FRANKLY SPEAKING

Last week there was thunder on the right. Mr. Glenn Frank released his long-germinating Republican battle-chart for the scrutiny and approval of good anti-New Dealers everywhere. Like all well-written platforms, it makes pleasant reading, paints an inspiring Utopia, but makes little sense without an analysis of the economic and social skeleton that supports it. Under such a probe, Mr. Frank's essay shows up as something far different from the trumpet call to "the good life" that it purports to be.

That Mr. Frank is a clever man, no one can deny. His program twists and turns the New Deal mercilessly, and ends up by tagging it with the twin damnations--reaction and defeatism. It is reactionary, says Mr. Frank, because it restricts free enterprise, and it is defeatist because it assumes that America has reached a limit of economic expansion. The results of the reign of this two-headed monster Mr. Frank finds in many present-day aches and pains--the debt, the unemployed, taxes, and labor trouble. He then makes the promise that if the god of free enterprise be once more enthroned in Washington, not only will our present economic structure pick up, but it will soon expand to almost unrecognizable proportions.

The New Deal can be called reactionary only by a wild perversion of facts. Inheriting a host of problems raised by an unbridled free enterprise, it met and answered an anguished cry for action, and for a plan. Maybe America didn't come out of the depression quite as fast as some foreign countries, but it didn't end up in a war as fast, either. If public works are a less vicious shot in the arm than armament programs, and a little slower to take effect, still it is pleasanter to see a man driving over a bridge than bombing one. Undeniably the New Deal has made tremendous social reforms, but Mr. Frank, while admitting their value, still condemns the economic methods by which they were achieved. He makes sweeping accusations, and for a remedy would only restore the system that ran itself into the ground in 1929.

The New Deal is not essentially defeatist. True, it now emphasizes planned reform and regulation of private enterprise, but only because further expansion is impossible until the unjust distribution of wealth inherited from the older system is rooted out. Thus the New Deal concentrates on restoring health to the present economic structure, and rightly looks for expansion only after the patient is well.

In 1932 misery and revolt were everywhere in the land. To a fear-worn nation Franklin Roosevelt meant leadership and soccer. When in 1936 "the people approved," they did so because the New Deal stood for hope and security. If the present was not entirely without its troubles nor the future without its worries, still the people had faith in an administration which stood for something tangible--a comprehensive program of social and economic changes designed for the emergency and directed toward reform and recovery. On Election Day 1940 the people will not lightly cast aside that administration for one which offers nothing but platitudes and denunciations. It takes more than semantics to feed a nation.