VOTE THE SOCIALIST TICKET!
THOMAS, NORMAN
VOTE THE SOCIALIST TICKET! Vote For Plenty, Peace And Freedom! By Norman Thomas Socialist Candidate for President |1TE ARE coming to the end of the bitterest campaign in this generation. More...
...Hoover can hardly approve...
...Efficiency demands an integration of power approaching monopoly...
...Why, thai, have we heard so little about the issues that matter...
...It is part of our shame that we do not even know how **y»»««» and zvomen in this country of stock market prosperity know that most * and heart breaking sort of toil: the hunt for a job...
...To help it in its task the Socialist Party welcomes profeswnal men and women, workers on farms, in mines and in factories...
...Those monopolies which the state or nation is not ready to take over it can declare touched with public interest and partially control by representation in the directorates as on jhe Federal Reserve System today...
...The same general principle we would apply to all the commanding heights of industry: banking, transportation, and the tragic waste of coal...
...SMITH DODGES ON IMPERIALISM But Governor Smith in his mild criticism of his political opponents in Nicaragua does not promise to withdraw our marines and he keeps discreet silence about Haiti, governed by American marines under a constitution forced on it by American bayonets, a constitution writien'bythe Governor's friend and nominator, Franklin D. Rooseveltr when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy...
...The law of the jungle is natural to a country where one per cent of the people own one-third of the wealth...
...Various laws might increase our civil liberties...
...They fight only for cfFce...
...Candidates can dodge the woprition of Russia, the question of German reparations and inter-allied debts, «r relations to China and Japan, the World Court and the League of Nations...
...THE MASTERS OF . CREDIT, THE OWNERS OF COAL, IRON, OIL AND COPPER...
...Surely it is not necessary ten years after the tragedy of t World War which made the world safe neither for democracy nor peace to point out that we shall not win peace by a formula or by a pious pledge...
...Our Socialist contention is that unless in our economically independent world we can substitute friendly coooperation between all nations, great and small, in place of the jealousies of rival exploiters, and the hates of the exploited, no outlawry of war and no formula for peace can save us from the abyss of war to which imperialism has always led since ancient prophets pronounced the doom of God upon Assyrian .and Egyptian conquerors...
...Socialist Party in the platform has analysed the cause *of these evils and •"•*» the way to their cure...
...tmJL ^ ^atcf"nas> have trenchantly pointed out...
...Probably there are at *f0Ur million or one in every 5 or 6 of the workers...
...As for president Coolidge, his appointment of Insult's man, West, for Secretary of the Interior where he will pass on nine'applications from companies in which he is interested is a brazen affront to decency of which even the politically docile Mr...
...THE POLITICIANS ARE THE EXPERTS ^ IN THE SERVICE OF LANDLORDS...
...The last is the necessary and _W remedy for what has been called 'technological unemployment,' that is, untff?_P'menl due to increased efficiency in the use of machinery...
...There is law enough to deal with violence...
...on a program of taxation, peace and the control of our basic industries...
...Has of the Monday night hook-up was decided upon, according to Socialist Imadquarter*, as a result of the great rmpsnsr reeoWed from aB parts mt the...
...They must be publicly owned and managed under non-partsian authorities representing consumers and producers...
...We have a right to knmv in some detail the postFor Plenty, Peace And Freedom ^ORMAN THOMAS, Socialist candidate for President, made his camP*tgn on the key-note demand of "plenty, peace and freedom...
...The Socialist Party demands an end of a judicial autocracy in the interests of the bosses through the use of injunctions...
...Only the Socialists undcr. stand that to be for peace is to be against imperialism » 7™ Coolidge's infamous war in Nicaragua, like Wilson's infamous xvars in Ua*^ond Santo Domingo are illustrations...
...INDEED THIS INTERFERENCE OF COURTS WHO ARE MAKING A BAD JOB OF THEIR OWN LEGITIMATE BUSINESS AND YET READ HERBERT SPENCER AND THEIR OWN CAPITALIST PREJUDICES INTO OUR CONSTITUTION IS SOMETHING WE CANNOT AFFORD TO TOLERATE IF WE WANT TO MAKE PROGRESS IN MANAGING OUR OWN BUSINESS...
...The stations which wffl carry his address will include j WJZ—New York WHAM—Rochester KYW Chicago WBZA—Boston KDKA—Pittsburgh KWK—St...
