Tough Cookie

Two nights before Franklin Roosevelt's eloquent appearance in the Midwest last week (see p. 7), the man whom he snowed under at the polls in 1936. Alf Landon of Kansas, stepped to a microphone in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to do what he could as a challenger. "I know I can't compete with Mr. Roosevelt as a radio artist," said Mr. Landon, but he tried:

"During the last election there were seventeen million people who voted against the present Administration. I think if you would take a poll of these seventeen million people you would find an overwhelming majority of them believe in collective bargaining . . . social security . . . unemployment insurance. They believe in relief--relief to the needy and unemployed, but not the financing of a vast political machine under the false label of relief. They believe in a better distribution of wealth created, in raising the standard of living, and a great many other social reforms. . . .

"America has decided these issues. Regardless of what party comes into power, they will have to be carried forward be cause the majority of our people want them. But they want them to work. . . .

"As long as we are resigned to crooked ness and waste in government, we will continue to have a wasteful government. As long as we depend upon intellectual trick ery instead of truth, we will continue to have crowd psychology and propaganda, instead of well-informed public opinion.

". . . Unless there is a change in the President's methods and policies we will be right back in another depression as soon as the Government spending splurge is over."

When he had finished, his friends told Alf Landon he had done a good job. Franklin Roosevelt's friends watched the newspapers and, from the small headlines concluded that as a challenger, Alf Landon in 1938 was no more devastating than he was in 1936.

Friends of vividness in U. S. political oratory wished that Alf Landon had said over his national network at Council Bluffs something as readable as his impromptu remarks at Willis, Kans. two evenings be fore. There, before an audience of 1,500 farmers, Landon of Kansas unhitched his oratorical galluses and cracked:

"Tough cookies built this State--not cake-eaters. They had fire--in their bellies. The first job needed in this country is to put something in the bellies of its citizens--put some fire there! . . ."

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