Oct, 2.
'Mr. William Randolph Hearst, the publisher of a notable string of newspapers all over the United, States, has been once again guilty' of drawing a red herring across the trail in the coming election of the} president of his country. No one can accuse Mr. Hearst of being a man of fixed ideas. In fact, the extraordinarily swift changes of point of view which he has displayed in his press have more than, once proved puzzling to those who, in attempting to count the pulse of the American public, have been. misled into believing that the Hearst journals, being amongst the most popular in the country, must) reflect to a fairly accurate degree, the opinions of their readers. brief study, however, is enough to convince the observer that the opinions reflected are not those of the large. portion of: the American public who read the daily news in his. journals, but are those of Mr. Hearst himself. And it is regrettable that these views are of such a weather-cock variety that their tendency is often difficult to understand. "To accuse President Roosevelt of being the secret! nominee of Moscow in the forthcoming presidential elections in the United States, as Mr. Hearst appears to have done, if the cabled, summaries of his articles are correct, is to reduce ordinary electioncering to an almost incredible pitch of absurdity. There is at) Present in the field against the, President a Communist candidate who, from his record as known even from his activities in China, can lay better claims to Moscow. affiliations. At the moment, to the sorrow of his supporters and to the curiosity of those who had thought that election campaigning in the Jand of liberty could not be cribbed, cabined, and confined by the whims, of petty police officials, Mr. Earl} Browder is languishing in an Indiana prison on a charge of, vagrancy. But his opposition to the, two major parties in the United States cannot be takea seriously; it be sufficient, with the assistance of the Union Parly sponsored by that eccentric priest, Father Coughlin, to cause the elec tion of the president in November' to be referred to the House of Re=
Presentatives. But nothing that President Roosevelt has said or done or Mr. Browder has left unsaid and undone, can be cited in support of the contention that Mr. Roosevelt is at heart a Communist and that Mr. Browder is simply an elaborate bluff which Moscow is attempting fo pull, as Mr. Hearst would apparently have the American public believe.
There is no desire on the part of this journal to take sides between Mr. Alfred London, the Republican candidate, and Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the affairs of the United States during the three and 4 half years or more that President Roosevelt has held office have} marked a most interesting stage in the efforts of the world to rid itself of a system which has brought about periodical cataclysms and to evolve something new but not. revolutionary, that the success or failure of the Roosevelt experiment of interest to many more beside those immediately affected by it, within the boundaries of the United! States. By November, or at least January, the verdict of those who have been most intimately affected by the moves which have accompanied President Roosevelt's search for a solution of his nation's prob-ems, will be known; the President will have either been confirmed in his office, or his rival will have been nominated to take over the reigns of government, If the latter is the case, Mr. London can congratulate himself that he will not have to unravel such a tangled skein as Mr, Hoover left for his successor. Whether the measures pressed by President Roosevelt and his "brain trust" are responsible for the recovery of conditions in the United States or not is disputed between liberals and conservatives, It may be argued that the United States would have recovered any~ how, in common with the general tendency towards recovery which has fortunately been noticeable the world over. But it cannot be denied that, when President Roosevelt took over, the United States was in the depth of one of the greatest economic crises in its his tory. Banks were closing all over the country, There was an unprecedented agricultural slump due, not to natural calamities such as have largely discounted the pres~ ent administration's attempted reforms, but to the too lavish gifts of nature, which were in turn over= emphasized by uncontrolled exploitation. There was over-production in industry' as well as agriculture; starvation in the midst of plenty; and men were without Jobs while machinery which could have kept them busy was growing rusty because no one wanted what it could produce. It was a situation that called for drastic remedies" and the Roosevelt administration, rightly or wrongly, applied the remedies that they thought best.
The good sense of the American electorate will probably prevent Mr. Hearst's Communist red herring from becoming an issue in the election campaign. There are many more important questions over which there can be differenced of opinion—so many, that observers predict that this year's election may be one of the most bitter in American history. The impartial looker-on may be a little pursed in the next few weeks by clection~ ering dialectics. One of the principal charges against the Roosevelt administration has been its prolific expenditure of public money and its inability to balance the American national budget But, as the chairman of the American Bankers' Association stated in San Francisco recently, at the annual meeting of his organization, no reasonable man can object to the expenditure of public money when it is a question of saving citizens of the country from destitution and starvation, That innumerable citizens of the United States were faced with these conditions during the carly months of the Roosevelt administration is a matter of history. It was one of the contentions of the Democrats at that time that the economfe con stitution of the United States needed important revisions. "Thely' lets, therefore, had a dual purpose: to relieve immediate distress and to ensure, according to their ights, that the conditions which ted up to that distress should not recur. The chief points of opposition in the present electoral campaign hinge round the latter. The one side maintain that President Roosevelt and his advisors did not go far enough along the path of reform of the economic and indus~ trial system; the other contend that the reform was unnecessary or, if needed, was carried out too precipitately' and without due regard to the existing circumstances, The vote in November which will tell the world what the American public really believes in these con= nections will be awaited with interest.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.