THE FORGOTTEN FILES
Meyer, Ernest L.
The Forgotten Files By ERNEST L MEYER IN HIS recent swing around the circuit, Thomas E. Dewey came up with some really remarkable remarks. He said that the Administration doesn't want quick...
...A Mighty Fine Thing' Look tThrough the forgotten newspaper fftes of Hie years of the great collapse to get a hint of the depth of our degradation...
...In West Virginia, according to the United States Children's Bureau, hundreds of miners' children who had no clothes and no protection from the rigors of the Winter have been issued discarded flour sacks...
...In Chicago, 10,000 hunger marchers paraded through the Loop streets and presented to Mayor Cermak demands for an increase in*relief funds...
...In Athens, Greece, Samuel Insull, wanted in Illinois in Connection with the crash of his utility empire, in which investors lost millions of dollars, played golf...
...It gave them the chance to do their own thinking and made them self-reliant...
...These are a few of the incredible items in the dusty files...
...It proves that the Hoover do-nothing formula ended in economic bankruptcy...
...He also said that President Roosevelt, after taking office in 1933, was guilty of prolonging the depression, thus inferring that if the Republicans had been kept in office Americans would have waded knee-deep in milk and honey...
...From a host of sermons and speeches on Thanksgiving Day, 1932,1 extract a few to illustrate the sickly Polly-anna philosophy of the hour...
...The marchers braved the cold and the rain to walk in the parade...
...Inez Carrell drowned her three children and attempted suicide...
...Carrell, an unemployed widow, suffered the loss of her entire savings in the security market crash, chiefly in the collapse of the Insull investment stocks...
...We do not dispute that...
...Self-reliant—on the bread line...
...This cold statistical comparison alone nails the fallacies and foolishness of the line that Mr...
...6,1932, President Hoover said: "The acute phases of the crisis have obviously passed...
...The comparison, as everybody knows, in the matter of unemployment, bank failures, stock market panics, utility swindles, hunger marchers, and "Hoover Towns," proves the real miracles achieved in the dynamic days of the early New Deal...
...In his message to the opening of Congress, Dec...
...Ormal Leroy Miller said: "We may be thankful for the depression, because no longer are people worrying about and striving to attain false financial standards as they did before the economic structure was upset...
...It-would be well if he would say candidly: "In his first two or three years, Mr...
...A mighty fine thing...
...Take, for example, the month of November, 1932, with the depression at its nadir, and hungry millions looking forward to a bleak Winter...
...He said that the Administration doesn't want quick demobilization after the war is ended but wants to keep the boys in the Army because it is cheaper than keeping them on the dole...
...Roosevelt accomplished miracles...
...It would be well if Candidate Dewey scanned them before reiterating his preposterous charge that the New Deal prolonged the depression...
...Thus our bootstrap-lifters put a halo on a holocaust...
...no honest or informed person will swallow his thesis that the GOP could have salvaged the nation in 1932 when Hoover told Congress all's well, and the children of miners were issued Winter clothing of flour sacks, and a poet laureate went about crowing that the depression was a fine thing for our youth...
...But we today ask these questions—has the New Deal wearied of domestic reform, is it selling out to reactionaries, is it compromising with Southern Bourbons to save the election, is it playing more and more into the hands of the elements which in the early days the New Deal denounced ?" If Candidate Dewey asked these questions, there are many people who would listen...
...In a sermon at the University Methodist Church, in Madison, Wis., the Rev...
...At Charleston, 111., Mrs...
...Brave voices of revolt were speaking out, true, but scan the forgotten files and you will find that the "best" people and the "best" papers were sunk in a moral bog...
...And a few days later, harking to the same theme, Edgar A. Guest, American "poet-laureate," happily told an audience in Milwaukee: "The depression has been a mighty fine thing for the boys and girls...
...AH that they needed to do was summarize, statistically, the state of the nation from 1929 through 1932 and the state of the nation during the first years of Roosevelt's regime...
...At Beloit, Wis., the students cancelled their annual homecoming bonfire so that the poor might have some fuel...
...What the figures fail to show is that the soul of the nation was also beaten and bankrupt and low in the dust...
...And why not, when they were led by the Great Engineer himself...
...And shortly before the President spoke, these, among other things, occurred in this brave land of ours: "At Peoria, 111., the Kiwanis club voted to donate the salad course of each luncheon throughout the Winter to the relief of Peoria's jobless...
...What Dewey Might Say Even while he was speaking, the Capitol was heavily guarded, because on the day before an army of 2,500 hunger marchers descended on Washington and were bottled up by bluecoats on the outskirts where they stood, cold and shivering, all night long...
...And on the same day, speaking in London, omr Ambassador Andrew W. Mellon told a Thanksgiviag dinner of the American Society that we must giro thanks because despite "a deflation in values and a reduction in wages and commodity prices without precedent in the history of the world," Americans have "adhered to the orderly processes of government...
...Dewey is currently peddling...
...Candidate Dewey's fantasies have, of course, already been answered by the Democrats...
Vol. 8 • October 1944 • No. 40
