This is the first of a series of articles on various aspects of the next four years in American life. The other contributors are: Secretary Henry A. Wallace, Under-secretary Rexford G. Tugwell, Morris L. Cooke, John L. Lewis, Dr. Arthur E. Morgan, Professor Thomas Reed Powell, Bruce Bliven and George Soule.—THE EDITORS. In a cloudburst of votes, the people washed away "Jeffersonian" Democrats, assorted big shots, newspapers, in a deluge of hilarious bitterness—and when the sun rose bright and shiny, there was Franklin D.
Like most great victories, the Roosevelt triumph raises more questions than it answers. It is easy to guess what the people voted against, but not what they voted for. The majority was reluctant to turn the country over to the same crowd that had been represented by Coolidge and Hoover, that had helped to bring on the depression and had done so little to end it or to relieve the distress it caused. Many voters feared what this crowd, if in power, might do to labor or to those on relief, or to the farmers, who plead so long and so vainly for a fair deal before Mr. Roosevelt was elected.
PRESIDENT Roosevelt’s overwhelming victory promises to change the face of American political life. Even those expert observers who predicted a landslide did not envisage the unprecedented majority, both in popular vote and the electoral college, that he rolled up. As early as eleven o’clock on election night, when the first returns indicated a Roosevelt victory in every one of the doubtful states, and a popular majority of perhaps 9,000,000, leading Republican politicians and newspapers began to concede that their cause was hopeless; only the incredible John D. M.
Those who are selling the French film Les Miserables to the American public are plugging the “challenge” angle; “France challenges comparison with the American version.” While this is a very good way to sell the picture to the kind of trade it will be sold to, there are still going to be some of us who will take a piece of that dare money as fast as anyone will put it up. Just to start with, the old picture made the course in one hour, forty-nine minutes: the present one covers roughly the same material m (counting intermission) two hours, fifty minutes.
The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 By Van Wyck Brooks (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 550 pp., $4) Toward the end of the fine essay on Van Wyck Brooks printed in this issue, it seemed to me that Bernard Smith did less than justice to "The Flowering of New England." He might of course urge that he was discussing a literary career of almost thirty years, in which this new book was a single episode.
THE LATEST bargain-counter sale of the Van Sweringen railroad empire was made on April 24. Two days afterwards, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, the buyers became the subjects of a favorable publicity boom which possibly came to an end in exactly thirty days, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The subjects of the publicity were Robert R. Young and Frank F. Kolbe, New York Stock Exchange brokers who bought control of the $3,000,000,000, 23,000-mile railroad system. Young is the dominant partner.
The Physculter Parade, one of the three great demonstrations of the year, the other two being the May Day Parade and the anniversary of the October Revolution. The Arcade Building opposite the Kremlin is hung with great faces of Lenin and Stalin and with pictures of runners and hurdlers so crude that they would disgrace an American billboard. The slogan, “Ready for Labor and Defense!” The whole thing was quite different and more impressive than any American parade I had ever seen.
