Great Opposer

One fine January morning 27 years ago the Idaho legislature elected William Edgar Borah to the U. S. Senate. Among his colleagues today Senator Borah is senior member in point of service. To the press gallery he is the Senate's No. 1 orator and to historians the Senator most likely to be remembered in their future chronicles of this era. But to U. S. Presidents from Roosevelt to Roosevelt "Bill" Borah has always been the Great Opposer. Last week the Senator from Idaho arose to his immemorial task and demonstrated that the New Deal was to be no exception in his crusade against the White House.

Rooseveltian candor, Rooseveltian liberalism, Rooseveltian charm, some people thought, had insensibly softened stern Critic Borah. His favorite topic, unforgiveness of War debts, was practically shelved by the new Administration. Relief was being doled in quantities of which he approved. He championed silver and the President gave him and his fellows the Silver Purchase Act. When the Recovery Act was under debate he succeeded in inserting a provision on another of his favorite subjects--forbidding NRA codes to "permit monopolies or monopolistic practices"--and then ultimately voted against the measure. He joined Senator Nye in attacking NRA as a promoter of monopoly at the expense of "the little fellow" and the President gave him the Darrow board to investigate his complaints.

Last week Senator Borah, with the President at sea and Congress scattered, remained in Washington, as he has often done before, to seize a good opportunity for publicizing his views. Before a microphone he poured out his ringing phrases from coast to coast and once more became Borah the Great Opposer. Points on which he gave the New Deal a thorough flaying:

Dictatorship. "The most brutal system of government yet developed is vast capital linked to personal or arbitrary power. It is under a constitutional government alone, a government of law and order, that the rights and liberties of the average man and woman are, or can be, preserved and enjoyed. . . . Their rights are being constantly chiseled away, their position in the economic world more and more circumscribed, their freedom and political rights more and more limited, in Europe under dictatorships and in democracies under bureaucracies. . . .

"It was the practice of Augustus Caesar, when preparing to take over some new bloc of power, to deliver a eulogy on the virtues of the republic and announce his deep solicitude for the liberties and happiness of the people. How faithfully this fine precedent has been emulated in the modern world by dictators and bureaucrats alike!"

Regimentation. "When the controversy arose over the freedom of the press under the codes ... it was said it would be unspeakable for the Government to say there are enough newspapers and no more must be started. To me it is no more unthinkable than to say there are enough stores and no more must be started, that there are enough shoe factories and no more must be started. . . .

"The Government has just as much right to say there are too many newspapers as to say there is too much cotton being grown. It has as much right to reduce the size of newspapers and turn the printers on the street as it has to force the reduction of cotton and turn the share croppers onto the highway. . . ."

Bureaucracy. "I do not call this Naziism. God forbid! I do not claim it is Fascism or Communism. It is none of these. It is simply that meddlesome, irritating, confusing, undermining, destructive thing called bureaucracy. It is that form of government which steals away man's rights in the name of the public interests and taxes him to death in the name of recovery.

"Of all forms of government which has ever been permitted to torture the human family, the most burdensome, the most expensive, the most demoralizing, the most devastating to human happiness and the most destructive of human values is a bureaucracy. It has destroyed every civilization upon which it has fastened its lecherous grip."

Monopoly. "In the last campaign the successful party denounced the party in power for 'fostering the merger of competitive business into monopolies' as one of the chief causes of the present disaster.'

"That party was right. But when this party took charge of the Government, one of the first things it did was to suspend the Anti-Trust Laws and monopoly was never more unrestrained or more ruthless than at the present time. . . ,"

Promise. "The so-called party leaders of the two great parties may believe they can smother this issue in this campaign. But they were never more mistaken in their lives. If I can get the radio about the middle of October, I shall report progress on this issue. . . .

"And I shall during the summer and autumn, as best I may, present these matters to the people of this country and urge them to ask the leaders at Washington to loosen the grip of bureaucracy upon the daily lives and habits of the people."

After this opening blast, Senator Borah last week started for Boise by way of Chicago. After a month's rest, he said, he would carry out his promise. Conviction and not political necessity will take this one-man-party out on the stump because Senator Borah will not come up for re-election until 1936. But then all seasons are open seasons for the Great Opposer.

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