Non-Political Campaign

THE PRESIDENCY Non-Political Campaign

From the crest of gigantic Chickamauga Dam, which backs up the waters of the turbulent Tennessee River eight miles above Chattanooga, President Roosevelt this week made his first major address since he accepted the Democratic nomination for the Third Term. Hatless in the withering sun, he sat in the back seat of an open car that had been run up on a hastily-built slack pine ramp. Sweat poured down the President's face, soaked through his seersucker suit.

The President had said that he would make no political speeches. But he drove to the scene through the streets of Chattanooga, lined for three miles with crowds standing three and four deep on the sidewalks, with Roosevelt and Wallace placards everywhere. And he spoke in the setting where the conflicting philosophies of Wendell Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt had clashed before.

In his sonorous and flexible voice, his delivery easy, President Roosevelt dwelt on the meaning of TVA. "When I first passed this place . . . there flowed here a vagrant stream, sometimes shallow and useless, sometimes turbulent and in flood, always dark with the soil it had washed from the eroding hills. . . . There were and are those who maintain that the development of the enterprise that lies largely in this State is not a proper activity of Government. As for me, I glory in it as one of the great social and economic achievements of the United States."

His local audience had grown rather too used to the idea of TVA to thrill to it again. It cheered, but the effect was not what he achieved later that day. The eleven-car Presidential special took him and his party to Newfound Gap to dedicate the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with a speech on a sterner topic. Fascism.

"If the spirit of God is not in us," said he resonantly, "and we are not prepared to give all that we have and all that we are to preserve Christian civilization in our own land, we shall go to destruction. ... I hope that one hundred years from now this park will still belong ... to the people of a free nation . . . will not be in the hands of some strange kind of government puppet subject to an overseas overlord. I hope the use of it will not be confined to people coming hither on government-specified days and on government-directed tours. . . .

"We know that in the process of preparing against danger we shall not abandon the great social improvements that have come to the American people in these later years. We need not swap the gain of better living for the gain of better defense. I propose to retain the one and gain the other. . . . What shall we be defending? The good earth of this land, our homes, our families--and far more. We shall be defending a way of life which has given more freedom to the soul and body of man than has ever been realized in the world before. . .. The winds that blow through the wide sky in these mountains--the winds that sweep from Canada to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Atlantic--have always blown on free men. We are free today. If we join together now . . . and face the common menace as a united people, we shall be free tomorrow."

So began Franklin Roosevelt's non-political campaign of 1940. Republican Chairman Joe Martin proposed that the Senate Committee on Campaign Expenditures investigate to find out whether public money carried Franklin Roosevelt's

"political sally into the Tennessee Valley." The war over Term III had begun.

Last week the President also: >Signed a bill authorizing U. S. ships to enter European combat zones to remove children--though the State Department emphasized that the U. S. would not take the initiative in sending ships.

>Played host to Crown Princess Martha of Norway & her children--Princess Ragnhild, 10, Princess Astrid, 8, Prince Harald, 3--who after a perilous voyage through northern minefields from Petsamo, Finland, aboard the U. S.iArmy Transport Amevi-can Legion (TIME, Sept. 2), landed in the U. S.

>Spoke to 500 members of the Roosevelt Home Club at Hyde Park, praised "understatement," especially in an election year, praised the simple life of small-town neighbors and declared: "I have here, sitting almost directly back of me, the successor of a very splendid old friend of mine . . . Jim Farley ... in the Postmaster Generalship. ... He came from Montana and lived in New York and then, because cf business interests, became a citizen of Pennsylvania. [He is] Frank Walker. Get up, Frank."

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