Heffernan: Has the Democratic Party no Mirabeau?
Some years ago, when President Roosevelt proclaimed himself the Master, and the dictatorial trait in his character began to manifest itself, my comment was a quotation of the servant of Louis XVI of France to his royal master: “It is not a riot, sire, it is a revolution!”
Now Mr. Roosevelt, for whose election Sidney Hillman’s CIO Committee on Political Action is prepared to spend millions of dollars, is styled the Commander-in-Chief, a title which he has a right to assume with respect to the Army and Navy but which none of his predecessors cared to accept in place of the honored one of President of the Republic.
There have been leaders of the Democratic Party which his Communist and New Deal adherents captured who have tried to prevent his leading us, in the words of John W. Bricker, down the road to state socialism. Farley tried it, Carter Glass tried it, John Garner tried it and Senators Wheeler and Byrd tried it.
But the claptrap of the New Deal political bravos, the prizes offered to labor in the form of a temporary orgy with paper money, backed by the taxing power of an administration that will tax to the bone; all these have prevailed. Mr. Roosevelt, his health permitting, will be the candidate again. And the public opinion polls recently published indicate that he has an edge on Governor Dewey, the presumptive Republican nominee.
And once more from that tragic story of the French Revolution which was the first step in the downward road to the abyss in which unhappy France now finds herself, I quote from what Malouet of the dying Mirabeau:
He was on the point of rendering great service to the state: shall I tell you how? By confessing to you his faults and pointing out your own; by preserving to you all that was pure in the Revolution and by energetically pointing out to you all its excesses and the danger of those excesses; by making the people affrighted at their blindness and the factious, at their intrigues.
Has the Democratic Party no Mirabeau?