Smith Speeches

Boston. Parrying the Hoover charge of '"Socialism!" (see p. 7) was the main concern of Nominee Smith's speech last week at Boston. The technique was characteristically Smithian, taking a text out of his opponent's mouth and working for a reductio ad absurdum. The Boston text was Mr. Hoover's: "We shall use words to convey our meaning, not to hide it."

The defensive thesis was that crying "Socialism!" is an old trick of "The Interests." Besides defense, however, there was an offensive.

Nominee Smith returned to the as-yet-undefended illegal renewal of Oilman Sinclair's lease in the Salt Creek field, Wyoming, by National G. O. P. Chairman Hubert Work when he was Secretary of the Interior last winter (TIME, Oct. 22). He requoted Dr. Work's famed remark: "People are tired of hearing of these oil leases." He quoted Nominee Hoover's one comment: "I will not discuss that matter." The textile depression in New England was a fair target for the critic of Coolidge Prosperity. Nominee Smith cited the average wage of textile workers, $17.30 per week, and contrasted it with an advertisement published in Boston by the G. O. P. The advertisement advertised that the G. O. P. had put "a chicken in every pot," had "filled the workingman's dinner pail and his gasoline tank besides and placed the whole nation in the silk-stocking class." Said Nominee Smith: "Now, just draw on your imagination for a moment and see if you can in your mind's eye picture a man at $17.30 a week going out to a chicken dinner in his own automobile, with silk socks on."

He attacked Prohibition: "If my plan is socialistic, then the present bootlegging and hijacking and racketeering that is going on is anarchy!"

Philadelphia. After the icy rebukes of Charles Evans Hughes--that he had "stooped too low to conquer," etc., etc.-- it was not surprising that Nominee Smith was boiling inwardly on his way to Philadelphia. His wrath became apparent during the delivery of his Philadelphia speech, in the bitterness of his tone and the fre quent unleashing of angry "ain'ts," which discreet shorthand reporters corrected into ''is nots" and "have nots" but which there was no concealing from the radio audience.

He did not, however, take issue with Hooverizer Hughes on the subject of platform etiquette. He conserved radio time by hushing the gallery orators and plunging straight into Prohibition. His text was Hooverizer Hughes' remark, a few days prior in Missouri, about the Prohibition issue being a "sham battle."

He said: "I will assure the distinguished Republican representative that this is no sham battle. This is a real fight ; and it is not a fight upon the merits or the demerits of the Eighteenth Amendment or the sustaining legislation; it is a fight against bribery, corruption, lawlessness, intemperance and disregard and disrespect for all law.

"And the American people do not fight sham battles when these questions are at issue."

His cloud of witnesses to the demoralizing nature of Prohibition in its present form were President-Emeritus Hadley of Yale, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson. He said: "I would like to ask Governor Hughes-- a simple question. . . . Is he satisfied with the condition that exists today?"

Next was quoted Nominee Hoover's 1918 expression about Beer v. Whiskey and Gin, including the famed remark: "It is mighty hard to get drunk on two and three quarters per cent beer."

Further fire:

"Still, Mr. Hoover seems to think that it is a noble experiment. What he intends to do is to appoint a commission to in vestigate.

"Why, there is no need to do that. He can send over to the Senate files in Washington and he will get so many volumes of testimony that four men could not carry them into his office."

In the Senate's files is some testimony by Nominee Hoover, given at a time when officials cogitated putting the U. S. Life Saving Service (Commerce Department) as well as the Coast Guard (Treasury Department) on Prohibition enforcement duty. Nominee Hoover agreed that the Coast Guard should do rum-chasing, but protested against including the Life Savers. He said: "I cannot conceive anything that would corrupt the fine traditions and personnel of those groups of men more than by having them plunged into police duty of that character."

Nominee Smith quoted this Hooverism and said: "Now, bear in mind, the forces that he was talking about were men that were under his control. He was perfectly satisfied to let the Coast Guard enforce prohibition, because they were under Andrew Mellon, but notice, he did not want his men to have anything to do with it. He was afraid they would be corrupted. . . . The noble experiment is all right but keep it away from my men."

". . . The Republican gossip is, 'Smith can't do anything about it.' That is quietly whispered around. When a Republican says, 'I think Smith is right on this question ; I am sure that he has the nerve and the sense to be able to tackle it,' the other fellow says, 'He can't do anything about it.'"

The Nominee said he had heard such gossip before, during all his eight years as Governor of New York, when he had to fight Republican legislatures for Smith-proposed reforms.

"How was it finally and eventually accomplished? I did not stay in the Executive Mansion in Albany and rest up and have a good time for myself. I went around the State of New York and I talked about these matters before the people, and in a little while I grew to be an expert in talking about them. I could imagine I had an audience before me by looking at two pie plates. . . .

"This is no sham battle. ... If I am elected President, I shall take this matter to the American people. I shall lay the facts before them in a clear, calm, deliberate way, and I shall suggest a remedy.

"I shall suggest the remedy that I set forth in my speech of acceptance predicated upon the Jeffersonian Democratic theory of the rights of the sovereign States.

"And I disagree entirely with Mr. Hoover and with Mr. Hughes and with all the Republican orators. I believe that under constructive, forward-looking leadership the American people themselves are fully competent to make the proper disposition of this question. So much for that."

To Nominee Hoover's Boston speech, in which Nominee Smith's proposal of a non-partisan Tariff Commission was represented as a proposal to take Tariff control away from Congress, the Smith retort was: "What is the idea of all that? . . . I never suggested that the power of Congress be handed over to a commission, . . I ask that the Tariff Commission be rehabilitated and be strengthened, that the right type of people be appointed to it ... to lay before Congress and the people of the United States the underlying facts that sustain the reason for every change in a tariff schedule.

"Now, Mr. Hoover knows just as well as I do that the power of making tariffs could not be transferred from Congress to a commission without an amendment to the Federal Constitution, and there was no reason for that statement at Boston, unless it was intended to mislead the people as to what my belief about the tariff is."

To Hooverizer Hughes's remark last week in Chicago, that "the Democrats, to take Smith's tariff plan, will have to eat more crow than the Democratic stomach can stand," the Smith retort was: ''What a delicious pot of crow the Governor [Hughes] is compelled to witness his party eating on the Federal Reserve Bank system.'' Then he announced that all Democratic members of and candidates for Congress had been telegraphed and asked if they would stand by the Smith tariff declaration. Four-fifths of these Democrats had replied in the affirmative, "the other 20% being away on campaign tours." Then came another potshot at Coolidge Economy.

"I think," concluded Nominee Smith, "I have fairly made out a case here tonight that the Republican Party is seeking to continue its control of this Government under false pretenses. It is seeking to keep that control by misstating and misrepresenting the Democratic attitude, and misstating, by the same token, and misrepresenting its own attitude on a great many of the big questions."

In Baltimore. The Smith words were again like the gallop of cavalry in brisk attack. Of Republican Foreign Policy he said: "You cannot preach one doctrine in Europe and practice another in Latin America." He flayed the G. O. P. for failure to reorganize the Government as promised, both in 1920 and in 1924. He ridiculed Mr. Hughes for saying that "prohibition" is a sham battle, while Senator Borah pronounces it the paramount issue of the campaign.

* Governor of New York, 1907-1910.