The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn How to Talk To the People As THE political campaign gets rolling, numerous observations confirm me in my opinion that there are many sharp differences between...
...The President springs from an old line of farmers...
...Relying on accurate knowledge rather than on campaign bunk, it will ask its members to vote as their consciences dictate...
...The leaders are misusing their power...
...And, too, there have been changes in the laws and in the attitude of society...
...The Democratic leaders, I notice, say very little about this decision of the labor men...
...He indulges in the same sly humor, uses the same high-class vocabulary as when he is addressing other folks...
...There has, obviously, been a great change...
...The fine, upstanding, proud and independent American workingman will not let any labor boss tell him how to vote...
...No matter what the occasion was or who the speakers, it seemed as if the Democrats addressed trade-union members as chums and neighbors...
...But when he marched down Detroit's Woodward Avenue on Labor Day, he was one of the CIO boys...
...The present labor movement needs to ask favors of no one...
...Adlai Stevenson has been, by his life's experience, less closely allied to working people than has the President...
...The Labor Day speeches and ceremonies brought out a strange, self-conscious awkwardness which develops among the Republicans whenever they confront organized workers...
...They needed the help of politicians and feared the attack of political enemies...
...They want everyone to be interested in politics, but not these particular people in this particular way...
...The Republicans, on the contrary, make the stereotyped remarks with which they have always greeted such actions...
...That austere scholar, Wood-row Wilson, drew crowds of union men who drank in every word...
...And when the Secretary proclaimed that Jesus Christ was a carpenter, I felt like walking out...
...They know how to present them in a more appealing way...
...And he, too, did not talk down...
...Secretary Mitchell has been close to labor as a personnel manager...
...Jefferson and Jackson were so effective in their appeal to the common people that they drove their opponents to despair...
...But when they stood up before union officials and delivered talks which were to go out to the workers of the entire nation, the whole business seemed to me to smack of insincerity...
...The fact is that Democrats know how to talk to working people better than Republicans do...
...He never talks down to working people...
...The other day, George Meany was invited over to the White House lawn to sit with the Secretaries of Labor and Agriculture while President Eisenhower dedicated a new postage stamp to labor...
...Fifteen million men are in a different position from two or three million...
...He limited himself to backing the men who were emphatically with him and attacking those who were opposed...
...Now both the President and the Secretary of Labor, who did the speaking, are exceptionally honest and straightforward men...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn How to Talk To the People As THE political campaign gets rolling, numerous observations confirm me in my opinion that there are many sharp differences between our two political parties...
...And the workers eat it up...
...Since Samuel Gompers's day, there has been a great change in the social, economic and political position of organized labor...
...So Meany, Reuther and their fellow officials feel free to take any action they consider right and wise...
...The Republicans, on the other hand, spoke to them as aliens, outsiders to whom it was necessary to be very, very nice...
...The Democratic party has been a divided party, a rowdy party, a curiously up-and-down and in-and-out party...
...In moving against this combination of labor and the Democrats, the Republicans seem to me singularly slow and awkward...
...Others- especially politicians-ask favors of it...
...It is not merely that they present more appealing programs...
...So Gompers never-except once-lined up his people with a political party...
...But it has persistently exhibited an effective knack for breaking through to the common people...
...They prefer to regard it as a natural development, something that was to be expected...
...By American standards, he comes of a rather aristocratic family...
...In his Labor Day message, George Meany made it clear that neither he nor any other union official wants to tell any member how to vote...
...Now George Meany and his AFLCIO Executive Council, representing 15 million members, have met at Unity House and backed Stevenson and the Democrats...
...The AFL-CIO will raise a couple of million dollars-nothing like the hundreds of millions in the Republican campaign chest-and will spend it compiling and publishing the records of all candidates...
...America needs, he explained, "more progressive and forward-looking government...
...Thirty or forty years ago, the few million workers who had dared to join unions were in a precarious position...
...If the Republicans defend the records of their candidates point by point, we should have a most interesting campaign...
...The unions were not organized for this purpose...
...I never have the feeling that he is trying to establish relations with someone who is alien to him...
...Then they add, rather illogically, that the action will not have any effect...
Vol. 39 • September 1956 • No. 38
