Old technique employed again by Roosevelt
Strategy of satire and ridicule in speech recalls his addresses made in 1940
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
President Roosevelt’s first avowedly political speech of 1944 gave every indication – in subject matter, technique and tone, in use of satire and ridicule – of a campaign strategy cut from the same cloth as that with which he beat Wendell Willkie in 1940.
It was rated widely here as one of the President’s best political speeches. But observers who placed parts of it against the half-dozen campaign speeches of four years ago came up with “this is where I came in.”
The President’s springboard for the fourth-term campaign is the same he used in 1940. He said then he would have no time or inclination to engage “in any purely political debate,” but that he would “never be loath to call the attention of the nation to deliberate or unwitting falsifications of fact.” He said just about that this year.
Four years ago recalled
In his opening campaign speech at Philadelphia four years ago, he said:
Certain techniques of propaganda, created and developed in dictator countries, have been imported into this campaign. It is the very simple technique of repeating and repealing and repeating falsehoods, with the idea that by constant repetition and reiteration, with no contradiction, the misstatements will finally come to be believed.
Talking Saturday night, he said:
The opposition in this year has already imported into this campaign a technique invented by the dictators abroad… According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one, for its very fantastic nature will make it more credible – if only you keep repeating it over and over again.
Record cited
Mr. Roosevelt will not let the Republicans forget – nor did he in 1940 that his administration came to power after three and a half years of depression, overcame a bank crisis, began taking steps to put people back to work, and went on to institute programs of social security, collective bargaining, bank deposit guarantees, stock market reform and wage-and-hour laws.
Campaigning four years ago, Mr. Roosevelt commented that now the Republican leaders were all for such progressive measures, and “believe in them so much they will never be happy until they can clasp them to their own chests and put their own brand upon them.”
Saturday night, he cited the Republican Party platform’s acceptance of such reforms and remarked that many Republicans “would not even recognize these progressive laws if they met them in broad daylight.”
Loves a fight
Four years ago in Philadelphia, Mr. Roosevelt talked of “a chicken in every pot” and “two cars in every garage.” Saturday night it was “Hoovervilles."
“I am an old campaigner,” he said in his opening speech in the fall of 1940, “and I love a good fight.”
He still does. He warmed to that fight Saturday night with effective thrusts of satire and dramatic emphasis on the droll or amusing touch – something GOP candidates somehow do not match.
In 1940, there was the famed “Martin, Barton and Fish” phrase he dished out in his Madison Square Garden speech and, so well did it catch on, used again in Boston.
Chides Dewey
Now. in this campaign, he tells a rollicking story of his dog, Fala. He uses a gag, “Never speak of rope in the house of one who has been hanged,” in chiding Governor Dewey for talking about a depression which began in Republican President Hoover’s era. And talks of seeing many marvelous circus stunts but never a performing elephant that “could turn a handspring without falling flat on his back.”
The speech was that of a man who long ago got his degree in political tactics; he chose adroitly to discuss issues that pleased him and which he could handle frequently with barbed sarcasm, and to overlook others. He could discuss labor questions at length, for example without attempting to answer Governor Dewey’s factual account of the conglomeration of Federal agencies in the labor field.
Jobs is big word
Both Governor Dewey and Mr. Roosevelt are making “jobs” of top-rung importance in their speeches.
Friday night at Los Angeles, Governor Dewey cited the importance of a job in everybody’s mind, said the country must not go back to the 10 million unemployed of 1940, repeated his charge that the New Deal had to have a war to get jobs, stressed the need for peacetime jobs.
The next night, Mr. Roosevelt said:
The keynote of all that we propose to do in reconversion can be found in the one word – “jobs.”
