1936

Worried migrant mother.

____________________

 

“Hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government.”

 

President Roosevelt

____________________

 

 

“I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a frontline of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.”   Frank Buchman

*

January 3: FDR gives the first evening State of the Union Address. He delivers a slashing attack against “unscrupulous money-changers,” a phrase he had used before. He said such men hoped to lead the nation “back around the same old corner into the same dreary street.” “Give them their way” and they would “take the course of every autocracy of the past – power for themselves, enslavement for the public.” 

According to George Wolfskill, “The New Deal had broken off the romance between government and the private interests, and in accomplishing this had ‘invited battle,’ had ‘earned the hatred of entrenched greed.’” (1127/118)

 

 

*

 

“Backs cut to pieces with a leather strap with buckles on it.” 

February 17: In the case of Brown v. Mississippi, the U.S. Supreme Court throws out the murder convictions of Ed Brown and two others, all African American, related to the murder of Raymond Stewart, a white farmer, on March 30, 1934. The defendants were indicted on April 4, 1934, for that crime, the trial began the next day, and on April 6, they were convicted. 

The evidence against them came in the form of confessions. Defendants later appealed, saying they had been beaten by police till they confessed. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed that states had wide latitude to conduct trials according to their own procedures, but could not deny due process of law. 

It is worth noting that the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the sentences for the three men. 

The U.S. Supreme Court explained in graphic detail why the confessions must be thrown out:

 

The crime with which these defendants, all ignorant negroes, are charged, was discovered about one o’clock p. m. on Friday, March 30, 1934. On that night one Dial, a deputy sheriff, accompanied by others, came to the home of [Arthur] Ellington, one of the defendants, and requested him to accompany them to the house of the deceased, and there a number of white men were gathered, who began to accuse the defendant of the crime. Upon his denial they seized him, and with the participation of the deputy they hanged him by a rope to the limb of a tree, and having let him down, they hung him again, and when he was let down the second time, and he still protested his innocence, he was tied to a tree and whipped, and still declining to accede to the demands that he confess, he was finally released and he returned with some difficulty to his home, suffering intense pain and agony. The record of the testimony shows that the signs of the rope on his neck were plainly visible during the so-called trial. A day or two thereafter the said deputy, accompanied by another, returned to the home of the said defendant and arrested him, and departed with the prisoner towards the jail in an adjoining county, but went by a route which led into the State of Alabama; and while on the way, in that State, the deputy stopped and again severely whipped the defendant, declaring that he would continue the whipping until he confessed, and the defendant then agreed to confess to such a statement as the deputy would dictate, and he did so, after which he was delivered to jail.

 

The other two .defendants, Ed Brown and Henry Shields, were also arrested and taken to the same jail. On Sunday night, April 1, 1934, the same deputy, accompanied by a number of white men, one of whom was also an officer, and by the jailer, came to the jail, and the two last named defendants were made to strip and they were laid over chairs and their backs were cut to pieces with a leather strap with buckles on it, and they were likewise made by the said deputy definitely to understand that the whipping would be continued unless and until they confessed, and not only confessed, but confessed in every matter of detail as demanded by those present; and in this manner the defendants confessed the crime, and as the whippings progressed and were repeated, they changed or adjusted their confession in all particulars of detail so as to conform to the demands of their torturers. When the confessions had been obtained in the exact form and contents as desired by the mob, they left with the parting admonition and warning that, if the defendants changed their story at any time in any respect from that last stated, the perpetrators of the outrage would administer the same or equally effective treatment.

 

Further details of the brutal treatment to which these helpless prisoners were subjected need not be pursued. It is sufficient to say that in pertinent respects the transcript reads more like pages torn from some medieval account, than a record made within the confines of a modern civilization which aspires to an enlightened constitutional government.

 

* 

Langston Hughes, a 34-year-old poet, publishes what will become one of his most famous poems.

 Let America Be America Again 

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

 

(America never was America to me.)

 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

 

(It never was America to me.)

 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

 

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

 

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

 

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

 

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

 

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

 

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

 

The free?

 

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

 

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

 

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

 

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

 

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

 

*

 

“Ten to one he will reply – J. Edgar Hoover.” 

