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In the chill, foggy morning the President, a navy cape thrown over his shoulder, stood on the rear platform of his car, waved to a crowd at Johnstown while a high-school band played and cheers thundered in vast wavelike surges against the train. Down the Conemaugh River the train moved slowly past the fivemile, $7,600,000 cement flood-control walls that the President had promised Johnstown residents four years before. A sign along the banks read: "Thanks, Mr. President." In Pittsburgh, masses lined the streets solidly, cheering, roaring, waiting: Carnegie-Illinois steelworkers at the plant at Homestead, who last week greeted Wendell Willkie with boos; reverential Negroes of Pittsburgh's Harlem, who had watched silently, even resentfully, when the President's opponent passed; school children, let out of school for the day, who had jeered in shrill-voiced mockery at the Republican candidate. Now they were merged in a solid mass of organized enthusiasm that reached from Pittsburgh's East Liberty Station, up through the hills of Swissvale and Rankin, that poured out of the grimy factories and working-class homes to roar its sustained, unvaried, tumultuous welcome.
The President spent 21 minutes in the Homestead plant (armor plate), 15 minutes at the Mesta Machine Co. At Terrace Village, $14,000,000 project of the U. S. Housing Authority, he gave the keys of a four-room apartment to Steelworker Lester Churchfield, with a brief, extemporaneous speech on the meaning of housing and defense: "As long as they know that their Government is sympathetically working to protect their jobs and to better their homes, we can be confident that if the need arises the people themselves will wholeheartedly join in the defense of their homes and the defense of democracy."
Youngstown. No Willkie buttons showed along the way, except a furtive few in downtown Pittsburgh; no jeers were heard, save for one plaintive "Boo, Roosevelt"; one group of twelve-year-old boys chanted, "We want Willkie." It was the day for the masses to shout, and they knew it: under the bunting of Mahoning Avenue in Youngstown, swarming in a cheering, yelling horde on Federal Street, breaking through police lines to the car in which the President and Steelmaker Frank Purnell, president of Youngstown Sheet & Tube, were riding.* Democrats had no success in the steel country when Franklin Roosevelt campaigned in 1920; the great steel strike of 1919 was a raw memory; the Democratic machine was broken; a short, savage depression was beginning.