CONTRAST ON PLATFORM

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19129, 25 September 1936, Page 5

CONTRAST ON PLATFORM

LANDON AND ROOSEVELT APPEALS TO AMERICANS NEW YORK, Sept. 23. The Presidential contest has assumed full momentum. The Republican nominee, Mr. Alfred M. Landon, who is proving himself only an indifferent speaker, has eschewed all oratory, whereas President Roosevelt’s addresses are crowded with classical and literary allusions. What. Mr. Landon has advocated may he summarised a-s the. return of a liheraL, simple and lion-dictatorial government, while President Roosevelt has insisted that men of great wealth and power must awaken to the. full consciousness of their duty to the- poor and disinherited. The campaign has not been without oddities. The amusing and illuminating efforts of Mr. W. U. llearst- to drag the Communist issue into the contest by persistent allegations that President Roosevelt’s advisers were of Bolshevik sympathies and that the President himself was. the real, if unofficial, candidate of the Comintern have stirred up more tempest than it intrinsically merits, since the Communist vote in the United States in 1932, at the height of the depression., was less than, one-tenth per cent of the electorate and it is now estimated that Mr. Browder will probably receive only one twenty-fifth per cent of the vote. The New Deal continues to lead a Jekyll and Hyde existence. President Roosevelt, a few days ago, announced that he would advocate crop insurance as an anti-drought measure in the next Congress. Mr. Landon immediately issued a statement giving excerpts from a speech he was going to deliver next day advocating a similar measure. The Republicans made a great ado about W.P.A. workers .being employed on building so-called Roosevelt monuments, namely large roadside hoardings reading: "Vote Roosevelt.” The Democrats immediately retaliated by so timing the divulgence of the Nye munitions report, showing that a large American munitions firm helped to rearm Germany, that the disclosure coincided with, another divulgenee. that the head of the same firm was a large contributor to the Republican funds in the Maine campaign.