Coloradoan splits with Roosevelt
Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
Democratic Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado formally parted company with President Roosevelt last night in a speech at North Park College in which he charged that:
History will name the fourth term, if it ever materializes, as “the term of defeat and frustration.”
In recent months, an increasingly open critic of the administration, Mr. Johnson said “the greatest tragedy of American history was the President’s decision four years ago to seek a third term.”
He said:
It launched the 1940 campaign by appeasing the internationalists with the appointment of two old-line Republicans [Frank Knox and Henry L. Stimson] as Secretaries of Navy and War. It appeased the nationalists by assuring them “again and again” that no mother’s son would “be sent to fight in a foreign war.”
The New Deal appeased Japan, he said, by selling her all the war material she could pay for.
It appeased China, with money and credit and, after the election, appeased Britain by going to war. It has been appeasing everyone everywhere ever since with Lend-Lease at a cost to the American taxpayers of billions. It appeased Russia by junking the Atlantic Charter. It appeased John L. Lewis, the railroad brotherhoods, at the back door of the White House, after scornfully turning them down at the front door with the beating of drums.
Senator Johnson said that “one-man control” has reduced the Democratic Party to hopeless impotency.