Franklin Roosevelt 1936: With Enemies like this, who needs friends?
Arthur M Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, The Age of Roosevelt, pages 519, 520
Two thousand guests gathered in the banquet hall of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on January 25, 1936. Among them were an even dozen du Ponts, old Democratic leaders like Davis and Ritchie, dissident younger Democrats like Warburg and Dean Acheson, businessmen like Winthrop Aldrich and Ernest T. Weir, and a miscellany of other figures like Elizabeth Dilling and her husband. The audience, according to the New York Times, “represented either through principals or attorneys, a large portion of the capitalistic wealth of the country.” For an hour Smith, resplendent in white tie and tails, assailed Roosevelt and all his works. “It is all right with me,” Smith said of the New Dealers, “if they want to disguise themselves as Karl Marx or Lenin or any of the rest of that bunch, but I won’t stand for their allowing them to march under the banner of Jackson or Cleveland.” (While he no longer mispronounced the word “radio,” he still frequently employed “ain’t,” enchanting listeners who had been repelled by precisely such solecisms eight years earlier.) His peroration summed up his message. “Let me give this solemn warning: There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow. There can be only one atmosphere of government, the clean, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of communistic Russia.” […]
One hearing that Smith was coming to Washington, Roosevelt had promptly asked him to spend the night at the White House, an invitation which Smith as promptly declined. […] And he had reason to be grateful to his old friend. Arthur Krock of the New York Times subsequently dated the revival of Roosevelt’s popularity in 1936 from the Liberty League dinner.
Page529
[Frank Knox, Republican Presidential hopeful and eventual vice president pick — 1936]. Knox somehow convinced himself there was a deep anti- New Deal groundswell throughout the nation. His editorials and speeches therefore took a rather mechanical anti- New Deal line, with much forthright talk of Marxism, “Tovarich Tugwell”, State socialism, and coercion supplanting liberty. “Upon what food does this our Caesar feed?” Knox cried in Los Angeles in 1935. “What madness has seized upon him? Does he not see how dangerously close this comes to conspiracy to break down our institutions of government?” After a certain amount of this, a newspaperman asked Roosevelt whether Knox and Hoover were on the Democratic payroll. “Strictly off the record,” the President replied, “it is a question of how much longer we can afford to pay them. They have been so successful they are raising their prices.”
His public expressions did Knox something of an injustice. Like Ickes, Pinchot, Richberg, and other TR devotees, the Colonel had adopted the Bull Moose rhetorical convention of picturesque exaggeration by which nothing seemed worth saying if not said at the top of one’s voice.
page 522
Late in January 1936 the forces gathered at Macon, Georgia to save teh republic — Thomas L Dixon, the author of the Clansman, Gerald L K Smith, an assortment of other southern spellbinders, and Eugene Talmadge himself, in a green double breasted suit with a sapphire pin on his black necktie. Above the platform hung the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy. On every seat lay a copy of the Georgia Woman’s World with a two-column photograph splashed across the page; it was as described by Vance Muse, “a picture of Mrs. Roosevelt going to some nigger meeting, with two escorts, niggers, on each arm.” […]
What gave the episode significance was the readiness of northern businessmen — who presumably knew by 1936 all that it was necessary to know about Gene Talmadge — to give him money to advance his ideas and ambitions. […]
Other attempts on the part of the Liberty Leaguers, du Pont section, to break through to the masses were even more ludicrous. One shrewd promoter sold them the idea of establishing something called the Farmers’ Independence Council. The only known address of the organization was the Liberty League office in Washington. “The biggest contributor,” remarked the Philadelphia Record, was that old hayseed, Lammot du Pont, who kicked in $5000. (Crops pretty good this year, ain’t they Lammot!) Other interested agriculturists were Sloan, Ogden, Mills, Wintrhop, Aldrich, and Pew of Sun Oil. Relentless congressional investigation failed to disclose a single working farmer in the membership.
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Dueling thoughts of the day.
Story Number One:Â Money in Politics as it is right now.
Story Number Two: RNC conference call warns of attacking Obama Personally.  Always a tricky business, because it does tend to get you where you need to get… for a good long while.