...The lobby has somewhat overreached itself, yet its power was so great that in the last session of Congress the Democratic candidate for Vice President had a batting average of 666 in its favor...
...They will be thinking and dividing on rum...
...Statestanship in search of peace must deal with international disarmament, with the jingoism of our own big navy men, the militarizing of our youth in state universes...
...Under it the national power of strong nations is put at the disposal of a favored investing class in dealing with weak nations...
...He has not brought about proper regulation of public utilities by bis Public Service or Transit Commission...
...It is announced by the Socialist National Campaign Committee that Thomas will apeak over a hook-up of eleven stations of the "bine chain** of the National Broadcasting Company nesft Monday evening, November 5. Thomas will apeak for a half hour from 8x50 to 9:00 P. from dm studio of WJZ in New York City...
...TO MEET UNEMPLOYMENT I have repeatedly said that by a combination of unemployment insurance, the five day week, public works in dull times and a nationwide employment system the evils of unemployment can be greatly mitigated, old age pensions can relieve that one-third of our population 65 years of age and upwards now wholly or partially dependent on the bitter bread of charity...
...As a great creditor nation America has become a leading imperial power, particularly with relation to Latin America...
...State regulation has almost completely broken down...
...THAT IS, REPRODUCTION COSTS, STILL FURTHER TIE THE HANDS OF THE COMMISSIONS...
...The next administration cannot...
...We can succeed if we will...
...It is a party of Americans Staking tD Americans not alone about American problems but about the probfass of fellowship in a world where we are all dependent one upon the other...
...Maurice Scharff, a consulting engineer and leading authority in tins field, in the Septan] issue of the conservative Atlantic Monthly, actually describes how utilities throe the pyramiding of control by holding companies, big payments to inside bank for underwriting and to holding companies nominally for supervision and « gineering services, regularly beat the game at our expense...
...THERE IS NO REAL DIFFERENCE IN PRINCIPLE BETWEEN THEM...
...Proper valuation and proper plans of amortizing bonds plus proper taxation of incomes, inheritances and land values will solve the financial problem of acquiring these basic industries...
...They can retard or advance industrial developments, make life harder or easier on the farms and for the housewives in the homes of the nation...
...But what will they vote for ? For principles or prejudices...
...Both old parties and their candidates have been compelled to give lip service to the demand for reform in injuction procedure...
...We shall have to learn by experience beginning by taking over theind us tries where the situation is worst The unions of the workers must be recognized and they must have a voice in administration...
...Governor Smith, better than his platform, denounces Republican imperialism exemplified in our ignoble Nicaraguan war...
...But I do not speak for such indirect immediate results...
...And only the Socialist Party has spoken clearly on the baste question of imperialism...
...Thus is democracy mocked and the election reduced to a decision between Tweedledum and Tweedledee...
...That question is at the heart of imperialism...
...Only the Socialist Party and its caKu.uatcs hate sought to speak plainly on them...
...THE GREAT ISSUE—TO REBUILD A PARTY One essential instrument in this or shay program of peace, freedom and plenty is a political party organized in cities, states and nation...
...There isn't much quarrel as to the facts...
...No denunciation can be to severe for the hypocrisy of a nation which hunts a patriot as a bandit in Nicaraguan jungles while rival bandit gangs of its two principal cities—New York and Chicago—carry on unchecked a private vendetta...
...THE BREAKDOWN OF REGULATION I have so often and so carefully examined the Republican and 'Democratic programs on Muscle Shoals and Boulder Dam that I do not need to repeat my comment here...
...Yet one of the beneficiaries of the system which makes this possible wrote me recently rebuking me for an appeal I had sent for the textile workers of New Bedford striking against a reduction of wages to an average of a little over $17 a week...
...Wage Ot» snd injunctions are no respecters of Catholics, Jews or Protestants...
...THE ISSUE OF FREEDOM We who must answer to our children for the wars we have not sought to avert must also answer to them for what share of freedom we bequeathed them...
...But we propose specific imUsJ°'c rc"i("'ies, among them: (1) A proper record of the'unemployed, (2) a r*°n~vnde system of public, non-profit making employment exchanges, (3) a g^** a,'d carefully planned program of public works in dull times, (4) unem?^"*n/ insurance, and (5) the five day week...
...Beyond j^KMing public works in dull times the old parties say nothing...
