Page 12 — April 21, 1945

- with Jefferson

A Great Man Pas

es

- By AL PARKIN

N Thursday, April 12, at 1:35 in the aft ernoon, the world lost one of its great men and

the American people their greatest president in history.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt laid his head back in his armchair in a cottage at
Warm Springs, Georgia, to pass peacefully away a few minutes later of a cerebral hemor:

rhage, the 130 million people of
the United States and all the
peoples of the democratic world
sustained an immeasurable loss.
Por the great president, in his
12 years as leader of the Amer-
ican nation, had become a world
eitizen and leader, a world sym-
bol of humanity’s age-long
Struggle for a new and better
life, of the never-ceasing fight
for human rights and decencies.

America has already inscribed
his name on its honor roll of
great presidents along . with
those of Jefferson, Jackson and
Lincoln. And the judgment of
world history will undoubtedly
place his ndme with such as
Cromwell and Robert Owen,
With Danton and Robespierre,
and Thomas
Paine, with Marx * and Lenin,
and all that great company of
men who have helped shape the
destiny of human kind in the
direction of progress.

No other judgment than that
could adequately explain the
deep sense of shock which came
last Thursday when the news
of Mr. Roosevyelt’s death was
flashed to an almost unbeliey_-
ing world. The shock to Ganad-
ians was as great as it was to
his own people. And it was no
accident that everywhere —_— in
the cities and towns and in the
villages, in industrial plants and
on the farms—it was the com-
mon man and woman, the plain
working stiff of factory and
field, who felt his passing most
keenly.

You saw and heard evidence
of that on every hand. On the
street corners, in taverns and
eating places in the working
class districts, men, when they:
came together, would invari-
ably exchange a serious word
or two on the president’s death.
“It’s a tough break,” you would
hear’ them say. “He was the
working man’s friend.’ And
then in a worried tone: “TI hope
this man Truman has what it
takes.”

For Roosevelt had identified
himself with the common
people, with the common man’s
hopes and aspirations. And as
a consequence, the working
people found themselves sine
cerely mourning the death of a
world statesman for the first
time, perhaps, sinee, that day.
back- in 1924 when another
people’s leader—V. I. Lenin—
passed away.

Organized labor feels his loss -

perhaps most keenly of all. For
during the period of his leader-
Ship, the labor movement and
the cause of progress generally
had made greater headway than
at any other time in the history
of this continent.

It was a little over 12 years
ago that Franklin Delano
Roosvelt was inaugurated for
his first term of office. That
was during that dark winter of
1932, when the whole economy
of United States and Ganada
had crashed to a standstill,
when Adolf Hitler had become

«Chancellor of Germany. The 12

HARRY S. TRUMAN

years since then were years of
hard and bitter struggle. But
they were, despite sethacks and
tragedy, years in which progres-
Sive humanity gathered its
strength till it is now shattering
the very citadel of evil.

For those 12 years Roosevelt
Was president of the United
States. Under ‘his leadership

.- America fought its way out of

the depression and established
the broadest democracy and the

highest economic standards in ~

the modern history of the coun-
try. During this time, labor
organized its ranks in the im-
portant industries, and for the
first time achieved a position
in the political life of the coun-
try which was mainly respons-
ible for attaining national unity
in the prosecution of the war.
Under his leadership, Am-
erica refused to take the road
te: Munich, rejected the fas-
cist purpose concealed be-
hind appeasement, and form->
ed the epoch-making alliance
between capitalist and social-
ist democratic states which is
on the eve of crushing fas-
cism and is laying the basis
for a democratic and peace-
ful world.

When Roosevelt took office in
1933, trade union membership
in the United States stood at
less than three millions. Today
it tops 14 millions. A great part
of that growth wus due to the

president’s enlightened labor
policies, beginning with his Sec-
tion 7A of the NRA which

granted unions new freedom to
organize. Then came the Wag-
ner Act, that Magna Carta of
American labor. Union mem-
bership grew with tremendous
leaps. The CIO was organized
and moved into the mass pro-
duction industries. Men who
had endured for years a form
of industrial feudalism on the
job, overnight became free men
—free to organize and bargain
collectively, free to speak out
on the political issues of the

day in a way never before
dreamed.

Accompanying this veritable
revolution in the American
scene were other great ad-
vances,

It was Roosevelt who plan-
ned and led the drives against
Jim Crow, against that vici-
ous policy of race segrega-
tion and race discrimination
practised against the nation’s
15 million Negro-Americans.
Today the whole economic
and social level of the Negro
people stands at its highest
point in history. The very
basis of Jim Crowism is be-
ing removed from the Amer-
ican scene. :

He it was who sponsored the
Social Security Act, the child
labor amendments, national
minimum wages, the Fair Em-

ployment Practices Act. He led |

the fight against the poll tox
laws in the Southern states,
and lived to see one of those
states—Georgia — abolish that
unjust law only a few weeks
ago.

Even the very physical ap-
pearance of America changed
under his hands. No one can
travel across the United States

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

today without encountering the
evidence of those changes —
great new legislative buildings,
colleges, community centers and
theaters, bridges and highways,
all built under WPA. And those
three massive power and re-
clamation’ projects —— Bonne-
ville, TVA, and Grand Coulee,
forever standing as monuments
to his fight for public owner-
ship of America’s natural re-
sources. :

These things explain in part,
then, why organized labor is
mourning the death of a friend.
And Canadian. labor, too, bene-
fitted from his leadership. You
can’t stop ideas at customs
border stations. And when Ga-
nadians saw American labor
beginning to fight its Way out
of economic and political op-
pression, our own fight against
the regime of “Tron Heel” Ben-
nett was strengthened. When
the CIO began its great organ-
izing drive in American indus-
try, the demand for industrial
unionism began to sweep Can-
ada. And when the CIO came
into Oshawa in 1936 to organ-
ize Canadian automobile work-
ers, an organizing campaign
was opened which was to bring
250,000 Canadian workers into
industrial unions by the end of
1944. :

Se

Wet of those qualities which

made him so eminently a
world leader as well as a ereat
American ?

Individual men, however able
they may be, do not of course
make great history by their
own qualities alone. Only when
they achieve an understanding
of the direction of events in
their time and use this knowl-

.

edge to give leadership to th
people, do they become great,
Here, then, was the es-_
Sence of FDR’s greatness. He
was the first president since
the days of Jefferson, Jack-*
Son and Limeoln toe raise the

nationa]| politics of his coun-
try from the level of a Tam- —
many Hall te that of a science
of government. And he coulé ;
do this because he understood -
America’s historical] develop-
ment, and’ had a grasp of that
elementary law of the science
of society — that society
changes and grows and that
political and ‘social thought
must change and grow with
it.

Thomas Jefferson wrote lonj
ago that, -“as new discoyerie
are made, new truths disclosed
and manners and _ opinions
change with the change of ai |
cumstances, governments * and
institutions must advance alec
and keep pace with the times.
And on September 20, 1940,
Roosevelt declared in 4 speech
that ‘new conditions impose
new requirements upon govern |
ment and upon those who con-
duct government.”

This was the spirit in which
the great American approach-
ed the solution of the economic
problems of our time. His ap-
proach to the problems of de
mocracy, his hatred of tyranny; |
together with his knowledge of
history and military affairs,
were the factors which guided
the international policy of his
administration. His anti-fascist
position, first made clear in his
famous “Quarantine the Ag
gressor’” speech back in 1987, |

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