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Akron. The train moved on. Another car had been added for local politicians. The President, sometimes flashing his smile at the crowd, sometimes appearing strangely concerned, moved through masses of humanity in which his name thundered and echoed like the roar of the surf. The crowd swarmed into the railway yards at Akron, stood on the tracks and the right of way, perched on the Market Street overpass, chanted his name until he appeared for an unscheduled, unpolitical speech: "You and I know the difficulties and dangers of these times in the world. . . . I believe, and I think most of you do, too, that the best way to avoid an attack is to be ready to meet one. And that is why, in the steel plants. . . I told the foremen and the men . . . that the one thing we all ought to work for in speeding up this program is more speed—the quicker, the better."
Dayton. While President Roosevelt spent three hours cutting his speech from 3,600 words to 2,513, the train moved from the Democratic to the Republican strongholds of Ohio. There were crowds in Columbus—big crowds—but none of the pellmell, jubilant, unrestrained and uncontrollable mass enthusiasm of Homestead, Youngstown, Akron. There were political complications: Republican Governor Bricker rode with the President; the Democratic candidate, ex-Governor Davey, rode far back in the procession. Then to Dayton to visit the National Military Home, to inspect Wright Field (where Captain Elliott Roosevelt is stationed), to have dinner with Publisher James Cox, his running mate 20 years before (at the publisher's home, called Trail's End), and to make early return to the train for his speech on hemispheric defense.
That speech (its first draft written by Judge Samuel Rosenman) had the lofty, sermonlike quality of the President's best affirmations of principle, more telling when given the benefit of his accomplished delivery than when read or quoted. It opened with a tribute to Columbus in which observers read political implications (since Italians in the U. S. reportedly resented the President's stab-in-the-back phrase in his speech at Charlottesville) and contained a reference to the Argentine Political Philosopher Juan Bautista Alberdi—"of Italian birth,"* interpolated the President.
But the speech held to a high level. Seated in a bare dining car that had been outfitted for broadcasting through all major chains, by short wave to South America, Franklin Roosevelt read solemnly, deliberately, with a trace of nervousness that newsmen noted. He affirmed the unity of the Americas:
"No one group or race in the New World has any desire to subjugate the others. . . .
"There are those in the Old World who persist in believing that here in this new hemisphere the Americas can be torn by the hatreds and fears that have drenched the battlegrounds of Europe for so many centuries. . . .
"We are determined to use our energies and our resources to counteract and repel the foreign plots, the propaganda, the whole technique of underground warfare originating in Europe and now clearly directed against all of the republics on this side of the ocean.
"That propaganda repeats and repeats that democracy is a decadent form of government. . . .