Speaking broadly, I believe that any party which looks for
success must have a fundamental basis of principle and achievement to which men
and women alike can conscientiously subscribe. There are certain truths that
are self-evident and time does not change them. The creed of Thomas Jefferson,
as formulated in his first inaugural address, stands today as the simple statement
of the beliefs of all men and women who hold that government exists for the
governed. Jefferson declared for equal and exact justice to all men, peace and
honest friendship with all nations, the support of state governments and their
rights, the preservation of our general government “in its whole constitutional
vigor,” a jealous care of election by the people, the supremacy of the civil
over the military authority, economy of public expenses that labor may be
lightly burdened, the honest payments of our debts, encouragement of
agriculture and commerce, freedom of religion, and freedom of the person under
the protection of the habeas corpus and trial by jury.
In the beginning there was great unwillingness on the part
of many of the leaders to embark upon the uncharted sea of democracy and they
finally acquiesced in the adoption of a representative form of government with
many misgivings. The idea of popular government was repugnant to them and we
still see this same unwillingness to trust the people in their descendants who
now control the destinies of the Republican party. Whenever the Democratic
party has broken faith with its great traditions it has lost the support of the
people, but there never was a time in all its history when it has been so absolutely
dedicated to the ideals of its founders as it is today, nor can any other
legislative period compare with the record of the last six years in the number
of far-reaching enactments for the public welfare.
However strong the tradition and family urge upon the woman
voter, she is bound at this stressful time in the history of her country and
the world to turn to the men of her family and ask them what position the party
that they support is willing to take constructively in the solution of national
and international, industrial, social, and economic problems which are pressing
upon us from all sides. She will inquire which party stands for policies that
protect the home and not the profiteers, which listens to the voice of the
people in all pleas for justice and equal opportunity, which is concerned with
the formulation of measures calculated to prevent a recurrence of war. They
have a deep heart interest in the prevention of another world conflict and the
League of Nations is the only feasible plan that statesmen have yet suggested
to achieve this purpose. I believe that women are fundamentally and profoundly
opposed to war and that they finally accepted this war as a supreme effort to
end all war, and I believe by the covenants of the nations.
Mere assertions that they are Democrats or Republicans, made
by the men of their families, will not influence a majority of the newly
enfranchised citizens.
When the woman voter’s Republican relatives tell her that
they have no program, but one of opposition to President Wilson; that they are
willing to sacrifice or place in jeopardy the peace and safety of all nations
to discredit him; that although controlling both houses of Congress, they have
no statesmanship to put at the service of their country in an effort to avert
an industrial and labor crisis that may shake the very foundations of our
social structure; that while they recognize there is a national unrest growing
out of the high cost of living, and that its relief requires serious
consideration of fundamental economic conditions growing out of the world war,
yet to them it is only another opportunity for political maneuvering, she is
not going to be satisfied, and family tradition and family loyalty will not be
strong enough to hold her.
I believe women are too inherently practical to accept and
to be satisfied with a program of negation, and that it was because of its
record of actual achievement that the Democratic party asked for an received
the votes of the women of this country in 1916. The list is a long one, so long
that every section of the country and every element of our citizenship has
participated in the advantages which have followed these enactments.
The Farm Loan Law brought relief to the farmers of the west
who had struggled with drought and grasshoppers and lonliness and privation
only to see the homestead that had cost them so much go into the hands of loan
sharks and land speculators because they could no longer meet the extortionate
interest piled up against them. It is said that the average ranch of the Far
West passes through four hands before it finds an owner. The mortgage that pays
itself off at a rate of interest so low that it is not a burden brought a new
day to the hundreds and thousands of men and women who are developing the region
that used to be known as the Great American Desert and making it the garden of
America.
The Agricultural Extension Act has brought the discoveries
of science to the aid of farmers and farmers’ families everywhere. Under this
act the government appropriates dollar for dollar for the benefit of any State
willing to accept its provisions. This money is used to demonstrate the most
improved methods of farming, to teach the easiest way to get results, and in
many places where the women have a voice in public affairs there is explicit
provision that a generous share of this money shall be used for the special
benefit of women living on farms.
The Good Roads Act has conferred great benefit upon our
people. We have endured almost impassable highways ever since the trail of the
trapper gave place to the rough and ridgey road which characterizes the country
districts of nearly all the states. National associations have been created and
miles of statistics compiled to show the waste in time and horsepower of
ungraded, unkept highways. Men and women engaged in the “Back to the Farm”
movement have shown how lack of proper turnpikes has made the farm an isolated
and dreary spot, where it was increasingly difficult to keep either boys or
girls. If there is one thing about which the general public has long possessed
adequate information it is the roads of the nation, yet Republican Congresses
came and went, listened to their constituents, received their petitions, and
left them without relief. It remained for a Democratic Congress to act.
The passage of the Child Labor Law is another instance of
Democratic faith and courage. The women of the nation had been asking for a law
of this kind for a quarter of a century. The human animal is the only one that
deliberately exploits its young. Petitions and protests without number had been
filed with Congress after Congress—in vain. The President at the proper moment
took such action that an adequate Child Labor Bill was passed. When certain of
its provisions were held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, they were
written into all war-work contracts, and in a better form incorporated in the
Revenue Law passed by the outgoing Democratic Congress in the winter of 1918,
and it is in operation at the present time.
I call attention also to the rules adopted governing the
employment of women engaged in war work. The contractor who wanted to do
business with the government had to subscribe to the following general
standards set up in “General Orders Number 13”:
No employment of children under 14
years of age.
No employment of children over 14
and under 16 more than 8 hours a day.
An 8-hour day for women.
Saturday half holidays.
Six-day week.
Avoidance of night work and
overtime.
