Clapper: Roosevelt message
By Raymond Clapper
Washington –
Not since the honeymoon 10 years ago had President Roosevelt had such favorable circumstances then and now are quite different.
Ten years ago, the country was flat on its back, confidence had been lost in all leaders, and Mr. Roosevelt stepped into the vacuum and carried the country and a huge Congressional majority with him.
This time, Mr. Roosevelt deals with a Congress that is against him all but in name – or it thinks it is. It is against the New Deal – the name and the bungling, screwball excesses, boondoggling and sloppy government that are popularly associated with the New Deal.
The Congress may not be as much against the ideas for which the New Deal label originally stood as it is against the name and the barnacles that have grown on in these years, of which there are a lot because there hasn’t been a scraping in the whole 10 years. That’s one thing Mr. Roosevelt was too soft and too busy to attend to.
Mr. Roosevelt began with this Congress by talking in a conciliatory, moderate tone. He conceded mistakes, and somehow that went over as an unexpected novelty. Mr. Roosevelt also made some time with Congress by giving as little birthday surprise party for Speaker Rayburn to which a number of Congressmen, including some Republican and Democratic hardshells, were asked. Such little friendly social occasions may become more frequent now.
Jimmy Byrnes sits with ‘the boys’
The President will also make full use of James F. Byrnes, his Director of Economic Stabilization. Jimmy, former member of the House and former Senator, was up in congress when the President delivered his message. But was Jimmy at the President’s elbow to show his old Congressional cronies how close he was to the big boos? No, sirree!
Smart Jimmy was sitting way back there with the run-of-the-mine Democrats where he used to sit as a young Congressman. He sat back with the boys, just the same old Jimmy. Hadn’t changed a bit. From Tommy Corcoran to Jimmy Byrnes – that’s the cycle of White House liaison with Congress. It tells the story of the transition from the old days of sending up “must” bills to these new days of sending up “data” for Congress to study.
About the real things for which the Roosevelt administration took up the battle in the early days – as against the outside trimmings – I don’t think Mr. Roosevelt is compromising. I don’t think they are going to be wiped out. This Congress, and the country, are fed up on a lot of things. But when Mr. Roosevelt says we must fix it so that seven or eight million soldiers and sailors come back to jobs and not to selling apples on the street corners, they are not going to turn him down. Responsibility will sober the Republicans.
Social objectives of honest government
Industrial changes bring political changes. Just as the airplane has changed military conditions so that isolation is impossible for us, so economic and industrial changes bring new policies. Industrial and agricultural capacity have been multiplied so that society cannot justify permitting men to remain idle and hungry if they want work.
After all, it is all part of the long climb of humanity up the hill. As President Roosevelt said at a press conference in 1935, the social objective of any honest government in any country is:
…to try to increase the security and the happiness of a larger number of people in all occupations; to give them more of the good things of life, to give them greater distribution not only of wealth in the narrow terms, but of wealth in the wider terms… to give them assurance that they are not going to starve in their old age; to give honest business a chance to go ahead and make a reasonable profit, and to give everyone a chance to earn a living.
Mr. Roosevelt said that, offhand, when a visiting Canadian journalist asked him what the social objective of the administration was. It is a sound objective that members of both parties can follow – and probably will follow. Sacrifices in this war make such objectives imperative after the war.