"Viva la Democracia!"

Twenty years ago last week a tall, hard-working Democrat of 38 was in the midst of a speechmaking campaign throughout the U. S. No vast crowds attended his meetings, no swarms of reporters hung on his words. The atmosphere was heavy with the powerful speeches of William Borah and Henry Cabot Lodge, and only a fitful flickering came from the Democratic Presidential nominee, James Cox of Ohio. The illness of Woodrow Wilson filled Washington with rumors; war-sickened citizens wanted above all to get back to normal. Nobody paid much attention to the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate. He defended the League of Nations to an apathetic audience. No one then knew--since the radio was not then a political force--that his was the peerless radio voice of the future. The regular Democratic organizations had little money. The great bosses--Tom Taggart of Indiana, Charles Murphy of Tammany--knew that defeat was in the air. The local politicians hoped only to save something from the impending ruin. Arrangements were perfunctory. The candidate, with no expectation of victory, worked on toward the day when the ticket of Cox and Roosevelt would carry eleven States, get 127 electoral and 9,147,353 popular votes.

Shortly before midnight one night last week the ten-car Presidential Special, bearing President Roosevelt, some 25 newspapermen, 20 cameramen and photographers, about 40 members of the Presidential party, roared out of Washington northwestward along the Potomac. There had been nothing like it in 1920. Franklin Roosevelt was off on his non-political defense inspection tour of the important political States of Ohio and Pennsylvania, where Wendell Willkie had passed the week before. No estimates agreed on the number that turned out to cheer the President; but there were millions. No commentators agreed on the political advantage to the President of the trip; but it was great. There were innumerable signs of the aid to Democratic candidates carried by the power and prestige of the Presidency--"Senator Joe" Guffey put on a show of making up with Pennsylvania's Democratic National Committeeman David Lawrence by appearing with him on the train; hard-pressed Congressional Candidate Dow Harter received the Presidential blessing by appearing before his voters on the rear platform at Akron.

In the chill, foggy morning the President, a navy cape thrown over his shoulder, stood on the rear platform of his car, waved to a crowd at Johnstown while a high-school band played and cheers thundered in vast wavelike surges against the train. Down the Conemaugh River the train moved slowly past the fivemile, $7,600,000 cement flood-control walls that the President had promised Johnstown residents four years before. A sign along the banks read: "Thanks, Mr. President." In Pittsburgh, masses lined the streets solidly, cheering, roaring, waiting: Carnegie-Illinois steelworkers at the plant at Homestead, who last week greeted Wendell Willkie with boos; reverential Negroes of Pittsburgh's Harlem, who had watched silently, even resentfully, when the President's opponent passed; school children, let out of school for the day, who had jeered in shrill-voiced mockery at the Republican candidate. Now they were merged in a solid mass of organized enthusiasm that reached from Pittsburgh's East Liberty Station, up through the hills of Swissvale and Rankin, that poured out of the grimy factories and working-class homes to roar its sustained, unvaried, tumultuous welcome.

The President spent 21 minutes in the Homestead plant (armor plate), 15 minutes at the Mesta Machine Co. At Terrace Village, $14,000,000 project of the U. S. Housing Authority, he gave the keys of a four-room apartment to Steelworker Lester Churchfield, with a brief, extemporaneous speech on the meaning of housing and defense: "As long as they know that their Government is sympathetically working to protect their jobs and to better their homes, we can be confident that if the need arises the people themselves will wholeheartedly join in the defense of their homes and the defense of democracy."

Youngstown. No Willkie buttons showed along the way, except a furtive few in downtown Pittsburgh; no jeers were heard, save for one plaintive "Boo, Roosevelt"; one group of twelve-year-old boys chanted, "We want Willkie." It was the day for the masses to shout, and they knew it: under the bunting of Mahoning Avenue in Youngstown, swarming in a cheering, yelling horde on Federal Street, breaking through police lines to the car in which the President and Steelmaker Frank Purnell, president of Youngstown Sheet & Tube, were riding.* Democrats had no success in the steel country when Franklin Roosevelt campaigned in 1920; the great steel strike of 1919 was a raw memory; the Democratic machine was broken; a short, savage depression was beginning.

Akron. The train moved on. Another car had been added for local politicians. The President, sometimes flashing his smile at the crowd, sometimes appearing strangely concerned, moved through masses of humanity in which his name thundered and echoed like the roar of the surf. The crowd swarmed into the railway yards at Akron, stood on the tracks and the right of way, perched on the Market Street overpass, chanted his name until he appeared for an unscheduled, unpolitical speech: "You and I know the difficulties and dangers of these times in the world. . . . I believe, and I think most of you do, too, that the best way to avoid an attack is to be ready to meet one. And that is why, in the steel plants. . . I told the foremen and the men . . . that the one thing we all ought to work for in speeding up this program is more speed--the quicker, the better."

