I am happy to come to Pennsylvania again and report that a great upsurge is sweeping the country. Everywhere, from coast to coast, the American people are coming to the decision that it’s time for a change.
Republicans are confident of winning. Democrats, who deeply resent the kidnaping of their part by the Communists and the Political Action Committee, are also confident of winning – with us. Together with independents, they are fed up with 12 years of quarreling, waste and decay. They agree that 16 years would be intolerable. They want a fresh and vigorous government with faith in the future of America.
That’s why it’s time for a change.
In 26 Republican states, having two-thirds of our population, our people have found that we can have good progressive government without wrangling, waste and confusion. We have learned that we can change state administrations and greatly strengthen our unity for war and our capacity to hasten victory. With our great military command continued, a similar change in civilian Washington will speed total victory and will also speed our work for a just and lasting peace.
In the same way, a change of administration offers the only future to the working people of America. The slogan of the New Deal is: “Back to normalcy with ten million unemployed.” That’s where we still were in 1940, after seven years of the New Deal. But we Americans are not going backward.
When the war is won, a tremendous job will just begin. No one man and no single group will be able to hold all the forces released by war in constructive channels. Every group in our population – agriculture, business, labor and government – will have to pull together.
Can this great effort be led by an administration which is both worn out and torn to shreds by internal dissensions? Can it be done by a president who has warred with a Congress of his own party year after year until that Congress is in open rebellion?
Let me recall to you what happened at the end of the last war under another tired administration. 1919 brought soup kitchens into our cities – not for the helpless – but for returning soldier. In the best organized communities, it took a returning soldier an average of two and a half months to find a job. While that veteran walked the streets, this nation was shaken by its first general strike. The same year brought the great steel strike, the meat-packing strike, the lockout in the building trades. Making the strife more bitter were the assaults of the Democratic Attorney General, A. Mitchel Palmer, on union halls and civil liberties. This nation was so torn by cleavage and insecurity that it was in that year 1919 that the Communist Party of the USA was organized, dedicated to revolution.
Improved labor relations and advances for the working people of the country came only with good times. Labor leaders joined with a Republican Congress to establish the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor. They helped a Republican administration set up the Railway Labor Act, which is today still the model law in employer-employee relations. Under Republican administrations came legislation against child labor, limitation of interstate distribution of the products of prison labor, laws for payment of prevailing rates of pay on government jobs, and the anti-injunction bill of rights for labor.
This program was a part of the social trend which has continued since the Social Security Law, the Wage and Hour Law and the National Labor Relations Act. There is no reason why our social trend should not continue. There is no reason except one – the New Deal – tired out and too long in office. It distrusts the people. It treats the social gains of the 1930s as its private property.
The New Deal sits by the fireside and gazes back on its long-lost youth with happy contemplation, It hopes to spend its declining days clipping coupons on its political investments of the 1930s. It wants to hold office forever in stalemated idleness. I say that social gains are not the property of any party. They are the property of the people of the United States and no party can exploit them for its political profit. Good laws are necessary but they are not enough. Social progress needs vigorous protection and promotion all the time. It needs the nourishment of competent, free government.
Let’s look at what has happened to the right of collective bargaining under one-man government. The New Deal has posed for years as the friend of labor. But today it has turned collective bargaining into political bargaining.
Take just one example. In the autumn of 1942, the 1,100,000 non-operating railroad employes and then the 350,000 operating workers requested a wage increase to meet the higher living costs. Since 1926, the machinery of the law always had worked successfully in such matters. And it started to operate properly this time, with the regular hearings before the national mediation emergency boards.
But, the grasping hand of one-man rule reached in and set itself above the law. Mr. Roosevelt’s Economic Stabilization Director Vinson completely destroyed the effectiveness of the Railway Labor Act by setting aside the recommendation of the mediation board for an increase of eight cents an hour. Desperate, the railway workers of the nation decided to walk out, if necessary, by a vote of 97.7 percent.
For six months last year, while uncertainty and tension increased, Mr. Roosevelt did nothing but wage a war of nerves against the railway workers. Finally, he decided the stage was set for making political capital. He called the union leaders to the White House. They met there four times. Mr. Roosevelt demanded that he, instead of the legally established mediation board, be selected as the final arbitrator. Three presidents of railway brotherhoods declared, and I quote: “The whole thing had all the earmarks of a political setup.”
The tension rose higher. Finally, Mr. Roosevelt seized the railroads to forestall a national disaster which he himself had prepared. After he did that, he graciously gave the very wage increase to which the railway workers had been entitled for over a year.
The comment of the three brotherhood leaders was, and I quote: “The trouble was that the administration was not content to follow the law.”
“We are firmly convinced,” they said, “that if the administration had kept its hands off and had permitted the rail unions to proceed under the Railway Labor Act, we could have reached a satisfactory settlement with our employers without stopping work for a single day and without causing the slightest bitterness.”
“But the administration did not do that. It insisted on changing rules in the middle of the game.”
Now, political power wasn’t the only profit in this case. There was political cash, too – for one of the New Deal city bosses. The railway brotherhoods had to be represented by special legal counsel because the proceedings were obviously of a very special sort. And who do you suppose was the lawyer? An attorney eminent in labor law? An authority on railroad economics? Not under the New Deal.
