WHAT THIS COUNTRY NEEDS
Mayer, Milton
What This Country Needs By MILTON MAYER IT WAS the same hall where, four long years ago, Chicago's Superintendent of Streets and Sewers, established in the basement with a loudspeaker,...
...I was not alone, either, in this sense of hearing a voice from the dead Majk Hanna combined with the voice of the still-to-be-born Robot Ruler...
...Another was Madame Luce, the beautiful blonde warmonger of a few years ago, invoking the blood of dead soldiers against the man whose name signed the orders that sent them to war...
...Suddenly, at the instant the prize was to be dropped in his lap, he discovered his solemn obligation to continue to serve the great people of the great state of California...
...he would not accept the nomination...
...The Republican papers sang of his solemn sense of duty, but the hotel lobbies whispered of a smart politician, sniffing around the delegations, and then announcing, slightly privately: "These boys are going to get the pants licked off of them, and I don't want any part of it...
...I have gazed upon the shining countenance of Thomas E. Dewey, my friends...
...I tell you that if you elect him President, you will wake up on Inauguration Day and find nobody there...
...Warren of California...
...I am going to wait until 1948...
...Still, it's my personal feeling that there's a choice, if it's only between a man of some sort and no man at all...
...APPROVES WORLD PROGRAM...
...I have stood close enough to this Dewey to touch him with a fork...
...For four years now Dewey has been playing dead...
...Warren, you will remember, played the Dewey game until the midnight before the first ballot...
...So, in another one of the Greatest Crises in American History, the Republicans have nothing to say except, "We have here everything for everybody...
...But the best was the heroic sacrifice of Gov...
...Four items remain for the history books...
...One delegate died the day of the nomination, but it was not from excitement...
...Still another was the rumbling of "No, no," from the floor when Bricker, the honest Harding, announced his withdrawal in the interest of unity...
...They got the idea, as they get all their ideas, from Roosevelt, whose present policies the Sun and the Tribune could just as easily endorse, except that the Tribune would take a yellow dog, or poodle, in preference to That Man...
...What This Country Needs By MILTON MAYER IT WAS the same hall where, four long years ago, Chicago's Superintendent of Streets and Sewers, established in the basement with a loudspeaker, ventriloquized the delegates into thinking that they were hollering for Roosevelt and Wallace...
...And I still do not believe he exists...
...There is no reality in him...
...What this country needs is a two-party system...
...I give you the Republican Party, fellow-Americans, as lam unable to find any use for it...
...The delegates applauded in a ghostly way—the left hand passing the right like opposite trains on parallel tracks—when they heard the phrase "one-man government," and they applauded again when they heard the word "bureaucracy," or government by too many men...
...Some of you handy folks around the house may be able to stop up a leak in the plumbing with it...
...PUTS U.S...
...I can hardly wait to rush to the polls in November, or whenever it is, and choose between Twiddledelano and Twiddledewey...
...but win or lose, when this is all over, he will not have to play...
...FIRST, while the Chicago Sun, which loves internationalism, had it this wayrG.O.P...
...Hague and Bilbo...
...Like the Democratic delegates four years ago, the Republicans went through the motions, but they couldn't get themselves to holler...
...Dewey ascended the platform to accept the nomination, was the Mighty Stadium Organ drowned out by the roar of the mob...
...Odds Are Colossal Gov...
...He was not a candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, but neither was he not not a candidate...
...The place was a Turkish bath for wet heat, and the delegates just sat there...
...He is certainly not his own man, but I can not for the life of me figure out who he is, unless it's Walt Disney's...
...The odds are colossal that he can not beat Roosevelt...
...The day the platform was "adopted"—and I suppose I ought to put the word "platform" in quotation marks, too—the Chicago Tribune, which hates internationalism, ran the following streamer: G.O.P...
...I have listened to his honeyed words, spoken with the same ineffable eloquence with which I myself copped first prize at the Edmund Burke Grammar School Reading Contest...
...And then they got up and went home, and Roosevelt laughed and laughed and laughed...
...Dewey is the fall guy for '44...
...While the man, or whatever it was behind the mustache, was speaking, I dropped pin after pin and my neighbors in the gallery jumped at each crash...
...But since Sanitary Ed Kelly of the Roosevelt-and-Humanity mob still owns Chicago's streets and sewers, and the Superintendent thereof, the voice from the basement was missing last week, and the Republicans had to ventriloquize themselves...
...Ghostly Applause Brothers, it was enough to make a man vote for Roosevelt, only it is getting harder and harder to distinguish the Albany stuff from the product of Hyde Park...
...At no time during the convention, not even when Mr...
...One is Herbert Hoover, bumbling along with the old incantations against the New Deal failure to solve unemployment, while the millions of pallid shadows held out their hungry hands to him from the ruins of '32...
...Two weeks from now I will give you the Democrats, complete with the Messrs...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 28
