A ROOM OF OUR OWN

...The fair-weather liberals, of course, those who shed their convictions for the sake of riding the bandwagon, cannot be counted on...

...I explained to him that a party is made up of thousands of individuals and scores of leaders...

...This was confirmed in a surprising way last Spring when many life-long Progressives told me they were voting for Gov...

...You didn't expect anything like that, did you...

...that you may not carry your point at the moment but the very fact that you speak up is of inestimable encouragement to others...

...It has been obvious for some time that the Progressive Party, like all other political movements, has been in an extremely difficult position during the war...

...I have always remembered his concluding remark, "Old Charlie Crownhart used to say that the political trend started many months before an election, and that all a party can do is to assist it...

...While a substantial number take the position expressed by Sen...

...Many of these will be out for the general election in November, and countless thousands of them, of course, will cast their votes in the Progressive column...

...Also there are many factors including the status of the war which are bound to play their part in the November election...

...It was at the time of the Spring election when delegates for the Presidential conventions were selected, but with my political ignorance I could not understand why Phil was so eager to reach Charleston and the papers giving the returns...

...Reading the results changed his holiday mood to one of absorbed reflection from which I could not shake him, and after some prodding on my part, he finally diagrammed for me the meaning of the returns...

...We are adherents of the Lincoln political strategy, with its underlying philosophy, that the best course is to take your position, fight it out before the people, and wait for time and events to catch up with you...

...Obviously most of these avoided the dilemma by staying at home on our Primary day...

...I told him of my own difficulty, for example, when I had lost faith in the President sooner than the majority of the Progressives, that I continued to campaign as always for the state ticket up to the pre-Pearl Harbor days when it was clearly indicated to me by those bent on garnering votes wherever possible by avoiding controversial issues that my efforts were an embarassment to them...

...Our party has never run very strongly in the primary elections, but in November, when the real test is on,-our Progressive-minded men and women do respond with great courage and devotion to the challenge before them...

...The wheel does turn...

...Between these two poles are the hundreds of thousands of voters who "shop around" at each election, the ones who tell you today that "I won't vote for Roosevelt and I can't vote for Dewey...

...We see on every side people who want to get elected merely for the sake of holding public office with its prestige and power...

...Was there ever such confusion...

...The Wisconsin primary returns may not forecast which candidate will be elected President, since Wisconsin is a nominally Republican state in national elections...

...that his Uncle Bob and those of us who take the long-time view cannot force our opinions on other individuals whom events alone can teach...

...that an issue like the war split all parties down the middle, just as the last war split the Progressive Republicans in his grandfather's time...

...A period like this is made to order for such individuals who seize upon the general eon-fusion to be all things to all people and avoid real issues like the plague...

...The remnants of idealism left in the Democratic Party can be matched by courageous groups who recognize that the present Democratic leadership will not meet the issues that lie ahead and who are awaiting the moment when they can again forge forward...

...Bob, Jr., and The Progressive, others genuinely adhere to the remnants of the New Deal...

...Voters Are 'Shopping Around' The Presidential primary election this past Spring pointed the way to what we may expect in the months ahead...

...The Wheel Turns And so, I pointed out to Bob, since the center of attention is focussed on the Presidential fight where again there is no clarity of issues except the ancient cry of throwing the ins out and the outs in, what else could be expected of the primary elections...

...A leading daily in the state, formerly Progressive, is also shopping around, and appears now to be supporting Roosevelt for President, the 82-year-old anti-Roosevelt Republican incumbent for Governor, and a Democrat for the Senate...

...Dewey in our Presidential primaries, not because he represented their progressive ideals, but because he represented what they thought was the best hope to beat the man who had betrayed their ideals...

...A Time Of Confusion When ex-Mayor Dan Hoan, who won national repute as head of the Socialist city of Milwaukee and who left the Socialist Party for the Progressive Party, and is now running for Governor on the Democratic ticket, said as he did in the pre-primary campaign that he had given up hope of the possibilities of a third party, you have an inkling of the problem facing the sincere liberal voter in this state...

...Although I appreciated the difficulty of trying to get over to an 18-year-old with youth's black-and-white standards the vagaries and discrepancies of human nature, I sat down and tried to outline my political analysis of the Wisconsin primary election returns something as follows: In the Spring of 1932, when Phil was in his first term as Governor (elected then on the Republican ticket as his father had been during the years) we took a little coastwise cruise from New York down to Jacksonville and return...

...I observed to our boy that his father's analysis of our country's problems has been borne out day by day, that our effort to provide a spearhead through the National Progressives of America had been well worth while in focusing attention on the fundamental basis of American democracy—fighting for what you believe to be right...

...The problem for the political idealist, as I see it, comes at the point where theory and practice converge...

...What was obvious in the Spring and still more obvious now is the reaction against the national Administration...

...That is why I sympathized with our son Bob's political agonies and his normal reaction, "Are we going to take this lying down ? Why don't we do something about it...

...I know it is cold comfort to the young (and I am not yet so old myself that my head can completely subjugate my emotions !) to observe the slow evolution of one's prognostications...