscription of industry along with the conscription of young men. He promised again what the Democratic platform promised in Chicago: “We will not participate in foreign wars.”

He concluded: “No selfish interest, no personal ambition, yes, no political campaign can sway the majority will of our people of America to make America strong —and to keep America free.”

Last week, as Rival Wendell Willkie began his campaign tour, Mr. Roosevelt also got down to campaign business:

> Quietly invited John L. Lewis of C. I. O. to the White House. Mr. Lewis—who feels that Franklin Roosevelt never repaid C. I. O.’s United Mine Workers for their aid ($500,000) in 1936 and has no use for his onetime friend—no less quietly slipped over, had a talk.

> Received the formal support of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City. Mayor LaGuardia (as Wendell Willkie hastened to point out) once said: “I see very little difference in the New York of Tweed and that of John F. Curry, of Manhattan, or Edward J. Flynn of The Bronx,” was unabashed at finding himself in Boss Flynn’s camp.