...on a program to cut from out our body politic the cancer of unrelieved uemplovment...
...Indeed his own Public Service Commission, of which that arch politician, George VanNamee, campaign manager for both Smith nod Roossvtlt is a member, baa boas a chief sinner m favosax cor-* porations at public expense...
...Neither party discusses civil liberty] or what is the **mtn our courts, or the tragic failure of our country to give justice to the ^•especially if the poor arc also workers, strikers, radicals, aliens or negroes...
...He had no party and no program to save him and us...
...Indeed, in our national Bureau of Standards engineers do work for society with invaluable results...
...There is no reason why engineers should not work for society as they now work for absentee owners...
...The future of our machine society depends on our capacity thus to control it for use, not private profit...
...ISSUES THAT MATTER Hanger, cold, poverty, oppression and war do not ask us' religion...
...We want the whole great super power system managed by a coordinated network of public authorities, municipal, state and national...
...It is as the kttrument of these workers with hand and brain in making government their mvimt in the pursuit of plenty, peace and freedom that the Socialist Party finds it justification...
...In an effort to block federal interference in this situation the power companies formed the most cynical lobby of our history which has bribed the press with advertising, endowed college chairs for the purpose, invaded clubs, churches and schools, and hired prominent politicians to do its bidding...
...Obviously, inletting the under dog pay as he has paid in all former generations, social "* thc use of machinery, we should pass around the advantages of mmHon of parties and candidates on all these issues...
...I do not say the task will be easy or win not require an informed and intelli gent will...
...A conservative statement of excess charges is about half a billion dollars a year in the United States...
...Seventeen dollars a week, he argued, was a handsome wage if only enough of the family could work...
...Basically we believe that the menace to peace and the denial of liberty are natural to the crazy system under which a small minority of the people own property which fs the gift of God to men or the result of their collective toil, and manage that property not for the use of the people but for their own profit...
...But basically freedom, justice and plenty depend upon our collective ability to own and manage for ourselves the property necessary to our common life...
...3. Plenty— Hoovcr recently repeated his demonstrably false i ' estimate of the number of unemployed in America which P**s around 1,800.000...
...HE MIGHT HAVE ADDED THAT RECENT COURT DECISIONS ARBITRARILY FIXING A NON-CONFISCATORY RETURN AT 8% ON INFLATED...
...Particularly should the voters demand an unequivocal answer to this question: Will you under any circumstances use national arms to collect private debts due to American investors...
...speak of a party to plan and fight not for a campaign but in a crusade to control our fast developing machinery and technical skill so as to win beauty for ugliness, plenty for poverty and waste, freedom for the tyranny of fear, peace and life for the menace of war and death...
...Duponts and General Motors through their officials give equally to both'parties...
...Day...
...THEY FIGHT FOR PATRONAGE...
...Both old parties today belong to the interests which finance them...
...Will they vote out of reasoned conviction on the way in which government my serve plenty, peace and freedom or will they give a blank check to some canjfeteand some party to fill in...
...But there is no other way out of the wastes and autocracy of private exploitation...
...History in Europe and America is full of such triumphs...
...Whoever loses they win...
...Even while we are in a minority we can compel from the victors concessions greater than they would give from favor...
...race and religion whereas they ought to be thinking and uniting on a program to bring the onfort of justice to that one-third of our aged who now taste the bitter bread •(charity...
...Woodrow Wilson, whom we elected to keep us out of war, got us in as surely as Hughes would have done...
...We have recently learnd that a man who in 1908 invested $10,000 in General Motors—Raskob's company—would today hold stock worth about $1,600,000 besides having drawn dividends of $292,000...
...Does it not follow, therefore, that the one political tosh that matters is Ut build our party, the party of workers with hands and brain wherever honest work is done...
...TO REORGANIZE INDUSTRY Now we Socialists are positive on water power in particular and public utilities in general...
...No country is free where there is one justice for the rich and another for the poor...
...We want to keep the power of Muscle Shoals and Boulder Dam in public control only as a beginning...
...The Democrats profess to believe that "capital, labor and the bar" will work,out a solution—which will happen when sheep agree with the butcher on the laws of the slaughter "house...
...They have not ¦ drawn a proper bill for using public works to the best advantage for the rep of unemployment as those conservative students of the situation, Messrs...
