To Change or Not to Change

Some 40,000,000 U. S. citizens this week looked forward to exercising their sovereign power over their Government. Rich & poor, black & white, male & female, busy & idle, wise & foolish, they had all been through three years of the hardest times in their country's history. At least ten million willing workers were the Idle Poor. Five thousand banks had gone under. In man's memory wheat prices had never been lower. Taxes were piled on top of the galling burden of private debt. Savings had been swept away by waves of industrial failure.

The nation was, of course, still surviving all these misfortunes. And September had showed a slight pick-up in employment. Bank failures were disappearing. Here & there factory chimneys began to smoke again. After many a false alarm business seemed in the act of struggling back to its feet. But there was abroad in the land a spirit of unrest such as the country had not known since the War. Then the spirit had been directed outward, against a foreign enemy. Now it was an internal trouble, the country contemplating itself.

Such were the circumstances in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party, out of power for twelve years, were offering the country a "New Deal" if Herbert Clark Hoover and the Republican Party were voted out of office. President Hoover, with scorn and defensive anger, was mocking Governor Roosevelt's promises as "a new shuffle," asking to be kept in office for the country's sake, not his own.

Outside the U. S. the Depression has played hob with politics. In Britain a Coalition Government has been plodding along through crises of which last week's was one of the gravest, with great riots in London. France has swung from Right to Left while Germany amid civil blood & thunder was swinging in the other direction. A revolution turned Spain from a monarchy into a republic. China has gone from chaos to chaos. As an antidote for hard times Japan has taken a fling at militarism. South America has spawned too many revolutions to count. The King of Siam has ceased to be the world's last absolute monarch. Of all great foreign powers only the Russian Soviets and the Italian Fascists have not had upheavals and overturns.

The U. S. has taken its economic smash with comparative calm. In 1930 when the Depression was still young the electorate swung strongly away from President Hoover and seated a Democratic House to plague him for the next two years. That was the last nation-wide index of the country's temper until the straw polls this autumn. There have been sporadic outbursts of disorder. At England, Ark. stores were raided. Near the Ford plant at Dearborn four persons were killed in an unemployment disturbance. Twenty thousand Bonuseers, marching to Washington last summer, kept the peace until Congress adjourned and might have stayed peaceful if troops had not been sent to evict them with tear-gas and bayonets. Last week 15,000 hungry jobless paraded in Chicago, shouted "hang Cermak and Hoover!" Communist efforts to organize the unemployed into a revolutionary force have significantly failed. Doubtless the most potent factor in keeping the country steady and averting even the threat of an armed uprising has been the certainty--such as exists in no other large country--that Nov. 8, 1932 would, in due constitutional order, bring a Presidential and Congressional election.

Speaking on a Lucky Strike radio hour last April before his nomination, Governor Roosevelt tried to personify the country's spirit of unrest in the Forgotten Man. Said he :

"These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the Forgotten Man at the bottom of the economic pyramid."

The Forgotten Man first appeared on the U. S. scene in 1883 when the late William Graham ("Billy") Sumner, professor of political and social science at Yale, delivered a famed lecture about him. Professor Sumner's character was no down-&-outer, no object of public charity but rather the ordinary citizen who, in the mass, is called upon to care for Society's weak, incompetent, and shiftless. Declared Professor Sumner:

"Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, ready to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. . . . He is the clean, quiet, virtuous, domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle. . . . He works, he votes, generally he prays--but he always pays. He is flattered before election. He is strongly patriotic. He is a commonplace man. He gives no trouble. He excites no admiration. [He] is always forgotten by sentimentalists, philanthropists, reformers, enthusiasts and every speculator in sociology, political economy or political science."

Governor Roosevelt did not define his character with equal precision, did not say who he was, where he lived, what he did. When Alfred Emanuel Smith first beheld Mr. Roosevelt's tactics he cried "Demagog!" at his old friend "Frank," hotly declared he would "take off my coat & vest and fight to the end against any candidate" who tried to set class against class, rich against poor. But as the campaign progressed, the Governor continued to flatter and comfort a vague and various mass of the electorate by charging that President Hoover had overlooked them in administering Depression relief.

If there is a Forgotten Man and if he will not forgive his forgetter, perhaps he will not trust his new champions. On the basis of this year's straw polls, about 1,700,000 protest votes are to be cast for Socialist Norman Thomas. Undoubtedly many an alleged Forgotten Man will, like Henry Ford, have failed to register or is otherwise ineligible to vote. It is also true that the forces against a Change are usually quietest when the likelihood of Change is most imminent. As of last week the election of 1932 looked like a narrower thing than it seemed last month, with the outcome locked in the breast of that unknown if not forgotten character, the Common Citizen.

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