The Pittsburgh Press (September 24, 1944)
Editorial: Hillman at the crossroads
Speaking with what may have been unintentional candor, the CIO Political Action Committee’s Sidney Hillman gave the United Auto Workers’ convention some pretty concise directions on which way the United States ought to go. He said:
The right-hand fork is a wide road on which the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau and the Committee for Constitutional Government drive abreast at full speed with an escort of motorcycle police. It leads straight to the arid plain of “normalcy.”
The other road is neither smooth nor straight. It runs up hill and down dale, skirting the sides of many precipices and bumping along over stretches of bad pavement, but it leads eventually into the fertile valley of lasting peace and stable prosperity. I need not tell you much about this road, for it is the only one which we have been traveling for the last 12 years under the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The PAC people’s program… points the way.
To the left, of course. The “normal” America of busy factories, abundant jobs, prosperous farmers and the world’s highest wages arouses only contempt among Mr. Hillman’s Communist associates.
He’s right about that left fork he says we’ve been following, though. It isn’t smooth and it definitely isn’t straight. It has, in the 12 years he mentions, bumped over some mighty bad pavement and past plenty of precipices – only we call them “emergencies.” It has brought us, so far, to raking leaves for WPA, to waste and idleness and debt and endless depression – but nobody has ever yet seen the happy valley at the end of Mr. Hillman’s pink rainbow.
Well, it’s still a free country, and if anyone wants to follow a strange guide down an unmapped detour toward an unknown destination, it is still his privilege to do it. We’ll stay on the main highway, ourselves.