...Here is the u<ay he has put it: \ 1. PcjCC Every party sings its praise...
...To tell the-truth, the whole business of regulating utilities has been too mt for our commissions, for reasons hugely beyond their control...
...IT IS THE PRINCIPAL FUNCTION OF OUR POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS TO KEEP THE . VOTERS DIVERTED FROM THE REAL ISSUES...
...Governor Smith is to be judged in this matter not only by his words but by his record in the state...
...with the machinery not only for adjusting international disputes but for fflotive cooperation among interdependent nations...
...IT IS THEIR FUNCTION TO THROW TO THE PEOPLE ENOUGH BONES TO KEEP THEM QUIET SO THAT THEY * WILL NOT ASK FOR A SEAT AT THE HIGH BANQUET TABLE OF THE RICH AND MIGHTY...
...Minority parties got America her public schools, minority parties forced the pace in every bit of social legislation...
...We Socialists see in unJ*^"' a characteristic disease of capitalism...
...More men and women will vote than ever before...
...No country is free where Mooney and Billings and the Centralia victims are still held in jail...
...Whoever owns that power has a control over our lives kings and emperors might have envied...
...Take the electric power monopoly, for example...
...In eight years that happy warrior, Gov...
...Louis WBZ—Springfield WJR—Detroit WREN—Kansas /3ty WBAL—Baltimore WLW—Gnehmad This will be the third large hook-up over which Thomas has spoken and will conclude the most elaborate radio eampetgn the Socialist Party has been able to stage since the inception of radio broadcasting...
...Harry Sinclair and his fellow oil men milked both the government and their own stockholders, but it was the government, not the stockholders which discovered the fraud, What Ontario is doing with power—to say nothing of many American municipalities— what Canada is doing with her national railways, what we are doing with die Panama Canal, roads, schools and bridges, we can do with basic industries...
...Five companies already own 50 per cent of the power of America...
...In what we call normal ^* one in every 9 or 10 is in the sorrmvful army of the unemployed...
...None of these have the old parties advocated...
...But not even this horrible discrepancy in income is more serious than the consequences of it in terms of peace and freedom and fellowship...
...No country is free where the workers in their industrial struggles are restrained by injections which leave titcm no recourse but private Prayer to win their victories...
...The average domestic consumer pays five to seven cents per kilowatt hour in the Unied States as against a little less than 2 cents in Ontario, wliere power is publicly owned, developed and distributed...
...Into this situation comes the Socialist Party...
...The Standard Ooil Company of New York haS distributed in stock dividends $220,000,000 since 1920...
...A blank check which conceivably may be hon0tdm the bhod of our citizens if the foreign policy of the next administration jjtlt set us further on the road to war...
...For a political Messiah or their own party...
...OBVIOUSLY IT IS BECAUSE BOTH PARTIES BELONG TO THE SAME INTERESTS...
...The tragedy is that so many voters will go to the polls without asking themlebcs these questions...
...He did prevent the St Lawrence water power graft...
...Our Socialist answer to it is an abosolue NO...
...on a program of more equal justice for rich and poor, white man ad Negro...
...In the interest of an elemental regard for democracy every presidential candidate and every party should state its position on imperialism...
...2» Freedom^JBoth parties talk pious nonsense about injunctions...
...a nation which never has an honest election in New York City under the "new" Tammany or in Philadelphia under the Vare machine, but yet spends our money and sheds the blood of our sons and brothers nominally to guarantee an honest count in Nicaragua, but really to make Wall Street's investments safe...
...From this situation no candidate can save us, neither Hoover, the engineer, with his bad company, or Smith, the liberal administrator, with his friends of Tammany Hall and Wall Street and the motley company of Southern Bourbon politicians and Northern bosses like the notorious Hague of Jersey City...
...Government need not be corrrupt Even today it is often less corrupt than private corporations...
...Smith, has done nothing effective on this subject in New York...
...It krpnrty with a conception of history and "a vision for the future which it hopes to attain by no fantastic program of dividing up but rather by a wise program of aoperative action...
...Thomas Speaks On 11 Station Hookup Monday NORMAN THOMAS, Socialist candidate for President, wfO go ost die air for a final radio hook-op address on the very eve of Election...
...And as such an instrument it has waged this educational camTHE ISSUE OF PEACE I begin with peace...
Vol. 7 • November 1928 • No. 46
