Sachem Speaks

"Unless you're ready to subscribe to the New Deal 100% and sign your name on the dotted line you're a Tory, you're a prince of privilege, you're a reactionary, or you're an economic royalist. Now, my dear ladies, bear in mind that ... the smear department of the [Democratic] National Committee will be working overtime tonight to see if it isn't possible to tie you all up to the predatory interests. . . ."

So saying, Alfred E. Smith in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall opened an address last week to a political group known as the Independent Coalition of American Women. Forty-five minutes later he closed it, saying:

"If the Administration in Washington, no matter what it desires to call itself, had lived up to that Democratic platform that was adopted in Chicago in 1932, and if it had remained true to the principles of Jefferson . . . I know where I'd be, I'd be at the National Democratic Committee headquarters, where I've been for so many years, ready to bat for a success, but I can't see how anybody can expect me to battle for or even defend a failure. . . .

"I am an American before I am a Democrat, before I am a Republican or before I'm anything, and I have never in my long public career ducked, dodged and pussyfooted, I have never found fault with anything unless I was prepared to suggest a remedy. . . . I firmly believe that the remedy for all the ills that we are suffering from today is the election of Alfred M. Landon."

In Atlantic City a former advertising man listening by radio, died of a heart attack. His wife said he "seemed to get a little excited over some of the things Mr. Smith said." Only a little less excited by the Smith speech were the New Deal Democrats, who denounced him as a pitiable, embittered old has-been; Republicans and anti-New Dealers, who proclaimed that Al Smith's popularity would swing several doubtful states into the Republican column. In a local Tammany club on Manhattan's East Side, Sachem Al Smith's picture was taken from the wall because "we don't want the picture of any Benedict Arnold around here."

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