TTime-Life notes that in an era when Americans needed heroes, one emerged preeminent:

 

In the decade’s running battle between the law and those who broke it, one man emerged as a living folk hero of law enforcement. He was J. Edgar Hoover, the robust, iron-jawed supersleuth who headed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Pick a small boy these days and ask him who of all the people in the world he wants to be like,” wrote the New York World-Telegram in 1936, “and ten to one he will reply – J. Edgar Hoover.”

 

Hoover was the perfect hero… he seemed the very image of clean living, hard driving Americanism.

 

His image was carefully protected and curated – it was said he had unlimited energy. “When a big case is on he has often sat at his desk for 72 hours at a stretch,” said one friend. Hoover famously refused to take time off, saying, “The job is never done.” According to Time-Life, “No Boy Scout had fewer vices than the FBI chief. He hardly ever smoked, drank only moderately and was never known to tell an off-color story. His principal diversions were awesomely wholesome and American: baseball and fishing.” 

In a more modern way of thinking, it might have struck almost everyone as odd: that Hoover, a bachelor, lived with his elderly mother and pet dog in the same house where he was born in 1895. His few close friends were other F.B.I. agents, including Clyde Tolson, and, “He had never been known to take a girl on a date.” 

Before he took charge, the agency had degenerated, and the whole Department of Justice, in the Harding years, had become known as the Department of Easy Virtue.

 

Harding’s Attorney General, Harry M. Daugherty, had used the bureau to give jobs to party hacks, no matter how bizarre their qualifications. One man had been handed an agent’s badge for supplying chorus girls to a top administration official, another for singing ribald songs outside the Justice Department building during lunch hour. Many agents had close underworld contacts; some were ex-convicts, others engaged in wholesome graft and bootlegging. One particularly unsavory federal sleuth was Gaston B. Means, an expert at conning rich widows. He had been indicted once, for forging the will of an elderly matron who owned a fortune in timber. Later, during the Lindbergh kidnapping, he scandalized the nation by bilking $100,000 out of a dowager who had hired him to find the missing baby.

 

Hoover’s first major official act was to fire a third of the Bureau, including Means. (“The man had always disgusted me,” he said.) “The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not a catch-all for political hacks,” Hoover intoned. “Appointments must be made on merit.”

 

To his credit, Hoover cleaned up a mess. All agents would need a degree in law or accounting. A competitive exam would help determine which individuals were hired. A background check would weed out all but “decent, honorable, respectable young men.” “We can’t afford merely to be right,” Hoover said. “We must give every appearance of doing right to avoid criticism.” The Bureau put together a file of fingerprints from three million persons. “Another Hoover innovation was a crime laboratory for examining car tracks, expended bullets, blood stains, hair, fabric, and other shreds of evidence.” Field agents were on call twenty-four hours a day. 

By this time, two banks were being robbed per day; and the Justice Department warned that “400,000 hoods were loose in America.” 

Congress helped by passing laws to make robberies of national banks, thefts of more than $5,000 carried out across state lines, illegal use of telephone and telegraph wires, assaults on federal officers, and crossing state lines to avoid testifying in court all federal offenses, and subject to F.B.I. investigation. Hoover and his G-Men became the heroes of the day. Small boys wore tin G-man badges, carried toy G-man Tommy guns, and even slept in G-man underwear and pajamas. 

Hoover, ever the moralist, referred to the criminals his agents pursued as “mad dogs with guns in their hands and murder in their hearts,” and “scum from the boiling pot of the underworld.” “Don’t call them or refer to the country’s outstanding criminals as ‘public enemies,’” he once said. “I suggest that they be called ‘public rats.’” 

He also blasted those he believed offered sympathy for the criminal class. “This included ‘shyster lawyers and other legal vermin,’ ‘sob-sister judges,’ political liberals and other ‘sentimental moo-cows’ who believed in lightning the sentences of ‘criminal jackels.’” 

Hoover, perhaps tormented by the demons in his soul, since he was hiding his own homosexuality, warned: “Here is a battle between priceless God-fearing principles on the one hand and pagan ideals and godlessness on the other. … In these troubled days, when you strengthen the hand of law enforcement, you add power to the muscles of liberty.” He advanced the fight against radicals of all kinds, including anyone suspected of Communist, fascist or even liberal sympathies, warning, “Intellectual license and debauchery is un-American. In righteous indignation it is time to drive the debauchers of America out in the open.” 

