TWO DEMOCRATIC FRAUDS
Oneal, James
TWO DEMOCRATIC FRAUDS Roosevelt and Smith Match Each Other In Use of Deceptive " Weasel Words" By JAMES ONEAL WHAT we are expected to regard as a "political sensation" happened last week in the...
...It would be just as intelligible...
...Smith himself indulged in this in 1928...
...WHY DON'T THEY SPEAK CHINESE ? That paragraph might just as well have been written in a Chinese dialect as in English...
...While the masses look on their pockets are picked...
...Were they the "plans" that brought bankers and capitalists to Washington to head bureaus and committees and that sent thousands of dissenters to long terms of imprisonment...
...What were the "plans" of 1917...
...In his Farewell Address he apl>ealed direct to the "humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics and lal)orcrs" against the capitalism of the East that today has become the caretaker of the Raskub-Roosevelt-Sinith party...
...We urge them to disciplined action and education in labor solidarity in preparation for the conquest of the whole capitalist system...
...We urge the working class millions to take power...
...The princes of banks and industries who own the Democratic Party also pay him homage...
...He was against "any demagogic appeal to the masses of working people of the country to destroy themselves by setting class against class and rich against poor...
...THE PLAIN-TALKING SOCIALISTS On the other hand Socialists arc frank in their direct appeal to the working masses to unseat the ruling classes and their governing agents...
...The author of that sentiment is also claimed as the founder of their party...
...We speak of no mystic "plans" that leave voters groggy injhe attempt to figure out what is meant...
...Was it not the spokesmen of the "man at the bottom of the economic pyramid" who were sent to American bastilles while the fat boys at the top enriched themselves out of the war...
...We urge them to destroy the two parties of capitalism...
...Calculate that one rebellion In thirteen states in the course of eleven years is but one for each state in ¦ century and a half...
...They are deliberately put together to avoid any clear understanding and in this art Smith is just as much an offender as Roosevelt 'limself...
...TWO DEMOCRATIC FRAUDS Roosevelt and Smith Match Each Other In Use of Deceptive " Weasel Words" By JAMES ONEAL WHAT we are expected to regard as a "political sensation" happened last week in the speech of Alfred E. Smith at the Jefferson dinner...
...The less meaning the capitalist politician puts into his addresses the more does he meet the requirements of his trade in deceit and drivel...
...This was interpreted as a thrust at the mediocre Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...The Governor had said nothing to alarm the fat boys who own the Democratic Party...
...When he was elected for his first term and workers paraded in Boston it was a codfish aristocrat who declared them "demagogues" and "convicts condemned to the galleys...
...In his First Message Lincoln also used plain words when he said that "Labor is prior to and independent of capital," that "capital is only the fniit of labor" and that labor "deserves much the higher consideration...
...Speaking of the rising of poverty-stricken farmers and laborers in Massachusetts in 1787, Jefferson wrote to his friend, James Madison: "The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it should have done...
...The Smith-Roosevelt quarrel is a show with two dummies in the hands of a ventriloquist...
...We urge them to organize and wrest every measure of relief possible from their despoilers...
...One can understand such statements, but the "weasel words" of Roosevelt are the stock-in-trade of the modern politician...
...Here is what Roosevelt said...
...It is a fraud and a competition in deceit with the Republican wing of capitalist politics...
...Nothing was wanting but the handcuffs...
...The Jefferson whom the parvenue Smith honored last week was one of them...
...We Socialists utter no "weasel words...
...No country should be so long without one.** What do the smug diners at the Jefferson dinner last week think of that plain speaking...
...The prize exhibit of Tammany declared that "This is no time for demagogues," no time to "stir up the bitterness of the rich against the poor, and poor against the rich...
...These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for the plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid...
...A few of the Northern politicians indulged in the obscure language of Roosevelt and Smith but there were others who were frank and who stated that it was one set of interests pitted against another...
...To destroy both is the duty and interest of the laboring millions...
...AN OLD SMITH TRAIT Then there is Andy Jackson...
...He had used the usual obscure language of politicians that is intended to bring on stupor...
...JEFFERSON'S PLAIN WORDS There have been other men in our political history who did not use language to make citizens groggy...
...To be sure, Roosevelt is a demagogue in making that statement, but so is Smith in presuming that it is anything unusual in the politics of capitalism...
...Our rising bankers and capitalists did not mince words when the struggle to overthrow the ruling planters of the South reached a crisis...
Vol. 13 • April 1932 • No. 17
