National Affairs: Hoover Speech

Lifting up his voice in Newark, N.J., Nominee Hoover addressed himself to Labor, including “the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner on the job and the wages.”

He said: “Behind every job is a vast, intricate and delicately adjusted system of interlocked industries dependent upon skilled leadership.”

He said: “The modern relationships of government and industry are a tangled mass of economic and social problems. They are neither abstract propositions nor statistics. They are very human things. They can make for the happiness of every home in our country.”

He harked back to 1921 when “anxiety for daily bread haunted nearly one quarter of our 23 million families.”

He recalled how the Republican administration called a conference of which he was chairman; how “within a year we restored . . . five million workers to employment” and produced stability, prosperity. . . . This recovery and this stability are no accident. It has not been achieved by luck.”

Present depression in the coal and textile industries were touched on lightly, explained briefly. Then came a table of statistics showing how many more pounds of “that useful mixture,” bread and butter, the U.S. wage-earner can buy with his wages than any other wage-earner in the world.

Nominee Hoover said: “The Republican administration makes no claim to credit which belongs to the enterprise, energy and character of a great people.”

Protective tariff, restricted immigration, the Commerce Department’s service to exporters, its fostering of industrial efficiency were next mentioned. Specifically cited was the reduction “by nearly one-half” of the seasonal idling period in the building trades.

The Hoover promise for a billion-dollar Federal works program “to take up the slack of occasional unemployment” was repeated.

There was also repetition of the Hoover doctrine that efficiency in industry is “the road to the abolition of poverty.”

The use of injunctions in labor disputes got two short paragraphs. Such use must not be “excessive,” said the Nominee.

Conclusion:

“He would be a rash man who would state that we are finally entering the industrial millennium, but there is a great ray of hope that America is finding herself on the road to a solution of the greatest of all her problems. That problem is to adjust our economic system to our racial ideals.

“At such a time as this a change in national policies involves not−as some may lightly think−only a choice between different roads by either of which we may go forward, but a question also as to whether we may not be taking the wrong road and moving backward. The measure of our national prosperity, of our stability, of our hope of further progress at this time is the measure of what we may risk through a change in present policies. More than once in our national history a change in policies in a time of advancement has been quickly followed by a turn toward disaster. . . .”