The Pittsburgh Press (October 28, 1940)
WILLKIE RAPS HULL’S SPEECH
…
Nominee Also Gives Stand On Housing Program
…
By William H. Lawrence, United Press Staff Writer
Aboard Willkie Train En Route to Louisville, Ky., Oct. 28 –
Wendell L. Willkie today described Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s discussion of foreign affairs Saturday night as “an extraordinary documentation of New Deal futility.”
WJAS will carry Mr. Willkie’s speech at 10:30 tonight.
“The only solution to this crisis in our national leadership is to defeat the third term candidate,” he said in a statement issued as his campaign train returned to Illinois for the seventh time.
“I want to bring greater income to the farmers of the nation,” Mr. Willkie told 8,000 listeners at Bloomington, Ill., today.
Speaking in the heart of a rich agricultural belt, Mr. Willkie asserted that “under the New Deal the farmer is not better off than he was four years ago.”
The candidate’s voice was extremely husky as he began the first of five short talks scheduled in Illinois and Indiana before his address tonight.
He again took a pot shot at President Roosevelt’s refusal to debate campaign issues face to face. He said Mr. Roosevelt’s Philadelphia speech “discussed matters long ago settled.”
Earlier, Mr. Willkie said Mr. Hull, in his address before the National Press Club, had “pointed up more clearly than could any contemporary critic of the New Deal the serious failure to organize a national economy capable of building rapidly am adequate defense.”
Mr. Willkie said Mr. Hull’s statement that he had warned as early as 1935 against inadequate defense “makes the whole tragedy of world conditions and our present precarious position in relation to them ever more apparent.”
Had the President not then also been a candidate for re-election, he might have done better than merely send up verbal trial balloons to see how the popular emotion ran toward foreign events.
He could have given an effective leadership then that would have saved us from what the Secretary of State now calls the gravity of the present situation.
‘Defense Five Years Late’
Even without raising international questions, or making domestic issues out of questions of foreign policy, the President, who is now a candidate for the third term, could have adjusted our internal economy to the recovery level essential to support a program of adequate national defense, and could have done it without disturbing his purely political interests.
The President having failed, however, Secretary Hull’s picture of world crises since 1933 makes even more distinctly tragic the now famous sham of last May’s on hand and or order speech.
Certainly those directly and indirectly affected by the recent registration for conscription – especially the mothers, fathers, wives and other relatives of all those lads who were required to register – have cause for concern that our national defense program was not begun five years ago, at the time of Secretary Hull’s pointed warning.
Plans Housing Program
Mr. Willkie spent a quiet Sunday resting for the final week of his campaign. He went 160 miles off his route to stop at Rensselaer, Indiana, to visit Mrs. Blanche Halleck, wife of Representative Charles A. Halleck of Indiana, who placed Mr. Willkie’s name in nomination at the Philadelphia Convention. Mrs. Halleck was recovering from pneumonia.
He issued a formal statement charging the New Deal housing program had “bogged down” and “generally is paralyzed by a maze of red tape.” He pledged his efforts toward federal government co-operation with local authorities and private enterprise in housing if he is elected, and outlined a six-point program for slum clearance and reconstruction.
The statement, in reply to housing experts who had asked Mr. Willkie’s view of the housing problem read (in part):
As I have traveled across this country, I have been deeply impressed with the dilapidated appearance of the homes of millions of our people, and the run-down condition of large parts of our city areas. It is absolutely essential to remedy these conditions, both for economy and social reasons.
Points to HOLC and FHA
Significant steps in the direction of improved housing and land utilization were taken in 1931 by President Hoover’s conference on home building and home ownership. The New Deal has carried this movement further by creating a number of government agencies to deal with various aspects of the housing problem.
For example, the HOLC was created to ease the burden of mortgages on homes threatened by the depression, The FHA was established to insure lending institutions against mortgage losses. The USHA came into being to lend federal assistance to low-rent housing and slum clearance and to aid in the creation of a network of local agencies for this purpose.
It is widely recognized, however, that the New Deal housing program has bogged down, This has been due to a lack of frankness on the part of the New Deal in failing to admit the real extent of federal slum clearance subsidies. It has been also due to faulty administration.
13 U.S. Agencies Compete
Today is different uncorrelated agencies – FWA, USHA, FHA, FSA, HOLC, HOLB, CHC, DHC, NRBB, PBA, RFC mortgage, PWA, and the building departments of the Army and Navy procurement divisions – compete with and even fight each other, to the detriment of housing as a while. The New Deal system generally is paralyzed by a maze of red tape.
My own attitude can be briefly summarized as follows:
-
The stimulation of slum clearance, land use planning, and housing is a government function; but the efforts of government in this direction should always supplement and stimulate private enterprise and initiative, rather than encroach upon it.
-
The 13 government agencies now dealing with housing and planning matters should be correlated, and the present conflict of functions and undue overlapping removed.
-
Meanwhile, agencies such as the FHA and HOLC, which provide or insure the financing of private housing, should be continued, but their administration should be thoroughly inspected and improved. Likewise, these agencies which provide loans and subsidies for public housing projects such as USHA and FHA, should be maintained; but their administration must be improved and the federal subsidy for slum clearance frankly recognized.
-
The federal government has a great opportunity to co-operate with local authorities and private enterprise in the rebuilding of our cities and in undertaking far-reaching neighborhood planning, such as the New Deal has never undertaken.
-
Any housing program must clearly define the respective responsibilities of federal, state and local governments…
-
Important as is government assistance, the housing program in the main can be solved only by private enterprise. The New Deal has dismally failed to attack the maladjustments holding back housing recovery, such as high costs, politically exploited building codes, and excessive real estate taxes. The next administration will encourage the removal of such maladjustments in the belief that private housing may well prove to be the great industry of the future.