THE CAMPAIGN: Seagirt

To make his second major speech of the campaign, John W. Davis traveled from his Manhattan headquarters down to Seagirt, N. J., as a guest of Governor Silzer of that State. He spoke first of Wilson, then of the Oil and Veterans’ Bureau scandals, of the Fordney-McCumber tariff, of Foreign Affairs, of the Ku Klux Klan.

A Previous Visit. “This is my second appearance at Seagirt. You will not be surprised if I find my memory turning at this time to the circumstances of my earlier visit. It happened on a hot July day, twelve years ago. I was one of a party of 200 or more who tramped in the dust from the station to the Governor’s house at Seagirt. At our head marched that grand old Roman, Champ Clark, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives. We were calling on a Governor of New Jersey who had just received the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. Most of that company, including myself, had never made his personal acquaintance. It was our errand to assure him of our hearty support and to place ourselves at his service. The impressions of the day were summed up for me by one of my colleagues as we tramped back to the waiting train. Said he: ‘When that man comes to Washington there will be a leader in the White House.'”

Corruption. “In 1913, the lobby was scourged from Washington; in 1921, like a flock of unclean birds hastening to the feast, it gathered from the four winds and descended upon the city. The Little Green House in K Street was set up for sinister purposes but partly disclosed. Its occupants and their friends soon proved that they lacked neither zeal nor appetite.

“First of all came oil. At the head of the buccaneers as they marched along rode the Secretary of the Interior. And after oil, the veterans. Here was a rare field for enterprise. A year and a half after Congress had appropriated $33,000,000 for building purposes, only 200 hospital beds had been added to the Bureau’s equipment, and those in a hospital purchased readymade. If it be true that public interest in these things has waned, is it not a public duty to see that it is revived before the day of judgment comes ?

“If the fact is that the public resources have been squandered, is it any answer to say that a budget system has been installed? If unfit and corrupt men have been put and kept in office and left to their devices, is it a sufficient defense that the Administration was not actually desirous of dishonesty? If the wounded veteran has been defrauded of the care that was his due, is there any comfort to him in the fact that Congress made lavish appropriations?”

Tariff. “The tariff afforded an opening to hosts of privilege for an assault less direct but far more devastating to the public pocketbook. We are told that America in 1921 was threatened from abroad by an ‘impending avalanche of suddenly cheapened merchandise’ from which it was narrowly saved by the beneficent action of the Fordney-McCumber tariff.

“Let me give you two or three illustrations of what a high protectionist means when he talks of a commercial avalanche: Under a Democratic tariff sewing machines, necessary in every home, were on the free list and we were importing scarcely 1% of the value of our domestic production. This was an avalanche, however, not to be tamely borne and a duty of 33 1/3% (33 and one-third) was imposed to check it. “In rubber footwear, out imports were too small to be worth reporting, but the duty nevertheless was raised 150%. In manufactures of wool, our imports were less than 6% of the domestic production, so the rates of duty were increased by 80%.”

Foreign Affairs. “There was a day when America sat in the council of the Nations, occupying at their table the seat of honor and of dignity that was her right. There was a day when she made covenants and engagements in her own name and was not content to be merely the beneficiary of the effort and good-will of others. Today, apparently, she has no other program than to ‘encourage American citizens and resources to assist in restoring Europe with the sympathetic support’—but nothing more—’of our Government.’ It is a far cry to this from the declaration of Theodore Roosevelt that ‘If we are to be a really great people we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.’ “

Ku Klux Klan. “If any organization, no matter what it chooses to be called, whether Ku Klux Klan or by any other name, raises the standard of racial and religious prejudice or attempts to make racial origins or religious beliefs the test of fitness for public office, it does violence to the spirit of American institutions and must be condemned by all those who believe as I do in American ideals.

“I repeat that these matters must not be permitted to divert the attention of the public from the vital questions now before them. I venture, therefore, to express the hope that the nominee of the Republican Party will see fit by some explicit declaration to join in entirely removing this topic from the field of political debate.”