Lewis’ paper hits Roosevelt slogan
Calls ‘Win the War’ cloak of politics – sees New Deal dead 6 years ago
Washington – (Dec. 30)
On the heels of President Roosevelt’s adoption of the slogan “Win the War” in place of “New Deal,” the United Mine Workers Journal, the official organ for John L. Lewis’ miners union, says that the New Deal died more than six years ago.
In a leading editorial, the Journal contended in its issue to be distributed tomorrow that the “Win the War” slogan “has a greedy ring, like trying to rob the people of their birthright, of appropriating the people’s wartime prayers and their every desire, to cloak a political party.”
Criticism of the administration from this source was not unexpected, in view of the rift that developed after the mine union chief actively supported Mr. Roosevelt in two campaigns for the presidency.
The editorial said:
President Roosevelt’s belated acknowledgement that the “New Deal” is dead as such could have been well made, and honestly so, in mid-1937 – six-and-a-half years ago – for it was during the Little Steel strikes of that year when intelligent labor leaders first learned of the President’s feat that the rapid organization of the rank and file of American workers into unions might reach such huge totals as to give to the American workingman that degree of economic and political power which banking, business and industry, as well as those of the upper social caste, coupon clippers and the self-anointed ruling-class boys, deemed unwise for the workers to possess in these United States.
All of the social and control legislation which was enacted during the first years of the “New Deal” would have resulted in time, out of necessity, for the very sound reason that it represented needed reform long overdue.
The period of the Little Steel strikes, the editorial continued, made it “a matter of common gossip in big business circles that the ‘New Deal,’ as such, was dead.”
For that reason, and since the President’s second term still had some time to run, the Journal said, Mr. Lewis felt it was prudent for “labor to pay its hand out and get along the best it could for the remainder of the second term.”
It went on:
To us it seems incredible that, in shifting from the “New Deal” emblem, the domestic situation being what it is, the utter confusion which prevails as regards mustering out our fighting men and the complete lack of plans for the transition from a wartime to a peacetime economy, the erstwhile “New Dealers” would have the audacity to adopt as a new political slogan the one thing which all Americans are agreed upon – “Win the War.”
It has a greedy ring like trying to rob the people of their birthright – of appropriating the people’s wartime prayers and their every desire – to cloak a political party. In a democracy, when patriotism is involved against a common foe, the President of the United States, or a political party, has no more right to patriotic claims than the humblest citizen.