I Vote for Roosevelt

IT is revealing to dissect one’s political conclusions and try to see what really underlies them. To do so, however, it is necessary to write of oneself and eschew those generalities in which political campaigns abound. Otherwise a species of self-delusion takes place. For in the glare of the political klieg lights we tend to loom large, and to think that we are much wiser than we really are. We know how well or how ill the National Labor Relations Act has been administered, just how much WPA has softened American manhood, and we can calculate the extensive capital outlays and the increased employment that we should have had, had it not been for the SEC or the TVA. It is only when these lights have faded and we are quietly alone that we know how little we really know of all these things. But that little knowledge is all that stays with us in the isolation of the polling booth, there to govern the simple way in which we pledge our faiths.

My reasons for voting for Roosevelt for the third time cannot be complex. I cannot disentangle all the charges and counter-charges that to date have been made, far less read more than hastily the major speeches that have been delivered. But I have heard enough and read enough to know what to me are the things that matter. I would divide them under three heads — the field of foreign policy, matters pertinent to defense, and the domestic scene.

My belief that foreign policy would be an issue of the 1940 campaign was formed shortly after Munich. Of course, I knew that Europe mattered before that. But Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, even loyalist Spain — the electrolysis of those events failed to leave any appreciable deposit upon my or the nation’s cathodes. If I am honest with myself, I must admit to annoyance over the President’s quarantine speech in Chicago, his suggestion that the forces gathering abroad were brutal and antirational and that we held a responsibility to check them ‘short of war.’ But that was before Munich, before the morning when there were tears in my eyes as I read the President’s personal appeal to Hitler for justice and for peace. And when Munich ended as it did, I think I knew then that we as a nation had to have a foreign policy.

Here I found the President far ahead of me — ahead, too, of his advisers and his Congress. And since then it is he who has led and we who have followed.

I like the things that he has done, the building up of a spirit of hemispherical unity, the way in which he has told us plainly of the nature of the moves that Hitler has made, the encouragement by words and now by deeds that he has given men who are fighting for the right to live as we do. I have watched him do this almost alone, with hardly an important voice in the Congress to back him up, and I admire him for it.

But what of Mr. Willkie? The voice is certainly that of Jacob, even though here and there it quavers just a little. As an American, I am still proud of the President’s message to Queen Wilhelmina, his encouragement of the wavering French, his bold characterization of Mussolini for what he is. Yet Mr. Willkie seems to tell me we should have spoken softly in these matters or not at all. I am afraid that if we must stifle our feelings because we have no guns, we have only those feelings we can stifle because we have no guns.

But I fear Mr. Willkie less in these matters than his party. That party, of course, contains many men who think as he does, and maybe enough to let him do what he will wish to do. But I must remember that a Congress of his party would make Hiram Johnson the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and would bring to the head of the corresponding House Committee Hamilton Fish. In the Senate its leaders would be Taft, Vandenberg, and McNary. I should not like our foreign policy to be shaped by these men. Perhaps President Willkie could prevent that, but Candidate Willkie, the leader of his party, tried hard but succeeded poorly in affecting the views of men such as these on the Selective Service Act. That act was easy to pass, but there are others that may be more difficult.

In matters of defense I know that we are woefully laggard. We have too few planes and tanks and battleships, too many only ‘on order.’ I did not care for that phrase then; I do not care for it now. But if these things are only ‘on order,’ is this the President’s fault? I think we must be honest and admit, rather, that the fault is ours. The task is thus one not of apportioning blame for the past but of looking to the future. If enough of these weapons are now being made as fast as we can make them, I can have no quarrel. To test that ‘if,’

I think it better to turn to the men who know rather than to try to play with statistics. Mr. Knudsen, of whom no one yet has spoken with disrespect, has said things in this connection that seem to me important. The first is that the tuningup process is going as fast as he can make it go. The second is that industry is cooperating fully in that program. The third is that the President has backed him and his fellow Commissioners at every turn.

I cannot ask more than that. If Mr. Knudsen is right — and I think he is the kind of man who says what he thinks — I am satisfied not to try to change things at the top. Mr. Knudsen will change them at the bottom.

But for defense one needs, besides guns, a general spirit of trust in the man at the top. I am sorry that Mr. Roosevelt has made so many men in Wall and LaSalle and State Streets hate him. But if war comes, these are not the men who will fight that war. The men who will fight that war will be the few young men who graduated from college between 1926 and 1940 and the many young men who never had that chance. These are the men that found the jobless world of the thirties their reward for growing up. These men do not hate Roosevelt; rather they know he fought for them all that time. If they held a hate of Willkie in the way in which the bankers hold a hate of Roosevelt, arms would be useless and the defense of America would be over before it was begun. The unity of these men is what counts, in the factory, on the farm, and in the field. I know that Mr. Roosevelt understands them and that they will follow him; I can only hope that the same is true of Mr. Willkie. I know that Mr. Roosevelt could tell them, if that time should come, that they now must work long hours and they would believe him; I can only hope that they would believe Mr. Willkie. And just now I do not want to gamble on mere hopes.

It is hard to find specific issues in the domestic scene. I happen generally to be in favor of the New Deal program — its protection of collective bargaining, its emphasis on relief to the unemployed, social security, and wage-hour legislation, its encouragement of agriculture, its regulation of stock exchanges, public utility holding companies, and investment trusts. If I did not favor that program, I should not know where to turn, for Mr. Willkie has endorsed it. Yet the men I know who do not like that program are going to vote for Mr. Willkie. And why, I ask? Is it because somehow the administration of these measures may have a different emphasis than it does now, making, for example, of the National Labor Relations Board and the Securities Exchange Commission the kind of ineffective agency that the Federal Trade Commission became under Harding and Coolidge? Or is it that they really do not believe Mr. Willkie when he says that he endorses that program? I think that these men have hopes that both these things are true, and I must confess that I have my suspicions. It is hard for me to believe that Mr. Willkie is really for federal regulation of the public utility holding companies when he led the fight against the act that brought about that result. It did not seem to me that it was merely details that he objected to when he refused again and again at my pleading to withdraw the suit that his company, the Commonwealth and Southern, had brought to challenge the constitutionality, not of a provision of that act, but of the right of the Federal Government to deal at all with these power companies. It took the Supreme Court to convince him that he now can dare to be right.

I had something to do with other bits of that program. Of course, we were wrong at times, but, according to Mr. Willkie now, generally right. But he never said so then. He was on the other side when it took some courage and some faith to buck the Street. Had he been on Pennsylvania Avenue in those days, there would hardly have been a Bonneville, a TVA, and, perhaps, not even a National Labor Relations Board. That seems quite clear to me, and I think it is also very clear to those who then opposed and still oppose these things and now find it wise to vote for Mr. Willkie.

We talk much of administration these days, and I do not wish to decry its importance. But I wonder if Lincoln was a good administrator in the sense in which that term is now being used. I do not believe that Jackson was, and yet I think of him as a great President. Behind true administration lie ideas and a spirit. Behind Stanton was Lincoln; behind Stimson is Roosevelt — but, with due respect to Mr. Stimson, Mr. Roosevelt is the more important man.

Nor does the third term frighten me, for I know it comes only as a result of my vote. I know, of course, that Jefferson said some harsh things about it, but I have read much in Jefferson and found him saying things mostly good, sometimes not so good, and sometimes bad. That other men, even political parties, have echoed them fails to make them true. For my part, I distrust generalizations;

I would rather pin my faith on men.