No tenement-house work.
Proper regulation of temperature in
workrooms.
Adequate light, ventilation, and
sanitary conditions.
Protection against fire,
industrial, fatigue, disease, and accident.
Adequate time for rest and meals
outside the workroom.
Equal pay for equal work and an
advance in wages to meet the living conditions.
Mothers of young children not to be
employed in factory work, but kept in their homes when possible.
Co-operation between employer and
employee, under the term “Collective bargaining.”
Before the adoption of these standards the 8-hour day for
women had been decreed in the District of Columbia for employees of contractors
handling government work and for railroad men throughout the nation.
These are all simply, homely matters in the last analysis,
but the Democratic party believes the governments exist for the sake of the
governed, and that it is their province to make life richer, to bring
opportunity closer to the many, to lift the yoke from the shoulders of those
who labor and are heavy laden, and to place its burdens upon those best able to
bear them. For this reason the Democratic party made the Income Tax a platform
measure and finally succeeded in submitting an amendment to the people of the
country in order that this most just system of taxation might be adopted.
In contradistinction to this program we have the resolution
adopted by the Republican caucus of New York Assembly members which declared
the Welfare bills, including a minimum wage law, health insurance, an 8-hour
day, and several other measures “a program which we believe to be in violation
of the fundamental principles of Republicanism.” In view of this statement it
would be interesting to know what the fundamental principles of the Republican
party are. It might also be news to many members of that party.
It is not possible to draw any line of demarcation among the
war measures showing which appealed to women and which did not. The creation of
the Shipping Board and its subsequent operation may not have been very
thoroughly understood by either the men or women of this country, but the
fathers and mothers knew its province was to provide means to get their sons
abroad safely and provide them with adequate supplies of all kinds, and in
mountain towns, thousands of miles from the seaboard, they read with glistening
eyes the wonderful new story of the launching of the ship.
Again, women are not supposed to be specially interested or
gifted in the matter of finance, but this world-crisis through which we have
passed has convinced all but the most stupid of men that many of our
long-cherished ideas about Woman have a foundation no more substantial than the
baseless fabric of a dream. What the women of America did to finance this war
is a story by itself, a story which has been and will be written many times
over. The woman who sold bonds found a new avocation for her sex, and hundreds
of thousands of women bond-buyers have a new idea of partnership with and an
investment in the government.
When war first broke out in Europe, and shippers found
insurance rates soaring, the government undertook to meet the emergency. It
wrote the insurance, paid the losses, and made money. When we went into the war
it adopted a system of insurance that was based on the desire to deal not only
justly but generously with its sons. Considerably over a billing dollars has
been paid to those taking out this insurance.
The Selective Draft revealed many things to the nation. We
found that we had an astonishing percentage of native board who were
illiterate. We found men who had grown to manhood in this country still speaking
only a foreign tongue. We found many men unfit for service in the field because
of physical defects. In many cases they were of such a nature that they had not
even been suspected by the victim. Some of them were remedied. Science has
found many ways of making mankind over and health as an asset is understood as
never before. Vocational training on an immense scale is being carried on clear
across the continent. Begun in beneficient recognition of the Russian proverb
which says God never closes a door without opening a window, it has made the
blind to see with is fingers, the deaf to see the words he can no longer hear
upon the lips of his comrades, and the lame to walk. Its primary purpose is for
those who have been injured in war, but no man can measure its ultimate effect
upon the nation. Here we may find the superman, through offering him a chance
to develop brain and soul and make his vision real.
Teachers and preachers and doctors have been telling us for
years that man does not live by bread alone, and that all work and no play ends
in nervous prostration, but the basic idea back of all this began to come home
when millions of men in hundreds of camps asked for books and papers and
amusements and were given all they asked and more. At a time when we were
preparing to fling away life on a prodigious scale, if need be, that all that
makes life worth living might not perish from the earth, the government was not
unmindful of the needs of the individual. Undoubtedly there was extravagance;
wars are not an economical method of disposing of national wealth, but we were
not extravagant with human life. Ships and yet more ships, haste and still more
haste that we might stop the frightful waste of civilization, of life, of the
very spirit of life itself, and the result was the total collapse of the German
defense, the crumbling away of that gigantic army and the armistice eight
months before even the most sanguine thought it possible.
I have no disposition to make the winning of the war a
partisan affair, or to claim the League of Nations as a triumph of Democratic
diplomacy, but I do confidently assert that the humanitarian idea which has
permeated the whole conduct of this government in his prosecution of the war
and its deliberations at the peace table afterwards are the outcome of the same
ideal of governmental responsibility which has written upon our statute books
the legislations to which I have already referred.
The Republican party claims for itself the passage of the
Federal Woman Suffrage amendment, and appeals to the women of the country to
support it in return for its eleventh hour conversion to a measure which has
been pending in Congress for 40 years, and was already an old story there when
the Federal amendment was first introduced. The plain, unpalatable fact is, and
I suspect that the women of the United States know it very well that they owe
little to any party. The do owe much to individuals in all parties who have
been their champions. They do owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Woodrow Wilson
who made their cause his own and in spite of bitter opposition from some
members of his own party, facing almost certain defeat from the recalcitrant of
both parties, entered the lists in their behalf with an appeal that was hailed
by women of the nation as their proclamation of emancipation. It was the
President of the United States who said:
“Our safety as well as our comprehension of matters that
touch society to the quick will depend upon the direct and authoritative
participation of women in our counsels. We shall need their moral sense to
preserve what is right and fine and worthy in our system of life as well as to
discover just what it is that ought to be purified and reformed. Without their
counselings we shall be only half wise.”
I can not do better than use his words in closing. “This is
my case. This is my appeal.”
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