Stokes: A new GOP
By Thomas L. Stokes
With Dewey party –
Those crusty antiquarians President Roosevelt once described as “the gentlemen who sit in their well-stocked clubs” must have had something akin to morning-after jitters when they opened their newspapers and read what the newest champion of the Republican Party is telling the folks.
Governor Dewey broke cleanly with old-fashioned Republicanism in his San Francisco speech. He frankly accepted basic New Deal doctrines that the national government must concern itself actively with the welfare of the people, ready to step in with help when the highly delicate economic mechanism of today gets out of gear.
Taking this stand, he proposed – as Wendell Willkie did in 1940 – to do it better, and with careful consideration to democratic principles.
He proposed to breathe new life into this basic philosophy by substituting a fresh, vigorous administration of public affairs for what he pictures as a confused and tired administration that is carelessly letting the nation slip into totalitarianism as it gets bogged down in the tangles of bureaucracy.
It was significant that it was in San Francisco, where 12 years ago Franklin D. Roosevelt first outlined the still-vague tenets of the New Deal in his Commonwealth Club speech, that Governor Dewey moved himself up to an almost parallel position. The test henceforth would seem to be one of performance in realizing common ideals.
Expanding economy
It was also in the Commonwealth Club speech here that President Roosevelt said that America’s industrial plant was finished, that the problem thereafter was one of distribution. Governor Dewey has recalled that statement frequently and taken issue with it.
Governor Dewey thinks he has much to offer here, promising an expanding, rather than a static economy.
His break with the past is graphically revealed by excerpts from his speech.
No man can be free when he stands in constant danger of hunger… certain government measures to influence broad economic conditions are both desirable and inevitable… if at any time there are no sufficient jobs in private employment to go around, then government can and must create additional job opportunities… the savage, old cutthroat adjustments are gone for good… the prices of major farm crops must be supported against the menace of disastrous collapse… in many directions the free market which old-time economists talked about is gone… the industrial worker, however capable and energetic he may be, cannot in modern society assure himself by his own unaided efforts con tenuity of employment… even the largest industrial corporation cannot maintain employment, if the country as a whole is undergoing depression.
‘Dog-eat-dog’ is gone
Repeatedly he said the old “dog-eat-dog” economy is gone forever.
The Republican candidate’s appeal represented a desperate effort to win California and the coast states away from President Roosevelt. The President was reported well ahead today in California.
Here is the state, so favored by nature, which was hit so hard in the last depression.
Its people flocked to President Roosevelt in 1932. Here the Okies streamed across the border from the dust bowl and the worn-out cotton lands. They created a new problem.
Here, since the war, they have come in new hordes to work in the war plants which have given California a new industrial empire, of which she is proud and jealous.
But Californians, old and new, who work in the fields and the factories, are still conscious of the past. They want no more depressions. They want no more Okie camps. Their hope is in the new war industries. They want to keep them, and keep people at work.
Southern California is the haven of old folks who came here to live on incomes from farms which they had left to their children in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska and Illinois, and who suddenly found the remittances stopped. They trooped in desperation to meetings where old Doc Townsend talked about old-age pensions. New evangels promised $30 every Thursday in the not-distant past.
Governor Dewey, conscious of this, speaks tonight in Los Angeles on social security. He is leaving nothing undone.