National Affairs: I Preach

Instead of a sweltering day in Topeka, it was a cool evening in Chicago. Instead of a rural throng of picnicking Kansans on the State House lawn, it was an urban crowd of 20,000 packed into Chicago’s enclosed Stadium.* Instead of the flat prairie voice of Alf M. Landon, it was the boom of Frank Knox. But the difference was more than a difference of weather, crowd, voice.

In formally accepting his nomination for the Presidency, Governor Landon chose to fight with cold water the fire of New Deal enthusiasm (TIME, Aug. 3). Against the advice of those who felt that Republicans must start a back-fire of enthusiasm, against rabid New Deal haters who wanted him to preach a holy crusade, Nominee Landon offered no burning sentiments, spoke in no burning voice. Last week in accepting the Republican Vice Presidential nomination Publisher Knox of the Chicago Daily News cut loose with a red-hot attack on the New Deal which made GOPartisans jump with joy.

By now everything that can be said against the New Deal has been said. Last week in Chicago Nominee Knox said it all over again with a vim which so impressed the Republican National Committee that it decided to keep him almost continuously on the stump until November. Because Vice Presidents do not make national policies, he did not presume to set up a Party program but confined himself to straight-forward criticism, bold but not bitter, vigorous but not violent, scorching but not sarcastic. Excerpts: “An endless succession of interferences and experiments was inaugurated under the deceptive slogan of a new deal. This policy of government by guess, officially explained by President Roosevelt as founded on a philosophy of try-anything-once, was initiated under the title of economic planning. No one of its proponents has even been able to define the New Deal or to explain what it is aimed at or where it is going. No one of them has been able to make clear what the economic plan is.

It began with a proposal for a belt of trees in a territory that nature had decided should not have trees. It is ending with the use of public funds to conduct classes in tap-dancing. . . .

“The Republican Party recognizes that changing social and economic conditions call for increased Federal activities. But it always insists that such new activities shall be legalized by proper constitutional amendment. It always will. It approves the horse-and-buggy method of changing the Constitution, and it disapproves a philosophy that laughs at the horse-and-buggy method and wants to use only the buggy whip. … It prefers a government guided by constitutions to a government guided only by caprice. . . . Whatever concrete measures the Republican Party has in mind will be presented to the voters before election, not after. . . .

“The people want recovery, not rhetoric. They want economy, not waste. They want work, not relief. They want co-operation among the partners in production, not industrial strife. They want order in economic life, not an occasional breathing spell. They want dignity in government,not a merry-go-round. They do not believe that all bankers are scoundrels, that all employers are exploiters, that all businessmen are motivated by greed, that all working people are victims of oppression.They do not believe that the American system was a failure until the New Deal came along to save it from its sins. They do not believe that American industry is a jungle of cut-throat competition dominated by intrenched greed. The people know that with the election of a new administration next November the dammed up forces of recovery will burst forth in a magnificent prosperity. . . .

“Poverty and insecurity are not yet exterminated in our land. Economic hardship and economic injustice are not yet eliminated. But in the United States, in the last hundred years, the American people have come nearer to these goals than any other people anywhere in history. Brave pioneering and hard work and patient saving have made this the richest and fairest civilization in history. It has not been made by sleight of hand tricks. . . . “The President has recently told the American people that they have a rendezvous with destiny. As I understand the term, a rendezvous is a date. What is this rendezvous? Under present conditions, the most likely rendezvous is with a receiverfor the Treasury. After the acceptance by the people of the promises of the 1932 platform, what unexpected rendezvous did the people have? They had a rendezvous with the NRA. They had a rendezvous with Farleyism. They had a rendezvous with the tax-collectors. The American people want no rendezvous with a destiny plotted on blueprints in a Washington office. When they have a date with destiny they want to know what the lady looks like. . . .

“Two ways lie ahead. One lies along the apparently easy valleys of a regimented society, maintained by a paternalistic government which falsely promises to provide its subjects with a security that men were wont to purchase in the past by their own efforts. The other lies along the rugged heights of self-support, self-government and self-respect. . . .

“And so I preach to you the doctrine, not of the soft and spineless kept citizen of a regimented state, but of the self-respecting and self-reliant men who made America. . . . Next November you will choose the American wav.”

*Two of the 20,000 were Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Insull, who came early, took seats on the main floor. Newshawks and cameramen spotted them, descended in droves. Insull was assailed by questions on politics. ”I don’t know how I’m going to vote,” he snapped, “and anyhow I’m not going to be interviewed.” So pestered was he that he and his wife gloomily departed before the Stadium show really got under way.