For God and Roosevelt

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Your admirable editorial in today's CRIMSON seems to me to contain a point which cannot be overemphasized in connection with the New Deal. The sentiments of the administration as expressed in the speech of Governor Sweet at the National Council of Students in Politics last week were that all students should support the New Deal, back Roosevelt, trust in God, and everything would then come out all right. No attempt was made to clarify, define, or indicate the lines along which the New Deal was progressing. Nor were the lines of transition from a trust in Roosevelt to a trust in God indicated.

If this attitude were prevalent only in the mind of Governor Sweet it would not be worth mentioning. Unfortunately this is not the case. The Secretary of Agriculture, as the CRIMSON so well pointed out, wants the youth movement to back the New Deal, and to insure that its aims and ideals are carried out to their fullest realization. But the Secretary made no attempt to define the purposes of the New Deal.

The same note of blind optimism, almost pathologic in its character, pervades the entire Washington scene. President Roosevelt in his admirably phrased message to Congress refers to "those for whom recovery means a reform of many old methods, a permanent readjustment of many of our ways of thinking, and therefore of many of our social and economic arrangements." But the President makes no specific reference as to what general plan this "readjustment of our ways of thinking" are to take.

The inference can only be either that the Administration is blindly optimistic; that it is assured that somehow or other things will come out all right in the end; or that it is strictly opportunistic in its character. It asks for the support of the country in whatever it takes because the hand of God is upon it. This attitude--and even the most cursory examination of the utterances of Administration spokesmen will evidence its truth--smacks of Fascist doctrine too strongly to permit our viewing the situation without some misgivings. Victor H. Kramer '35.