"The Strangest Campaign"

It was political harvest time. Candidate Roosevelt set out across 1,800 miles of the richest voting soil in the U.S.

Everywhere the crowds were reminiscent of 1936 and 1940. In Wilmington, Del., thousands (many of them shipworkers) overflowed the railroad station to see Franklin Roosevelt, hatless on a raw day, make a brief rear-platform appearance. The 13-car train chuffed past a lonely country road, where 50 schoolchildren, shepherded by an anxious teacher, waved at the President. In Chester, Pa., 2,000 were at the station, though the train did not stop. And at Philadelphia, perhaps 800,000 people lined the streets, sometimes pushing their way close in beside the slow-moving open limousine, through a four-hour, 40-mile tour of the city, the Navy yard, and Camden across the river. Rain fell; the temperature fell as low as 27DEG.

That night in Shibe Park 40,000 shivering Philadelphians cheered Franklin Roosevelt, again hatless, but with a warm-sleeved sweater poking out under his cuffs, as he delivered a fighting 40-minute speech. He began with biting sarcasm: "I wonder whatever became of the suggestion that I had failed for political reasons to send enough forces or supplies to General MacArthur. Now, of course, I realize that ... it is considered by some to be very impolite to mention that there's a war on. In that war I bear a responsibility that I can never shirk. . . . For the Constitution of the United States says--and I hope you'll pardon me if I quote it correctly--the Constitution says the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy."

Candidate Roosevelt described the complex task of Commander in Chief Roosevelt: the intricate planning and timing of 27 D-days in the past year. Sometimes he spiced his story with new statistics ("here's a piece of news--more than half of our [8,000,000] Army is overseas"). Sometimes he used his news items to jab at Tom Dewey: of Admiral Halsey's victorious Third Fleet, all the battleships, all but two of the cruisers and all the aircraft carriers had been authorized during his Administration, and before Pearl Harbor. "There's the answer to a Republican candidate who said that this Administration had made 'absolutely no military preparation for the events that it now claims it foresaw.' "

"The Feelings of a Parent." Franklin Roosevelt took up another Dewey challenge: "I can speak as one who knows something of the feelings of a parent with sons who are in the battlelines overseas. . . . When this great job of winning the war is done, the men will be ... returned to their homes just as rapidly as possible.... I am pledged to that. The very law of the land, enacted by Congress, is pledged to that. . . . [Meantime] our fighting men are being given . . . the best equipment, the best arms, the best food, the best medical care."

To Franklin Roosevelt, "the miracle of our production here back home . . . has been due to the efforts of American business and American labor and American farmers--working together as a patriotic team." He was proud of the Republicans who had put "patriotism above party" to join his wartime Administration. Then he added: "But unfortunately there are some Republican politicians, in and out of the Congress, who are introducing a very ugly implication--that the Republicans in the Congress would cooperate with a Republican President in establishing a world organization for peace while at the same time they are clearly intimating that they would not cooperate toward the same end in event of a Democratic victory." Said the President scornfully: "I do not think that the American people will take kindly to this policy of 'vote my way or I won't play.' "

"Those Worn-Out Crackpots." Next day, as the special train crossed Ohio and Indiana. Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers (Judge Sam Rosenman, Playwright Robert Sherwood) worked hard to trim the big Chicago speech from 9,000 to 3,000 words. At Fort Wayne, there was an interruption: the President left the train for a specially built platform, standing high over a square where a crowd of 24,000 was gathered. The President, who knew that many wanted to reassure themselves about his health, said: "I am in the middle of a war, and so are you. . . . It is quite a job, but I am perfectly able to take it and so are you."

He arrived in Chicago too late to tour the flag-draped streets, but the rally for him at Soldier Field was the biggest in Chicago's history. People with lunchboxes and blankets lined up outside the stadium six hours before his speech. The 110,000-capacity stadium was filled, and outside, another 150,000 were unable to get in--one of the biggest of all U.S. political audiences.

The cheering lasted ten minutes, as the President's car entered the stadium, half-circled the field, then drove up on a ramp. Microphones were set up on the tonneau, and the President spoke from his car. Again he opened with sarcasm: "This is the strangest campaign I have ever seen. I have listened to various Republican orators . . . and what do they say? 'Those incompetent blunderers and bunglers in Washington have passed a lot of excellent laws about social security and labor and farm relief and soil conservation. . . . Those same quarrelsome, tired old men, they have built the greatest military machine the world has ever known, which is fighting its way to victory, and they say, if you elect us we promise not to change any of that. . . .' They also say, in effect: Those inefficient and worn-out crackpots have really begun to lay the foundations of a lasting world peace. If you elect us we will not change any of that, either. But,' they whisper, 'well do it in such a way that we won't lose the support even of Gerald Nye or Gerald Smith [or] the Chicago Tribune.' "

"Free Enterprise." Then the President outlined his conception of the future: of a U.S. foreign trade that would treble; of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee; construction of "well over a million homes a year for at least ten years"; new TVAs on the Missouri, Arkansas and Columbia; a "genuine crop-insurance program"; full employment with 60 million Americans at work. He bore down heavily on his devotion to private initiative: "I believe in free enterprise--and always have. I believe in the profit system--and always have. I believe that private enterprise can give full employment to our people.

"I believe in exceptional rewards for innovation, skill, and risk-taking by business. We shall lift production and price control as soon as they are no longer needed--encouraging private business to produce ... in ever-increasing volume, under free and open competition.

"If anyone feels that my faith in our ability to provide 60 million peacetime jobs is fantastic, let him remember that some people said the same thing about my demand in 1940 for 50,000 airplanes."

Franklin Roosevelt got frequent cheers by recalling apple-selling veterans, 4-c- hogs, 20-c- wheat, and the "moGULS" of 1929, who "still control the destinies of the Republican party." He concluded: "We are not going to turn the clock back. We are going forward, my friends."

At the end of his.speech, the President's car moved slowly down from the ramp, and as it left the stadium shouts could still be heard "We want Roosevelt." New Dealers exuberantly asserted that Franklin Roosevelt had won both Illinois and Pennsylvania, began to talk of a landslide.

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