The campaign is going well. Large and enthusiastic crowds at each stop who are eager to support the New Deal ticket to win the war and win the peace.
More information is filtering out about near debacle at the convention. The forces against H.A. were well organized and diverse. They included conservatives who want to halt any additional New Deal programs, big businessmen who want to be free of any government regulations, imperialists who want to expand U.S. hegemony around the world, isolationists who following the war want the U.S. to ignore the world, and southern segregationist who fear federal interference with their Jim Crow culture. On our side was labor, the progressives, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Because we beat the bosses, H.A. felt even more free to take on issues that the bosses wanted to ignore. He campaigned in neighborhoods absent from our 1940 tour. In New York, we appeared with New York City councilman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in Harlem to speak about Civil Rights and we did the same in Chicago with Congressman William L. Dawson. H.A. proudly attended integrated cocktail parties, even though he does not drink, in segregated Washington. H.A. is determined that all Americans will have an equal share of a prosperous postwar economy. I like to think that I have been a good influence on H.A., but I think I had little to do with it. It is just H.A. being H.A. H.A. has had a lot of good influences. For example, George Washington Carver, an associate of H.A.’s father while at Iowa State College, taught a young H.A. (he would have been around 6 years old), how to identify different parts and species of plants. George Washington Carver as a teacher! In Iowa! There is hope for this country – and its leading light is H.A.
H.A. campaigned on a lot of issues: full employment, responsible health and old-age insurance, low freight rates and improved roads, free enterprise and opportunity for small business, racial and gender equality, good schools, cultural resources, and a new international order to create economic opportunity and world peace. However, full employment was his main domestic issue, he said, “The greatest economic sin is the waste of human labor.” For some reason this scared some people (including people within our administration and campaign); however, among regular citizens H.A. is very popular.
© 2011 Ron Millar
© 2011 Ron Millar
