POLITICS & WAR

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 January 1940, Page 5

POLITICS & WAR

SPEECH BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT PLACING NATIONAL WELFARE FIRST. BUILDING ON ECONOMIC GAINS. By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright. NEW YORK, January 8. President Roosevelt, addressing Democrat leaders at so-called Jackson Day dinners throughout the nation, and at which there was some expectation that he might indicate his intentions concerning a third term of office, humorously referred to himself as being “supposed to be a self-made riddle,” and delivered a homily on politics behind the democratic form of' government. He insisted that devotion to the national welfare as a whole must transcend party interests. “People of the United States,” he said, “recognise two facts today. First, that the world outside our hemisphere is in really bad shape. This is a matter for realism. It is a fact so big that few people grasp its meaning, a fact so big in its effect on the future of the world that all our little partisan squabbles are shameful in the light of it. The second is that we have made great gains at home in our own economic prosperity and the security of individual citizens. These gains must not be chipped away. They must be only a foundation on which to build further gains.” The Washington correspondent of the United Press of America says that though the President’s remarks were good-humoured, they are, nevertheless, considered a blunt, forceful warning that the Democratic Party must continue to earn the support of liberal Republicans, progressives and others, who flocked to its standards from 1932 to 1936, and that the speech was an unmistakable declaration that Democrats cannot win with a Conservative Presidential candidate. MR LANDON PROTESTS “NOT A NON-PARTISAN SPEECH." THE PRESIDENT'S “FOXY WAY.” I (Received This Day, 10.10 a.m.) NEW YORK. January 9. A message from Topeka (Kansas) states that Mr’ Alfred Landon (President Roosevelt’s Republican opponent in the last Presidential election), who has frequently supported President Roosevelt's foreign policy, asserted that Mr Roosevelt's Jackson Day speech would make it difficult for the United States to “present a united front to the foreign countries watching us closely.” He added: “If the President would just give the spirit, of unity an opportunity to work, it would be so helpful. Instead he makes it difficult by his foxy way of playing with a third-term proposition and the business of inviting three Republicans to a Democratic meeting, then expressing regret that they didn't come. He knew they would not attend when they were invited. They had no business there. It was not a non-partisan speech and sounded more like a list of reasons why the Democrats should continue in power."