Louis McHenry Howe Quotes
ONLY DANGER SAN FRANCISCO STRIKE IS THAT MAYOR IS BADLY FRIGHTENED AND HIS FEAR INFECTED ENTIRE CITY
In July of 1934 there was a general strike in San Francisco while the President was on a Pacific vacation cruise. Hiram Johnson and Cordell Hull saw a "revolution" in the making and urged Roosevelt's return. His chief assistant, Howe, urged him not to return, so not to allow people to think it was anything more than a local labor dispute:. The President remained at sea and the labor dispute was resolved through normal channels.
Louis McHenry Howe, 1871-1935, Presidential Assistant (Democrat), Campaign Manager & Earliest Political Advisor, Radiogram to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, July 1934
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In 1937 there were major automobile and steel strikes. President Roosevelt castigated both sides of the dispute:
At the beginning of World War II the President called business and union leaders to the White House for a conference on labor management relations for the war effort. There was agreement on some issues but acrimony on others—especially the concept of a union shop. President Roosevelt congratulated the conferees on their agreements, ignored their disagreements, and told the press things had been settled:
This is a wonderful historical picture of FDR on his campaign train. Note that the President liked to listen to ideas of many people. Unlike most Presidents he did not have any particular political programs that he advocated in his campaigning. He had no immediate answers to the Great Depression that he had inherited from the Hoover administration. But unlike Hoover, and most Presidents, he was willing to try ideas for which there was no advance evidence of success. If that did not help, he would try something else. He sought ideas from anyone and everyone. His enemies called him a weak leader who had no ideology—no principles but just trying unproven solutions to solve the nation’s critical problems. But it worked and he was elected 4 times—the only President who had served even 3 terms.
While Abraham Lincoln set the precedent for independent Presidential action in a national political crises without much reliance on Congress, this was where Roosevelt established the precedent of unilateral action in financial crises.
Attacking FDR by pandering to anti-Semites and falsely claiming that a Jewish financier, Bernard Baruch ran the government: The Priest was the right wing demagogic radio host of his day. Virulently anti-Semitic and anti-Black, he was threatened with excommunication by the Catholic Church, which finally ordered him to cease us weekly radio show and stop the political hate.
Explaining why, as a Senate leader, he reversed his position on a crucial bill:
Holmes was a young soldier at the battle. This quote is also sometimes attributed to General Horatio Wright, who was present at the battle and actually got the President down to safety, but we regard it as unlikely that a sophisticated, mature general would have addressed the President so rudely
Mitchell had warned that the strike was coming (see {607760}). The strike lasted 29 days and ended when the miners received a 10% wage increase. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the dispute.
The strike went on. See Mitchell’s later statement: {607757}.
After Rudolf Hess was found missing, Hitler and others presumed he had become mentally instable and had been seeking a peace agreement with the Allies.
Lippmann was the leading political pundit of the time. He, like many others, totally underestimated Roosevelt whose easy-going manner, and non ideological style tended to put off ideologues and some intellectuals. See {609696}.
Much depends on the culture of the people and the power of the rulers. In Pakistan, corruption and one disaster after another occurs and neither the government nor the army—the two ruling elites—does little or nothing to help the people, yet they retain their power and support of the majority of the population. The Palestinians have been led by the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah, and with each decision the elite rulers make, the Israeli’s obtain more territory than they were willing to settle for earlier, the standard of living of the Palestinians degrades, their employment prospects deteriorates, and their humiliation becomes greater. Yet, the elites maintain their power.
Louis McHenry Howe was an American reporter for the New York Herald best known for acting as an early political advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