He referred to Communism and fascism as “two twin horrid, spectral growths of alien soil and alien spirit.” (1129/109-113) 

A hero in the 30s, by the 70s, he had come to be seen as a danger to democracy in his own right.

* 

March 1: Work on Hoover Dam, begun five years earlier is complete. Enough concrete has been poured to build a two-lane highway from Seattle to Miami, to put the work in perspective. 

Timothy Egan described its impact in an editorial for The New York Times, ninety years after work began:

 

The dam powered Los Angeles and birthed modern Las Vegas. Downriver canals made Arizona habitable year-round, delivered cold water to drinking fountains in Disneyland and created an Eden for winter vegetables in Southern California.

 

Humans bent nature to their will to shape a civilization in an arid land. Now, human activity — the accelerant of climate change — is threatening those dreams. Lake Mead, the big man-made body of water behind the dam, has sunk to near its lowest level since it was filled, signaling ripples of change in the world made possible by the backed-up Colorado River.

 

By May 17, 2021, Lake Mead had fallen to only 37 percent of capacity.

 

* 

March 13: Steel workers win a union contract with “Big Steel,” the United States Steel Corporation, guaranteeing: a standard pay scale, an 8-hour workday, and time-and-a-half for overtime.

 

* 

March 19: The German American Bund is founded, with a headquarters later in New York City. As noted by Wikipedia, the group liked to show its dual loyalty by displaying the American flag, and the flag of Nazi Germany, side by side at meetings.

Members were stridently anti-Semitic, anti-communist, and opposed to U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Leaders also insisted that George Washington was the “first fascist,” and didn’t believe democracy could work. (Three years later, the Bund would be able to pack Madison Square Garden with a crowd of 20,000 enthusiastic Nazi supporters.) 

In the 30s, the Bund operated a summer camp, Camp Siegfried, at Yaphank, N.Y., on Long Island. 

The New York Times explains:

 

Its teenage participants swam, hiked, competed in archery and went to dances, all the while absorbing Nazi ideology.

 

“On the surface,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of a book on the German American Bund, “it was like any other camp, except it was filled with swastikas.”

 

The flower beds and rose bushes, he noted, were planted in swastika patterns. 

 

Streets in the camp were named after Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels, and Herman Goering. Campers wore uniforms, similar to what might have been worn in Germany by the Hitler Youth. Like any summer camp, the teens shared cabins, and besides swimming (the camp sat on a lake) there were cookouts and family gatherings for fun, with Nazi indoctrination always added into the mix. 

Summertime at Camp Siegfried.

 

* 

March 30: The four “Little Steel” companies refuse to sign a union contract calling for “an eight-hour work day, a forty-hour work week, overtime pay, a $5-per-day minimum wage, paid vacations, health and safety standards, seniority, and procedures for resolving grievances.” 

   In this era, worker safety, to give just one example, was not prioritized. 

Safety conditions were as bad as wages. Occupational diseases such as carbon monoxide poisoning, “hot mill cramps” (from exposure to temperatures up to 220° F. at the furnace mouth) and pneumonia took hundreds of lives every year. Every week, on the average, one man could expect his clothes to catch fire, and if he did not burn to death he had to replace the clothes from his meager earnings. The overseer who went by the title of safety manager at a Jones & Laughlin steel mill in Pittsburgh admitted to having “a lot of equipment that is out of date, lacks the new safety devices and is liable to breakdown at any time, causing serious accidents,” but he had no plans for improving it. “It still yields a return on investment,” he said, “so the company cannot scrap it.” Instead the industry  scrapped  22,845 human beings in accidents in a single year: 242 were killed, 1,193 permanently disabled and  21,410 temporarily laid up. (1129/172) 

* 

March: Dorothea Lange has been working as a “clerk-stenographer” for the Resettlement Administration, but has spent the last six weeks photographing migrant workers. Since there was no money in the RA budget for a photographer, she invoices her film and travel expenses under “clerical supplies.” Now she publishes pictures a set of her pictures, including one of the “Migrant Mother” and others, capturing the “rock-hard realities” of Depression Era suffering. 

