The Pittsburgh Press (February 25, 1944)
I DARE SAY —
‘Needy and greedy’
By Florence Fisher Parry
Relief for the greedy instead of the needy.
That’s what did it. That’s what ran the cup over. Just one trick phrase too much. Just one neatest-trick-of-the-week too many. Just a little overuse of the old thesaurus.
It’s wonderful, the power of a word! Alliteration, it seems, can be enough to turn the course of Empire!
It dates back pretty far, now we come to think of it – this era of word spellbinding. It dates back to a day almost 11 years ago when the people of our Republic were gathered around their radios to hear the inaugural address of their new President.
The golden voice cast a spell. Clear and strong and confident, it rang a new bell. The people gathered closer, subtly electrified. Then, suddenly, the air became surcharged with a cold and withering current. “These economic royalists! These princes of privilege!” These words clove a rift between the people whom Lincoln had warned: United we stand, divided we fall.
Oh, words have been used before by Presidents to rouse the people to new consciousnesses. But never until that speech 12 years ago had they been chosen with such relish for their slick slogan value. Other Presidents had exhorted the people, but always to UNITE them; and although most of their speeches were written for them (as must be, for Presidents are busy men), they took care not to let their ghostwriters inflame, by catchphrases, the passions of the people.
The ghostwriters
Few Presidents have attempted their own composition. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson – these three are best known among those who reserved for themselves alone this solemn task. And it has long been known that our present President, in love with the slick alliterative slogan, is careful to surround himself with gifted scribes whose genius lies along the lines of his own rhetorical and dramatic tastes in phraseology.
There has been a trek of these ghostwriters scurrying in and out of the White House with their red-hot writings. Many of them are avowed leftists. Some are practiced politicians. A few feel themselves to be messiahs of a new order which has commissioned them to be its eloquent stooges.
More than one gifted playwright and poet has been glad to accept anonymity in order to fashion pronouncements that will go down in history under the President’s signature and, “more clever than honest,” a few closer advisers have lent their own oblique technique to the phraseology of Rooseveltian utterances.
Alas, alack!
Our President now finds himself in a most critical position because of his relish for the alliterative phrase. He doubtless smacked his lips over the slick wording of “relief for the greedy instead of the needy.” It took him back to his triumphant “princes of privilege” days; it was too tempting to resist.
It so carried him away that he forgot for the moment its dangerous effect upon those staunch friends of his in the Senate who had stood by him through think and thin and upon whom he must rely in the campaign ahead. It made him even forget his good old Dear Alben.
He could not have dreamed that Dear Alben would kick over the traces at last. Why, it had never failed to work, that Dear Alben technique! My friends, Dear Wendell, Dear Winston, why it was foolproof! Hadn’t William Allen White himself said, after he had met him, that his charm was positively dangerous it was so overwhelming> And if Dear Alben WOULD balk, couldn’t he Dear Alben him back into the fold again?
Greedy and needy. Princes of privilege. Alliteration did it, Mr. President. It’s been the death of writers before this, but I never knew it to beset a President before.