This is a graduation commencement speech that was written simply to appear on the printed page of a 1933 magazine - it was far too depressing to have ever been recited before an audience of eager-eared graduates and their doting relatives.
"You know, of course, that 'times are hard'... You know that less than ten percent of the post-graduate professional men from last year's class have found work. And you have heard from home. Allowances have been cut. Classmates have had to drop out of college. Old family friends have had grave misfortunes. Homes have been lost. You know all these things, but you can't realize them fully at this moment. You will, unfortunately, realize them only too well when you yourselves try to find a place in the world." Liberty publisher Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) was a reliable critic of FDR and his economic policies. In this column MacFadden lambasts the President for making error after error and learning from none of them. He points out that the open market economy of the United States has traditionally provided Americans with the world's highest standard of living, and yet:
"They would like to ignore precedent... entirely cast aside and forget the extraordinary results of our experiences in following the American system. They hate business and everything connected with it." "Scrip (sometimes called chit) is a term for any substitute for legal tender and is often a form of credit" - so reads the Wikipedia definition for those items that served as currency in those portions of the U.S. where the bucks were scarce.
The attached news column tells a scrip story from the Great Depression - the sort of story that was probably most common on the old frontier. Columnist George Sokolosky (1893 - 1962), writing from the road, reported that a general uneasiness had fallen across the land as a result of the economic stagnation:
"Wherever I go, I am told of how many families live on the city and country. In Williamsport, Pa., a delightfully intelligent young woman explained to me how this year was different from last in that many of those who contributed to charities are now, rather quietly, taking charity." Three years into the Great Depression a citizen of Chicago realizes that there is nowhere he can go to escape the uneasy presence of the hungry poor in his city:
"They're on the boulevards and in the parks. They're on the shady streets in nice neighborhoods and around the corner from expensive restaurants. You can tell they're starving by looking at them. Their nerve is gone - they don't even beg. You see thousands every day... Young men and old women never begged in this country before." This photo-essay tells the story of the radical elements within the United States during the later period of the Great Depression - all of them were directed and financed by Georgi Dimitrov (1882 - 1949) in far-off Moscow. The leaders of the American Communist Party USA (CPUSA) were William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, and Ella Reeve Bloor.
In 1944, the city of Seattle, Washington elected a communist to the U.S. House of Representatives, click here to read about him...
Click here to learn how thoroughly the FBI had infiltrated the CPUSA.
Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who pontificated on every street corner during the Great Depression...
Click here to read about the tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression...
From Amazon: Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936,
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