Lange admitted later that she very nearly missed the chance to take the photo, having seen a sign, “Pea-Pickers Camp” flash by as she drove. She kept going – twenty miles – but decided she had to turn around. “Almost without realizing what I was doing, I made a U-turn on the empty highway,” and headed back. In the camp, she took several photos of the woman and her children. There was also a teenage daughter living with them in a tent. Lange realized she needed a central focus, which the other photos she had already taken lacked, and honed in on the mother’s face. Her husband and his sons, from a previous marriage, were off at the time, looking to fix the family’s beat up car. 

I did not ask her name or her history,” Lange said later. “She told me her age, that was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She just sold the tires from her car.” Back home, Lange published the picture, notified the editor of the San Francisco News that migrant workers were slowly starving in Nipomo, California, and a story ran with her “Migrant Mother,” photo. The federal government promptly supplied ten tons of food. 

Not until 1975 did Florence Thompson, the woman in the photo, decide to tell her story. Bill Ganzel, a TV producer read about her, and in 1979, took her picture with the same three daughters in the original, Norma, Katherine and Ruby, by then all married. By the time Lange’s picture was printed in the News, Thompson and her family had already moved on. She told Ganzel that at one point they were living under a bridge, “Didn’t even have a tent, just a ratty old quilt.” She went on to have ten children, in all, and died in 1983. As Smithsonian noted in a brief article called “Migrant Madonna,” March 2002, the famous picture is still one of the most requested from the Library of Congress collection. “It’s the most striking image we have; it hits the heart,” says Nancy Velez, manager of the library’s photo lab. “If you know anything about photography, you’ll know Lange’s image immediately.” 

 

Family headed West, hoping to find work in California.

 

* 

April 22: Glen Campbell is born in Billstown, Arkansas, one in a family of 12 kids, picking cotton with the rest of the family as he grows up. At age 14 he drops out of school to tour with his uncle’s band. “He was the best guitar player I’d heard,” says one fellow session player. “His deal was he didn’t read [music], so they would play it one time for him, and he had it.” By 1964 he was successfully filling in for Brian Wilson with the Beach Boys, after Wilson suffered a breakdown on tour. His first great hit was in 1967, with “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” (It was written by Jimmy Webb.) In 1968, Campbell sold more records than the Beatles. 

In the mid-70s he slipped into what Rolling Stone (9-7-17) called “a life-shaking addiction to cocaine and alcohol. In his memoir, he recalled snorting lines during his nightly Bible readings.” He had a “substance-fueled fling with Tanya Tucker, who was 22 years his junior. ‘In our sick slavery to things of the flesh, we were either having sex or fighting,’ said Campbell.” 

He met Kimberly Wooten in 1981 and they later married, his fourth wife. She helped him clean up. “I give Kimberly all the credit for that. I’m very, very blessed. If you pray…there will be return mail. I believe that. Because I’ve seen it happen.” 

Eventually, he developed Alzheimer’s. At the end, when golfing, he would hunt balls in the woods. Says Kim: “His pockets were bulging with golf balls. Glen would write messages on them: ‘God is love,’ ‘Love the Lord.’ He thought, ‘If someone hits this ball and it goes into the bushes, when somebody finds it, then they’ll get this message—that God blessed them. He wanted to send messages out to people about that.” 

 

*

 

Victor H. Green, an African American postal worker, begins publication of a guide, The Negro Motorist Green-Book. At the time most hotels and restaurants would refuse service to travelers like Green. There were even “sundown towns” along the way, where posted notices warned people of color not to tarry after nightfall. 

Green began by focusing on places that were welcoming in the New York City area, where he lived. Gradually, others sent him tips about traveling across the country and the Green-Book grew in size, to 99 pages, in its final year of publication (1966-67). The book listed private residences that might put up black travelers overnight: for example, one in Andalusia, Alabama: Mrs. Ed. Andrews, 69 N. Cotton Street. Green charged 25 cents at first, later $1, and printed 20,000 copies annually. 

In 1948, he predicted: “There will be a day in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.” (Smithsonian magazine, 4-16) 

The movie The Green Book, based on a true story from the 60s was a huge hit.

