dwoodall: A prescient Goldwater editorial

A prescient Goldwater editorial

Barry Goldwater wrote this guest editorial in 1937 for the Phoenix Gazette. It is included in the wonderful book Pure Goldwater by John Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr.

Guest Editorial: “A Fireside Chat with Mr. Roosevelt” (June 19, 1937)

My friend: You have, for over five years, been telling me about your plans; how much they were going to do for me; how much they were going to mean to me. Now I want to turn around and ask you just what have they done that would be of any value to me as a businessman and a citizen?

Your plans, if I recall 1932 correctly, called for economy in government and a reduction in taxes. In five years you have spent more than this government of ours spent in its entire history before 1932. In five years my taxes have increased over 250 percent and I fear greatly that “I ain’t seen half of it yet.”

You had the very commendable plan of bettering the conditions of the working man. Have you done that? Well, I wonder. True, hours are shorter, which is fine, but wages, well wages have been raised hourly but the working man is working less hours due to an industrial condition that your plans alone have caused, so the working man is making the same, or a little less, than he did before. The worst thing about your labor plan has been you have turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the working man. Witness the chaos they are creating in the eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ll feeling between labor and capital and then decide for yourself if that plan worked.

You were confronted with a staggering number of unemployed when you took over in 1932. You immediately set up boards numerous enough to tax the entire run of the alphabet to name them in an effort to stamp out this evil. But in spite of your plans we still have just about as many unemployed in our midst as we did back in 1932.

Somewhere in your planning you thought it necessary to jump down the throats of everyone in business and where has it gotten you? No place. Instead of the businessman having confidence in you today, he distrusts you and fears your every utterance.

Now you are going to prime the pump—but are you? Isn’t that money really going to prime a few votes? Will it get into the channels of business or will it get into weak districts?

Now, these are but a few of the things that go through my mind as I think of you. I, as a businessman and citizen, am very interested in the queer antics of those in Washington. I would like to know just where you are leading us. Are you going further into the morass that you have led us into or are you going to go back to the good old American way of doing things where business is trusted, where labor earns more, where we take care of our unemployed, and where a man is elected to office because he is a good man for the job and not because he commands your good will and a few dollars of the taxpayer’s money? I would like to know because I like the old-fashioned way of being an American a lot better than the way we are headed now.