CAMPAIGN: War on Straddlebugs

One of the few things "Uncle Dan" Roper did for the New Deal, besides afford unintentional comic relief as Secretary of Commerce, was help Jim Farley organize the Young Democratic Clubs of America. Young Democrats are aged 21 to 39 and some 5,000,000 of them are now enrolled. They held conventions in 1933 (Kansas City), 1935 (Milwaukee), 1937 (Indianapolis), but not until last week, when 10,000 of them assembled at Pittsburgh for a war dance in Duquesne Garden, did they have much national significance. Then they suddenly seemed very important indeed, because their seniors in the New Deal organized and used the meeting as the first big sounding board for their 1940 campaign to prolong Franklin Delano Rooseveltism.

Claude Pepper, 38, the drawling, slick-haired junior Senator from Florida, had his last word drowned in thunderous cheers when he keynoted for a "third term for Roosevelt's ideals." Josh Lee, the junior Senator from Oklahoma, caused pandemonium by yelling: "Now is the time to unleash the devil dogs of democracy and set them baying on the trail of the Wolf of Wall Street! America, now is the time to unsheathe the sword of human rights! Now is the time to raise the banner of Roosevelt for 1940!"

Solicitor General Robert Jackson got an ovation when he cried: "They [Republicans] have struck at Roosevelt. But what they have hit is the American people. . . . The third-term demand is the people's answer to the efforts of reactionary politicians to eliminate the Roosevelt ideas from the 1940 campaign. . . ."

But the noisiest demonstration of all followed the reading of a message from Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By his own account, he chose his words with extreme care so that their meaning should be pikestaff plain:

". . . The Democratic Party will not survive as an effective force in the nation if the voters have to choose between a Republican tweedledum and a Democratic tweedledummer.

"If we nominate conservative candidates, or lip-service candidates, on a straddlebug platform, I personally, for my own self-respect and because of my long service to, and belief in, liberal democracy, will find it impossible to have any active part in such an unfortunate suicide of the old Democratic Party."

When Al Smith bolted the Democratic Party, he simply said he would "take a walk." Analysts of Franklin Roosevelt's straddlebug epic could find in it, beyond the threat to bolt if he does not like the 1940 nominee, no threat to found a third party. But it did definitely, for the record, announce that Franklin Roosevelt will dictate the next nomination, or else.