Roosevelt Dodges Jobless Issues and Shakes Hands With Hoover
Roosevelt Dodges Jobless Issues and Shakes Hands With Hoover GOVERNOR ROOSEVELT in hit Detroit speech again approached the social abyu into which about forty millions of men, women and children...
...No work means poverty...
...One philosophy would "let tilings alone" and the other "strives for something new...
...Workers are injured in industry so we have workmen's compensation acts...
...Triumphant Socialism would discharge the handful of industry's owners who have discharged millions of workers...
...Workers grow old in industry and this requires old age pensions...
...An Epic Revelation...
...And now let us turn to some interesting facts...
...It is an "old" practice which Roosevelt reconciles with the "new" philosophy...
...That's why we are for Thomas and Maurcr, th0 Socialist Party candidates, and against Hoover and Roosevelt, the candidates of a rotting industrial system...
...Roosevelt did not answer the question being asked by the unemployed millions whose ranks extend from the capital of the nation to all the states of the Union- Or, if he answered, it is the old answer of Hoover which is to feed soup to the destitute millions...
...So the politician turns sage...
...Note his guarded language: "Some leaders have wisely declared for a system of unemployment insurance throughout this broad land of ours, and we are going to come to k." One can see the sage balancing on a tight wire in those careful words...
...Roosevelt Dodges Jobless Issues and Shakes Hands With Hoover GOVERNOR ROOSEVELT in hit Detroit speech again approached the social abyu into which about forty millions of men, women and children have been thrust, looked in for a moment, and then retreated...
...YVe in the social abyss are interested...
...Each of them had its origin in trade union and Socialist agitation and even when they are reluctantly enacted into laws they often fail to fully comply with the needs of the masses...
...He and Hoover would "let things alone" so far as the fundamentals of the capitalist system are concerned...
...We are on the threshold of an epic revelation and we quake with anticipation...
...You are twin chicks from the same egg...
...He proposed to talk fundamentals and then turned to hackneyed pity for poverty...
...The same charity doles, gilded with a little religious sentiment, the same sanctimonious piety for the starving...
...This: "First of all, perhaps, upon the private agencies of philanthropy, just as far as we can drag it out of them, and secondly, the other social organizations, and last, but not least, the church...
...He represents something "new" and Hoover something "old...
...The "New" Approved by Fat Boys His New Jersey lieutenant, Frank Hague, one who wriggled up through the dirt like an earthworm in the foul politics of that state, last week solemnly announced that Roosevelt is loyal to the great "interests" of the nation...
...They have discharged millions...
...Some people become mental defectives and this requires special treatment to restore them to their families instead of incarceration in an asylum...
...Herbert Hoover, meet Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Roosevelt's Salt Lake City speech on railroads was submitted to several railroad magnates before it was delivered...
...What about them...
...These fundamentals "have been expressed in philosophies for I don't know bow many thousands of years in every part of the world...
...We, the nation, will own industry and employ ourselves...
...Caress him tenderly, for his "new" .is your "old...
...Or does he mean that it is going to come to us ? We do not know, he does not know, and nobody knows...
...It would release the millions in the social abyss by opening the gates of employment to them...
...He presented none...
...Our sage moves on to consider the present tragic destitution of some forty million human beings...
...It means sickness...
...Recently "men high in business and the financial world" broadcasted their support of Herbert H. Lehman for Governor of New York, also the choice of Roosevelt...
...Some leaders have wisely declared" in favor of unemployment insurance but his "wisdom" does not permit him to express an opinion- He thinks we "are going to come to it...
...Our Democratic philosopher comes to unemployment insurance...
...So long as the owning class has the power to sentence millions to idleness the main source of poverty remains...
...Workmen's compensation, old age pensions, unemployment insurance, shorter hours and better incomes, yes...
...On what shall we rely to destroy hunger...
...So the Democratic wing of capitalist politics offers something new...
...He proposes to attack the causes of poverty...
...It means worry and mental defectives...
...So the exponent of the "new" Democratic piety is "safe" for the class in the upper heaven of capitalist society that has thrust millions into the loner hell of the social abyss...
...Does he favor it...
...Some Real Fundamentals The owners of industry have the power to fire workers...
...It would wipe out ownership of industry by a class...
...But genuine acts, not acts with "jokers" that emasculate them...
...I am going to refer to some fundamentals that antedate parties and antedate republics and empires, fundamentals that are as old as mankind itself/' he said...
...That is to say, as long as the capitalist system of production and distribution survives, the system will cast up hungry human beings, jobless men and women, ill-nourished children and mental defectives...
...Shake hands...
...The Socialist Answer But that isn't all...
...Whit you, Herbert, in these four years of a vast population in rags and hunger have offered the workers in the social abyss is also offered them by Mr...
...Ideas Three Decades Old There are three items in this "new" philosophy that are at least three decades old...
...Often they are in part strangled for lack of enforcement machinery and appropriation of sufficient funds...
...Governor Roosevelt proposed to present some fundamentals...
Vol. 14 • October 1932 • No. 15
