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Listeners who had formed their impression of Communism from the Hearst Press must have received a distinct shock when small, sandy-haired Comrade Browder, son of a Kansas schoolteacher and longtime certified public accountant, began to speak in the tone of a mild, ingratiating Midwestern college professor. As he went on, alert listeners realized that most of his sentences could have been lifted almost verbatim from the speeches of the nation's most famed and respectable public characters. Samples:
Publisher William Randolph Hearst: The New Deal is in ruins and bankrupted.
Republican National Chairman Henry P. Fletcher: The cancer of unemployment is eating at the heart of the whole country.
Secretary of Agriculture Wallace: We demand that the farmers shall be guaranteed a market at fair prices for their produce.
Secretary of State Hull: Keep America out of war by helping to keep war out of the world.
Rev. Charles E. Coughlin: The House of Morgan is the real ruler today.
Dr. Francis E. Townsend: We say most seriously that within two months after a majority gives power to [our] program we can completely abolish poverty.
Governor Floyd B. Olson of Minnesota: A Farmer-Labor Party . . . would pledge itself to carry out only those few simple measures which millions of people are already agreed upon.
Henry Louis Mencken: Tweedledum and Tweedledee are still twins, even when one wears the cold mask of Hoover and the other the professional smile of Roosevelt. Herbert Hoover: We have complete confidence in the American people.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: We propose no actions except those which the American people are prepared to organize and carry out themselves in their own interests.
When he arose to answer Red Browder next evening, Republican Fish was moved to declare: "I am inclined to the belief that the open attacks of Communists against our industrial, social and political institutions are far less dangerous than the subtle and insidious attacks of New Deal spokesmen, such as Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell."