Broad & Sound

One fine frosty morning last week President Roosevelt drove up to the Capitol, entered the House of Representatives' wing, mounted the Speaker's platform.

As he spread out his arms and grasped the edge of the lectern to deliver to Congress the message on the State of the Union which the Constitution requires of him, he looked down at the floor and saw his Cabinet, and some 500 Senators and Representatives. He looked up at the gallery and saw his mother, his wife, his daughter, his daughters-in-law, his granddaughter.

To Franklin Roosevelt it must have seemed that he was the centre of the nation's interest. Yet in the newspapers of that day and the next the President and his speech were unceremoniously jostled to one side on the front page by dispatches from a small New Jersey town where a German ex-convict was on trial for the murder of the son of a popular aviator (see p. 16).

The President found himself second in the news not because his words lacked their usual magic but because editors found his speech too generalized to get a good newsworthy grip on. A quarter of his address was given over to warding off criticism. His declaration that the profit motive should not be destroyed answered a question whose embers have for six months gradually been growing cold. Headline sentence: "The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief." Keywords of his theme: "broad" and "sound"--"broad program," "broad problem," "broad subjects," "broad outlines," "broad principles," "sound policy," "sound administration," "sound conditions." The two points on which he made news:

The Dole "The stark fact before us is that great numbers still remain unemployed. . . . The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral distintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. ... I am not willing that the vitality of our people be further sapped by the giving of cash, of market baskets, of a few hours of weekly work cutting grass, raking leaves or picking up papers in the public parks. . . ."

Work Relief. "There are ... 3,500,000 employable people who are on relief. ... It is a duty dictated by every intelligent consideration of national policy to ask you to make it possible for the United States to give employment to all of these 3,500,000 employable people. . . . It is my thought that . . . all emergency public works shall be united in a single new and greatly enlarged plan. . . .

"All work undertaken should be useful. . . . Compensation . . . should be ... larger than the amount now received as a relief dole but ... riot so large as to encourage the rejection of opportunities for private employment. . . . Projects should be undertaken on which a large percentage of direct labor can be used. Preference should be given to those projects which will be self-liquidating. . . . Projects . . . should be selected . . . to compete as little as possible with private enterprises. . . .

"I have arrived at certain very definite convictions as to the amount of money that will be necessary for the sort of public projects that I have described. ... I assure you now they will be within the sound credit of the Government Clearance of slums . . . rural housing . . . rural electrification . . . reforestation . . . soil erosion . . . highways . . . elimination of grade crossings . . . CCC.

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