 

*

 

An interesting review in The New York Times focuses on two books on the topic. A collision with a white-operated vehicle, should there be any doubt about fault,  would be perilous.

 

An interesting review in The New York Times focuses on two books on the topic. A collision with a white-operated vehicle, should there be any doubt about fault,  would be perilous. 

As the reviewer notes, one early edition proclaimed, “Just what you have been looking for! Now we can travel without embarrassment.” 

That, of course, was only partially true. “The banner across the main street in Greenville, Texas, read, ‘The blackest land, the whitest people,’” for example.

 

[Candacy] Taylor’s book opens with an anecdote about her stepfather, Ron. He is traveling as a child with his mother and father in their “well-appointed” 1953 Chevy sedan when they’re pulled over by a white sheriff. As the sheriff approaches the car, Ron’s father says to his son, “Don’t you dare say a word.” Asked by the officer where he got the car, Ron’s father replies that it belongs to his employer and that he’s driving his boss’s maid and her son home. “Where’s your hat?” the sheriff barks at Ron’s father. “Hanging up right behind me in the back seat, officer,” he answers. Once the sheriff sees the cap, he waves the family on. Only then does Ron realize that the black cap hanging next to him in the back seat, the one that had been there ever since he could remember, was “a ruse, a prop — a lifesaver.” He later noticed similar chauffeur’s caps in the back seat of nearly every black man’s car. 

 

*

 

Paul Robeson, already living in London, in self-imposed exile, recalls being approached by John D. M. Hamilton, national chairman of the Republican Party. If he would return to the U.S. and campaign for Alf Landon, Hamilton promised, Robeson “could write his own ticket in Hollywood contracts.” 

Robeson later wrote, he “would smile at the thought that anyone could imagine his stumping the country, urging Negroes to turn against the New Deal.” 

Even W.E.B. DuBois agreed that people of his race had benefited more under FDR than under any other president, save Lincoln. (1127/174)

 

* 

“There can be no pity for a mob.” 

Memorial Day: Fifteen hundred workers with their families gather outside a Republican Steel plant in Chicago (Republic was one of the “Little Steel” companies) to demonstrate, shouting, “CIO! Let’s go! CIO! Let’s go!” Chicago police attack with tear gas, night sticks and gunfire. 

Ten demonstrators are killed and a hundred wounded. 

The head of the company, Tom M. Girdler responds to questions about the violence this way:

 

There can be no pity for a mob. As that artistic brawler, Benvenuto Cellini [an Italian sculptor of the 1500s, known for dispensing violent retribution to enemies], said, “blows are not dealt by measure.” Some of the mob were clubbed after they had started to run from the wrath they had aroused. Some women were knocked down. The policemen were there performing a hazardous and harsh duty. What were women doing there? (1129/176)

 

Workers were defeated this time, but Sen. Robert M. La Follette Jr. launched an investigation. The methods of “Little Steel” companies, using spies to ferret out union men, and turning loose armed guards on factory workers, turned public opinion against the owners and in favor of the strikers. 

“Franklin D. Roosevelt heard Lewis loud and clear, and so did the rest of the nation. For by the end of this bloody decade American workers, once scattered and beaten by the industrial goons, ignored or opposed by politicians, had assumed their rightful places as first-class citizens.” (1129/176) 

 

*

 

During the campaign for the presidency in 1936, FDR was in the habit of looking out at the crowds gathered to hear him and saying, “You look much better than you did four years ago.” 

The people would cry out in response, “God bless you, Mr. President.” (1129/26)

 

* 

October 14: In a speech in Chicago, President Roosevelt attacks critics in Big Business, who seem to forget:

 

Some of these people forget how sick they were. But I know how sick they were. I have their fever charts. I know how the knees of all of our rugged individualists were trembling four years ago and how their hearts fluttered. They came to Washington in great numbers. Washington did not look like a dangerous bureaucracy to them then. Oh no! It looked like an emergency hospital. All of the distinguished patients wanted two things – a quick hypodermic to end the pain and a course of treatment to cure the disease. They wanted them in a hurry; we gave them both. And now most of the patients seem to be doing very nicely. Some of them are even well enough to throw their crutches at the doctor. (1127/119)

 

* 

October 31: In a speech at Madison Square Garden, the president thunders:

 

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

 

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

 

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

 

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

 

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.

 

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

 

The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House – by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket....

 

I prefer to remember this campaign not as bitter but only as hard-fought. There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.

 

It is because I have sought to think in terms of the whole Nation that I am confident that today, just as four years ago, the people want more than promises.

Our vision for the future contains more than promises.

 

This is our answer to those who, silent about their own plans, ask us to state our objectives.

 

Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America – to reduce hours over-long, to increase wages that spell starvation, to end the labor of children, to wipe out sweatshops. Of course we will continue every effort to end monopoly in business, to support collective bargaining, to stop unfair competition, to abolish dishonorable trade practices. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

 

Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America, for better and cheaper transportation, for low interest rates, for sounder home financing, for better banking, for the regulation of security issues, for reciprocal trade among nations, for the wiping out of slums. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

 

Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America. With their continued cooperation we will do all in our power to end the piling up of huge surpluses which spelled ruinous prices for their crops. We will persist in successful action for better land use, for reforestation, for the conservation of water all the way from its source to the sea, for drought and flood control, for better marketing facilities for farm commodities, for a definite reduction of farm tenancy, for encouragement of farmer cooperatives, for crop insurance and stable food supply. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

 

Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.

 

Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless – that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief – to purge the rolls by starvation. To use the language of the stock broker, our needy unemployed would be cared for when, as, and if some fairy godmother should happen on the scene.

 

You and I will continue to refuse to accept that estimate of our unemployed fellow Americans. Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.

 

Again – what of our objectives?

 

Of course we will continue our efforts for young men and women so that they may obtain an education and an opportunity to put it to use. Of course we will continue our help for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged. Of course we will continue to protect the consumer against unnecessary price spreads, against the costs that are added by monopoly and speculation. We will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.

 

For these things, too, and for a multitude of others like them, we have only just begun to fight.

 

* 

November 3: Roosevelt crushes Alf Landon in the presidential election, winning the electoral vote 523-8. Says one Republican advisor later, “The Lord couldn’t have beaten Roosevelt in 1936.” (1127/40)

 

* 

Sit-down strikes take hold. 

December 28: Striking workers at a General Motors plant in Cleveland lay down their tools and, rather than walk out, launch a sit-down strike. Two days later, GM workers in Flint, Michigan sit down. Fifteen more plants, with a total of 140,000 workers follow, bringing production to a halt. 

GM officials respond by turning off the heat and directing police to stop all shipments of food to the strikers. Police sprayed pickets with buckshot and tear gas.

 

“We wanted peace. General Motors chose war. Give it to them!” shouted a voice over a loudspeaker, and the strikers did, with pipes, door hinges, coffee mugs, pop bottles, and an icy blast from the company’s fire hose. After an all-night battle in which 14 men were wounded, the strikers succeeded in routing the police. (1129/167)

 

Union workers sing this song:

When they tie the can to a union man,

Sit down! Sit down! 

When they give him the sack they'll take him back,

Sit down! Sit down! 

When the speed-up comes, just twiddle your thumbs,

Sit down! Sit down! 

When the boss won’t talk, don’t take a walk,

Sit down! Sit down!

 

When Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan asked John L. Lewis what he would do if the National Guard were called to clear out strikers, Lewis replied,

 

You want my answer, Sir? I give it to you. Tomorrow morning, I shall personally enter General Motors plant Chevrolet No. 4. I shall order the men to disregard your order. I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divests myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt and bare my bosom. Then when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first those bullets will strike. And as my body falls from that window to the ground, you listen to the voice of your grandfather as he whispers in your ear, “Frank, are you sure you are doing the right thing?” Murphy, whose grandfather had been hanged in the Irish rebellion, blanched and tore up his order. He further forbade General Motors to bar the delivery of food to the strikers and with great tact held further violence at bay. (1129-169)

 

Sit down strikes spread. Woolworth clerks napped on counters. New Jersey barbers sat in their chairs. Striking chefs at the Willard Hotel in D.C. sat atop a cold stove for a picture. Striking seamen lounged in deck chairs on the S.S. President Roosevelt. Workers in a hosiery factory slept in the factory, until the strike was won.