Dayton. While President Roosevelt spent three hours cutting his speech from 3,600 words to 2,513, the train moved from the Democratic to the Republican strongholds of Ohio. There were crowds in Columbus--big crowds--but none of the pellmell, jubilant, unrestrained and uncontrollable mass enthusiasm of Homestead, Youngstown, Akron. There were political complications: Republican Governor Bricker rode with the President; the Democratic candidate, ex-Governor Davey, rode far back in the procession. Then to Dayton to visit the National Military Home, to inspect Wright Field (where Captain Elliott Roosevelt is stationed), to have dinner with Publisher James Cox, his running mate 20 years before (at the publisher's home, called Trail's End), and to make early return to the train for his speech on hemispheric defense.

That speech (its first draft written by Judge Samuel Rosenman) had the lofty, sermonlike quality of the President's best affirmations of principle, more telling when given the benefit of his accomplished delivery than when read or quoted. It opened with a tribute to Columbus in which observers read political implications (since Italians in the U. S. reportedly resented the President's stab-in-the-back phrase in his speech at Charlottesville) and contained a reference to the Argentine Political Philosopher Juan Bautista Alberdi--"of Italian birth,"* interpolated the President.

But the speech held to a high level. Seated in a bare dining car that had been outfitted for broadcasting through all major chains, by short wave to South America, Franklin Roosevelt read solemnly, deliberately, with a trace of nervousness that newsmen noted. He affirmed the unity of the Americas:

"No one group or race in the New World has any desire to subjugate the others. . . .

"There are those in the Old World who persist in believing that here in this new hemisphere the Americas can be torn by the hatreds and fears that have drenched the battlegrounds of Europe for so many centuries. . . .

"We are determined to use our energies and our resources to counteract and repel the foreign plots, the propaganda, the whole technique of underground warfare originating in Europe and now clearly directed against all of the republics on this side of the ocean.

"That propaganda repeats and repeats that democracy is a decadent form of government. . . .

"We reject that thought. We say that we are the future. We say that the direction in which they would lead us is backward, not forward, backward to the bondage of the Pharaohs, backward to the slavery of the Middle Ages. . . ."

He linked hemispheric defense to freedom of the seas: "We include the right to the peaceful use of the Atlantic Ocean and of the Pacific Ocean." He denied that "the course the Americas are following is slowly drawing one or all of us into war." Said he: "This country wants no war with any nation. This hemisphere wants no war with any nation." He salved South American pride with the statement that newly acquired U. S. naval bases were open to other republics of the Western Hemisphere for cooperative use. And he came to a defiant climax:

"The Americas will not be scared or threatened into the ways the dictators want us to follow. . . .

"No combination of dictator countries of Europe and Asia will stop the help that we are giving to almost the last free people now fighting to hold them at bay. . . . "We will continue to pile up our defense and our armaments. We will continue to help those who resist aggression and who now hold the aggressors far from our shores. . . .

"I speak bluntly. I speak the love the American people have for freedom and liberty and decency and humanity. . . .

"The men and the women of Britain have shown how free people defend what they know to be right. Their heroic defense will be recorded for all time. It will be perpetual proof that democracy, when put to the test, can show the stuff of which it is made.

"I well recall during my recent visit to three capital cities in South America the vast throngs which came to express by their cheers their friendship for the United States. I remember especially that above all the cheers I heard one constant cry again and again, one shout above all others: 'Viva la Democracia!' . . .

"As I salute the people of all the nations in all the western world, I echo that greeting from our good neighbors of the Americas: 'Viva la Democracia!'--'Long Live Democracy!''

The train started back a few moments later for Washington. The President had hurried through his speech, finished five minutes early. As if pondering on how greatly democracy had changed in the 20 years since his Vice-Presidential race, the President remarked to a broadcast company representative that in his 1920 campaign he had made 850 speeches. The 850 had probably reached a smaller total audience than were reached by this one. As praise for the first big speech of his 1940 campaign rolled in, Franklin Roosevelt may well have pondered what the last 20 years had done to la democracia.

Last week the President also:

>Froze all Rumanian funds in the U. S. (estimate: $100,000,000) after German troops entered the country.

>Asked Congress to allocate $30,076,000 for rivers and harbors improvements in the interests of national defense.

>In opening the annual Mobilization for Human Needs, appealed to U. S. citizens to give freely to private charity: "Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fibre of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough."

* Willkie headquarters at Youngstown carried a 46-foot banner that read, "Welcome, Mr. President."

* The President "misspoke," since Senor Alberdi was born in Tucuman, in Argentina.

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