"Gratitude"

Among those whose last-minute declarations were for Governor Smith, was Professor John Dewey of Columbia University, economist, philosopher, outstanding U. S. student of pedagogy. Professor Dewey published his three reasons in The New Republic and followed them up by calling on the Nominee at the head of a college delegation that included Dean Christian Gauss of Princeton and representatives from 49 other colleges and universities.

The Dewey reasons were Prohibition, Bigotry, Humanity. He said:

"Al Smith has brought the matter [Prohibition] into the open; he has destroyed the atmosphere of secrecy and insincerity that surrounded it; it cannot again be relegated to the hush-hush closet. From sheer gratitude for this clearing of a most poisonous atmosphere--which the Republican party and Mr. Hoover are both breathing and perpetuating--I shall vote for Mr. Smith. . . .

". . . Administrator for administrator, he is at least the equal of Mr. Hoover, and his extraordinary administrative abilities are as much controlled by a human sense of his fellow beings as Mr. Hoover's are by a hard 'efficiency' which works out to strengthen the position of just those economic interests that most need weakening instead of strengthening. I can hardly think of any insincerity greater, whether it is calculated or unconscious, than is involved in the attempt to 'sell' Mr. Hoover to the women of the country as a great humanitarian. That he is an efficient administrator of charity and semi-philanthropy in times of emergencies I shall not question. But if he has any human insight, dictated by consciousness of social needs, into the policies called for by the day-to-day life of his fellow human beings, either in domestic or international affairs, I have never seen the signs of it. His whole creed of complacent capitalistic individualism and of the right and duty of economic success commits him to the continuation of that hypocritical religion of 'prosperity' which is, in my judgment, the greatest force that exists at present in maintaining the unrealities of our social tone and temper."