With legal process out the window by act of Mr. Roosevelt, the railway workers were forced to hire someone who knew his way up the backstairs of the White House. So, the railway brotherhoods had to hire Mr. Roosevelt’s third-term national chairman – that eminent authority in Belgian paving blocks, Boss Flynn of the Bronx. This was the man who once appointed the notorious gangster and gunman, Dutch Schultz, as a deputy sheriff of the Bronx. And did Mr. Roosevelt’s political manager lend his aid for nothing? The price of his services for the railroad workers was $25,000.
That sort of business must come to an end in this country. Political bosses and one-man government must not be allowed to keep a strangle-hold on the rights of our working people. I believe with all my heart in collective bargaining and it must again be free collective bargaining. It must be bargaining for the rights of working people and not for the profit of political bosses.
Now, playing with the rights of labor for political power and political cash is bad enough. But there is something even more dangerous in what the New Deal is doing. Here are the words of Robert J. Watt, one of the top officials of the American Federation of Labor. He says:
Even as we fight for the survival of our basic freedoms, we find that the democratic process in many ways is being hogtied and rendered subordinate to the dictum of a one-man boss…
Just a week ago at a public forum in New York, this same labor leader said: “Government intervention has already strangled collective bargaining to death.”
And to this, Railway Brotherhood President David B. Robertson said: “I should like to say amen to that.”
But collective bargain is only one of the casualties of the rights of the workers under the New Deal. Look at what has happened to the white-collar worker.
A friend of mine is an employee in a publishing house. He asked his employer for a raise and the employer agreed. But then the trouble began. The employer filed an application with the appropriate government bureau.
Seven weeks went by and then what? More information was requested. Two months later, the request was turned down. Three months more until an appeal was heard. Another month for a decision that the appeal had been denied. Three and a half months of further delay waiting word that a further appeal to Washington had been turned down. On the last appeal, four months later, the word was finally handed down: “OK. You can have half as much as you asked.”
Thus, more than 15 months after the original request, the New Deal settled the case by the old kangaroo court method of splitting the difference. If the request had no merit in the first place, a denial would be fair and proper. But when it’s right all the time, 15 months delay and three appeals to get justice are inexcusable. It is the same all through the New Deal. It has been the same with millions of other white-collar workers and factory workers all over the country. That’s why it’s time for a change.
It is time to face the fact that the New Deal is a bankrupt organization, living only to extend its powers over the daily lives of our people. It did some good things in its youth, but now it seeks to live on its past. In this great national campaign, my opponent has not offered to the people of this country even the pretense of a program for the future. He tells the working men and women of America to trust him, to do as they are told and ask no questions. That is the end result under one-man government, always. It is the inevitable end of a philosophy which sees no real future for America. It is the result of a viewpoint that can see nothing ahead but a repetition of its own peacetime failures – a return after the war to unemployment, with leaf raking and doles.
I am sure America will never submit to that dreary prospect. We are going forward to swift, total victory over our enemies abroad. We are going to take the lead in building a world organization for lasting peace, and here at home, we are going to establish a government which will make possible a vigorous productive economy with jobs and opportunity for all.
Only thus can we maintain social progress and make secure the rights of free labor.
With the full backing of our party, Governor Bricker and I stand committed to a program that will insure to American labor the guarantee of free collective bargaining through the National Labor Relations Act, and with freedom from government dictation.
We stand committed to the proposition that America can and must have both economic security and personal freedom. That program we shall begin to put into effect next January 20.
We shall appoint an active, able Secretary of Labor from the ranks of labor.
We shall abolish wasteful, quarrelsome and competing agencies which are strangling collective bargaining.
We shall establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee as a permanent service.
We shall put back into the Department of Labor the functions that belong in the Department of Labor.
We shall do away with special privilege for one group of American workers over another group. °
We shall see to it that every working man and woman stands equally in the Department of Labor and that the department exists to serve, and not to rule, the working men and women of America.
We shall work for a broader Social Security Act to include those not now covered. Old-age and survivors’ insurance is now denied to 20 million of our people. All those who have been left without protection under the New Deal must be included. Public employees who are not now protected by existing systems should, also, be included.
We shall work to widen the provisions of unemployment insurance to include the groups now unprotected.
To all these things we are pledged.
These things government can and should do. But they alone are not enough. We can have a free labor movement and make social progress only within the framework of a society that encourages enterprise – that provides opportunity for all – that is productive and growing.
To that end we are pledged to remove from the backs of American farmers and businessmen the hordes of bungling bureaucrats and the load of red tape and regulations under which they have staggered so many years.
Necessary regulation of industry and finance will encourage, not discourage freedom and opportunity. It must be administered by men who believe in the enterprise system and who know that the personal and political freedom of the average American citizen is more important than increased power for a government bureau.
We must have a government that wants every American to succeed, a government that will make possible full employment with an ever-increasing standard of living for every man and woman who works for a living.
Above all, we must have an administration that will restore unity to our country. That means a government with teamwork in its own ranks – a government that works in harmony with Congress – a government that has equal respect for the rights of agriculture, labor and business, and for every race, creed and color.
The years that lie ahead will be largely peacetime years. They will bring great problems and great opportunities. Let us determine now that we shall work together in unity as free Americans under an administration that believes in the future of America.
Tonight, brave men on far off battlefronts are fighting and dying for our country. If we are to be worthy of their sacrifices, we must strengthen freedom here at home. That we will do and with God’s help, we will build a future fit for heroes – a land of equal opportunity for all.
