My first Presidential vote was cast in this election (1896) and, while I put it on the line for the Republican ticket, it was without any enthusiasm. However, in the same election I voted for John P. Altgeld, who was running for re-election as Governor of Illinois on the Democratic ticket. I felt that he had been a greatly traduced man. How the Chicago Tribune and others had smeared this humane and courageous man because he had fought for the underdog, and especially because he had pardoned those who still lived of the innocent victims who had been railroaded to the penitentiary after the Haymarket riot! So far as I could see, Altgeld stood about where I wanted to stand on social questions.

Many billions of dollars could properly be spent in the United States on permanent improvements. Such spending would not only help us out of the depression, it would do much for the health, well-being and prosperity of the people. I refuse to believe that providing an adequate water supply for a municipality or putting in a sewage system is a wasteful expenditure of money. Any money spent in such fashion as to make our people healthier and happier human beings is not only a good social investment, it is sound from a strictly financial point of view. I can think of no better investment, for instance, than money paid out to provide education and to safeguard the health of the people.

Most of us will remember how boldly he (Franklin D. Roosevelt) attacked the most desperate problem that ever faced a Chief Executive, not excepting the one that had confronted Abraham Lincoln nearly seventy-five years before.

The "business administrations" that had been going on in Washington under three Presidents had ruined virtually everybody in the country (as well as their own reputations). Spurred by an existing national emergency, a panicky Congress lost no time in passing, among other pieces of remedial legislation, the National Industrial Recovery Act, hereinafter referred to as the NIRA. Congress, it seemed, could move faster in those days than it did subsequently, when it developed a slow, painstaking, and supercritical streak, which it continued to maintain even when the Nazi dogs were ready to spring at our throats. But in 1933 Congress quickly turned into flour the grist that came to it in the form of the NIRA. First off, it appropriated the then staggering sum of $3,300,000,000 to be spent on permanent public works, and it gave the Administrator, to be appointed by the President, the right to set up a Public Works Administration. The President honored me with that appointment.

Mr. Ickes knows all the rackets that infest the construction industry. He is a terror to collective bidders and skimping contractors. He warns that the PWA fund is a sacred trust fund and that only traitors would graft on a project undertaken to save people from hunger. He insists on fidelity to specifications; cancels violated contracts mercilessly, sends inspectors to see that men in their eagerness to work are not robbed of pay by the kickback swindle.

We should never forget that, in an era of unrest, a demagogue even as fantastic as Hitler first appeared to be can develop at such a pace that, before we realize it, he is beyond our catching. There are men here, and in England and in France as well, who believe in their hearts that a dictatorship is more desirable than democratic self-government. Given a brutal dictator such as Hitler, union labor could be "put in its place and kept there." In the thought of some of our prominent citizens, including persons inside of Congress, and even within our administrative agencies, the "place of labor" is at a machine for long hours at a bare subsistence wage. A dictator would also make short shrift of the farmers who think that they ought to have at least a decent living out of their long hours of sweaty toil. There are those among us who, without compunction, would reduce free-born farmers to the serfdom to which Hitler has consigned, in Europe, men who live on and by the land.

That types of American big business and concentrated wealth are not afraid of a dictatorship, even such a one as Hitler's, is attested by recent shocking disclosures with respect to secret and intimate business alliances between them and German big business-alliances that deliberately strike at the common man.