Georgia Cracker

Franklin D. Roosevelt makes a great public display of his affection for Georgia. Never a visit does he pay to Warm Springs without a hearty greeting to his "second home" and his "adopted State." To make that sentiment a reality he bought a 1,700-acre farm near Warm Springs, became a Georgia taxpayer.

But, with the exception of the late Eugene R. Black as Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, President Roosevelt has lifted no Georgian to high place as Cabinet member, ambassador, brain-truster, first-rank administrator. His CWA and NRA nettled Georgians by boosting the price of their cheap labor. His AAA drained the tills of Georgia textile millers with the cotton processing tax. His FERA humiliated Georgia by adjudging its elected officials incompetent to administer relief, appointing a Federal representative in their stead. His PWA last week canceled four loans to Georgia, impugned the good faith of its Governor (see p. 10). That Georgia does not care so much for Franklin D. Roosevelt as it did in the bandwagon days of 1932 was proven last year when it overwhelmingly re-elected Democratic Governor Eugene Talmadge on a violently anti-New Deal platform.

With this mandate to speak for the State, scraggle-haired, bespectacled Governor Talmadge has bawled unceasingly against the New Deal and all its works. Last week he announced that he was about to stump the entire cotton belt "telling the people just how they are being hoodwinked by this policy of destroying cotton, wheat and corn." Politically proud that he is a "dirt farmer," Governor Talmadge also sounded off characteristically with declarations that Secretary Wallace should be sentenced to two years behind a plow, that he knew little about Undersecretary Tugwell except that "they tell me he is poison ivy to the farmers."

Then Governor Talmadge did something he had not dared do before--took a personal crack at President Roosevelt. His cracker:

"Any man who condones the NRA, the AAA and other things now going on in this country is a radical in the extreme. The greatest calamity to this country is that President Roosevelt can't walk around and hunt up people to talk to. He can only talk to those his secretaries and assistants allow to come in to see him --and 99% of this crowd is the 'gimme' crowd.

"It would be a national calamity, a calamity to the Democratic Party if he is renominated. ... As long as the Administration keeps up the present program of trying to establish a fake prosperity from scarcity I will continue to fight until we whip them.

"There will probably be a third party in 1936. The next President will be a man who knows what it is to work in the sun 14 hours a day. That man will be able to walk a two by four plank, too."

Retorts to such talk were not long in coming. In session at Augusta, the Georgia Federation of Labor hotly resolved: "Governor Talmadge went so far as to insultingly refer to Roosevelt's unfortunate personal affliction. . . . We express our deep regret in this unwarranted and contemptible action on the part of Governor Talmadge. We desire to say to Governor Talmadge that President Roosevelt's acts have clearly demonstrated that his heart and head are in no way afflicted, and, with apologies to the rest of the nation, we regret that we cannot say the same for the present Governor of Georgia."

When Administrator Hopkins followed up Secretary Ickes' cancellation of PWA loans to Georgia with the announcement that Georgia would get no more direct relief funds after June i, Delaware's Daniel Oren Hastings did his duty as chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee by uprising on the Senate floor to storm: "Politics played at the expense of human misery, no matter what the excuse, smells badly and is nauseous to every right-thinking person in the country. It is lamentable that in venting its spleen against political enemies, unfortunate citizens must be denied a measure of relief."

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