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Tides in Men. It used to be that when U.S. citizens aged, they had earned and saved their competence, or their kin kept them. The New Deal changed all that. The New Deal quoted technologists to show that the enormous and soulless modern industrial machine (about which Engineer Herbert Hoover used to worry) throws oldsters on an "economic scrap-heap." Like the New Deal Mr. Downey had an inspiration to do something on behalf of what he calls, for campaign purposes, "our senior citizens." It came at a very timely hour when far cannier politicians were beginning to see the possibility of making pensions for senior citizens a juicier political racket than the ancient political exploitation of pensions for war veterans. Sheridan Downey won California's Democratic nomination for Senator from Senior Citizen William Gibbs McAdoo, 75. The manager of that performance was one Jackson Elliott.
Mr. Elliott of Los Angeles is a political hack, unillusioned, practical, alert. He managed Senator McAdoo's successful campaign in 1932. Perceiving how ebullient Sheridan Downey from northern California (Atherton, hard by Herbert Hoover's Palo Alto) had run ahead of Author Sinclair in the EPIC campaign, Jackson Elliott cocked an eye at him for 1938 because he knew where lay the biggest unstaked bloc of votes for that year—among EPIC and Townsend-conscious oldsters.
Franklin Roosevelt refers to the leaders of such movements as the "lunatic fringe." Their lunacy, if such it is, is ever among human beings, the urge of Something for Nothing. The moon which causes that lunacy may be the earth's satellite or human evolution, but the moon is powerful. It has created a tide in the affairs of men which this year crested in California under the name of "Thirty Dollars Every Thursday," alias "Ham & Eggs." Under this scheme the State would give everyone aged 50 or more $30 of State scrip every Thursday and retire the scrip with a 2¢ weekly stamp tax on every warrant issued.
Across the country, as smart Jackson Elliott could see, the pension wave had lesser crests, and in California spring tide seemed at hand. California the wonderland, California the rugged and golden, lies at that edge of the continent where the migrations that made the nation ended. There the last vanguard of pioneers halted and the rearguard of sick, halt, lame, blind, crooked and crazy have caught up. It is a home of saints and scoundrels, heroines and houris. There since Depression I has grown up a strange society in which men born in the great open spaces and hardshells with their feet two generations planted were artificially mixed with sunkist visitors and moonstruck social freaks.
Green Cheese. If the political potency of pension promises is the result of lunacy, then California is not alone in being moonstruck. Lee ("Pass the Biscuits Pappy") O'Daniel demonstrated the stump value of old age pensions in winning the Democratic nomination (virtual election) for Governor of Texas. Colorado is going gently broke because its promisers tried to give the oldsters too much ($45 a month). Last week Franklin Roosevelt, the smartest politician in the big U. S., recommended that the Social Security Act should be revised to extend its benefits to another 16,000,000.