National Affairs: Mr. London Speaks His Mind

Like a much-enduring man who can no longer hold his peace, Alfred Landon spoke his mind last week. In a broadcast speech from Kansas City, the Republicans’ 1936 Presidential candidate boiled some angry conclusions about a situation which he thinks “is growing worse each hour.” He spoke like any angry man, but he spoke the fears of many another brooding U.S. citizen.

Said Alf Landon:

> “[The New Deal’s] way of doing things shakes every moral and legal conception of representative government. Over eight years of that sort of ‘slick’ leadership is destroying the confidence in political leaders essential to popular government.”

>The President had broken the third-term tradition. “Now the non-partisan experienced political writers in Washington say that Mr. Roosevelt is seeking a fourth term.”

>The President has deceived the people with the Lend-Lease Act, which his lieutenants had said could never be interpreted to mean that the U.S. would guarantee delivery of lend-lease goods across the seas. Now, Mr. Landon declared, the act was being interpreted just that way. To evade the Neutrality Act, the U.S. is practicing subterfuges (such as putting U.S. ships under Panamanian registry) that are “beneath the dignity of a mighty people.” The U.S. is engaging in “a bootleg form of war.”

> Because of his unwillingness to deal candidly with the people, the President has fallen down on the defense job. “He is struggling with the interlocking and conflicting difficulties of his specific promises to the American people, his personal political ambitions and national preparedness.”

> The deepest deception the New Deal has practiced is in its use of national defense as a smoke screen behind which it plans to change the whole U.S. economy. The New Deal aim is to eliminate the small businessman as “an economic anachronism like the livery stable. . . . The answer that the New Dealers seek to our mechanized industrial civilization is big cartels, huge private monopolies managed by the State.”

“Out of this war,” Alf Landon charged, “regardless of what our part in it may be, this little group of New Dealers hope to establish, beyond repeal, their collective State.”