Dictators Challenged

When Harry Hopkins' small daughter Diana grows up, she ought to cherish a picture of herself which was taken last week, wedged into the President's gallery in the House of Representatives with the wife, uncle (Frederic Adrian Delano) and mother of the man who made her father famous. There Diana, who is six, listened to that man deliver his sixth annual address to Congress on the State of the Union. Diana's father can tell her that, up to a point, it was Franklin Roosevelt's most smashingly successful message since his "The only thing we have to fear is Fear" speech of March 1933. After the November elections had showed Mr. Roosevelt's political stock at a six-year low, last week's speech seized and dramatized the issue on which Mr. Roosevelt's personal popularity in the land was already sharply reviving: the U. S. v. Dictatorship.

Father Hopkins could also tell his daughter that this was the first message to Congress during the delivery of which Roosevelt II received a thoroughgoing razz from the Opposition.

Memorable excerpts from Franklin Roosevelt's 1939 message:

"A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted; but it has become increasingly clear that peace is not assured. All about us rage undeclared wars --military and economic. All about us grow more deadly armaments--military and economic. All about us are threats of new aggression--military and economic.

". . . In this Western Hemisphere we have, under a common ideal of democratic government, a rich diversity of resources and of peoples functioning together in mutual respect and peace. . . .

"But the world has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift that no nation can be safe in its will to peace so long as any other single powerful nation refuses to settle its grievances at the council table.

"We have learned that effective timing of defense, and the distant points from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what they were 20 years ago. We have learned that survival cannot be guaranteed by arming after the attack begins. . . .

. "If another form of government can present a united front in its attack on democracy, the attack must be met by a united democracy. Such a democracy can and must exist in the United States."

Wiser, Tougher. Thus Franklin Roosevelt once again struck, and struck vigorously, the keynote of contemporary U. S. feeling. In that key he proceeded to play the rest of his composition:

"Our nation's program of social and economic reform is . . . a part of defense as basic as armaments themselves. . . ." As part of "realistic national preparedness" during the last six years he listed conservation and development of natural resources, public health and welfare, agricultural aid, evolution of labor, credit system cleanup, morale-building among youth and the aged. He concluded:

"We are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1929 or 1932."

To make the U. S. still wiser, tougher, he was for overhauling: Social Security, public health, labor laws, set-up of the executive branch (reorganization), and the railroads.

By way of reassurance that a tougher nation did not mean to be tougher with Business, the President added: "We have now passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform. . . . The first duty of our statesmanship today is to bring capital and manpower together.

"Dictatorships do this by main force. . . . Can we compete with them by boldly seeking methods of putting idle men and idle capital together and, at the same time, remain within our American way of life? . . ."

Economy v. Spending. After triumphantly championing U. S. feeling against dictatorship, Franklin Roosevelt must have been shocked at what followed. No sooner had he broached the question of Government finances than he had his first opportunity in six years to know how Herbert Hoover used to feel facing a hostile Congress. As he spoke, his audience, the 76th Congress, awoke from its unanimously approving attentiveness. In the House chamber and over the air the U. S. heard the hard, masculine laughter of a party in opposition to Franklin Roosevelt.

"The whole subject of Government investing and Government income," he said, "is one which may be approached in two different ways. The first calls for elimination of enough activities of Government to bring the expenses . . . immediately into balance with income."

Someone on the Republican side started clapping. Then all the Republicans joined in loud and long. Franklin Roosevelt, his speech interrupted at an unintended point, stood with his mouth open, wiped his hand over his mouth, poked at his manuscript with his finger. Then he raised his chin, grinned challengingly and went on in a higher tone:

"This school of thought maintains that because our national income this year is only 60 billion dollars, ours is only a 60-billion-dollar country--"

Now it was the turn of loyal Democrats to applaud, and so they did, mocking the Republicans. When he could, the President went on:

"--that Government must treat it as such, and that without the help of Government it may some day, somehow, happen to become an 80-billion-dollar country."

Again the Democrats cheered, and the President proceeded to put the opposition on the political spot:

"If the Congress decides to accept this point of view it will logically have to reduce the present functions or activities of Government by one-third. The Congress will have to accept the responsibility. . . ." And he ironically listed some of the politically precious items on which the Congress might perhaps feel inclined to cut down: farm aid, veterans' pensions, flood control, Social Security, unemployment relief, national defense.

Still rubbing it in, he added: "The Congress alone has the power to do all this as it is the appropriating branch of the Government."

That was a mistake. The loudest applause of all followed, and not from Republicans alone but from both sides of the chamber.

Almost an anticlimax was the President's exposition of the alternative way, the Roosevelt-Eccles-Cohen way, of building up an 80-billion-dollar national income by continued Government spending. "We have learned," he said, "that it is unsafe to make abrupt reductions. . . . It is my conviction that down in their hearts the American public . . . wants this Congress to do whatever needs to be done to raise our national income to $80,000,000,000 a year. . . ."

The Peroration of Mr. Roosevelt's sixth Annual Address brought all hands up unanimously once more. "Dictatorship . . . involves costs which the American people will never pay . . . spiritual values. . . . The blessed right of being able to say what we please . . . freedom of religion . . . seeing our capital confiscated . . . being cast into a concentration camp. The cost of being afraid to walk down the street with the wrong neighbor . . . of having our children brought up . . . as pawns molded and enslaved by a machine."

Adolf Hitler was practically hammering on the Capitol's dome when Franklin Roosevelt closed with a quotation from Abraham Lincoln: "This generation will 'nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. . . . The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.' "

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