Page:GPO-CRECB-1937-pt2-v82.pdf/5

1937 Where is the particular thing to which the megaphone, banquet, and radio proclaimers allude as causing the stock  market to rise and fall that is of a legislative character? Is this the standing claimed as cannot be respected by honest men in the land? We ask the commanding question here: What is the motive behind these assaults, as well as what is the reason of these combinations concurring one with the other in misrepresentations of all true business and faithful business organization?

Mr. President, I beseech the Senate to hear me while I invite them to a bit of the history of the country. Do Senators feel there is something new in this particular course that has been taken at this time? Indulge me to the point of vexing your patience. I speak of that which is within your memory. I shall not hark back beyond that merely to recite recorded history.

In 1914, the off year after the election and preceding the Presidential election in 1916—and I hope the leaders of both political parties will catch this, because each participated in legislative action during the time—the World War was on the world. Promptly in 1914 there arose in this country suddenly and all at once a general assault upon the credit of the United States. There arose a hiss and scorn upon and a denunciation of anything there was of government. The result was that we could not get a cent to bring the farmers' goods to the railroads. We could not get the money to ship his goods to the consumer. The then Secretary of the Treasury, now the junior Senator from California [Mr. ], took the step, with the aid of the President, in putting the Treasury behind agriculture to get the products to the market.

At this time the securities of our land fell on the stock market with great suddenness; fright existed all over the land. Eminent gentlemen supposed to represent finance and commerce began denunciation upon their country. The administration was held up before the world as lacking worth or confidence in various respects. One charge was that our Nation did not join in war with haste. Then, secondly, the charge was made that the policies under the Wilson administration were the kind destructive of business, of credit, and of honor.

It may be that Senators feel that these charges initiated this feeling of unrest. Far from it. It was the product of the design. Hear me while I recite that under Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and 1907, in the off year, war was going on between Russia and Japan, and promptly, with suddenness, came an assault on this distinguished President and his policies, denying him the right to respect, withholding the people's confidence from him. He was demeaned as lacking in intelligence. He was accused of being an anarchist and his legislation of being destructive to all principles and products of America.

It was then that in this honorable body Senators were compelled to find their recourse as refuge in different forms of legislation, some of which went by the name of railroad legislation and others by designation of Treasury finance.

But the fact is evident that we see how absolutely duplicated today is of that which was in 1914 an off year. Now, in the off year of this administration, while war is pending in Asia, occupying all of Asia, war in Europe induced by conditions in Spain, with a terror hanging over England and France because of Germany and Russia, we find the very same element throughout the land, directed by certain influences of the exact nature, duplicating the very conduct that we saw during these other days of war and under similar circumstances and situations. Behold the similarity and answer, "Why?"

We ask, "What does it mean?" May I ask the question of you, Mr. President, is it possible that these eminent speculators throughout the country bide their time to depress the stocks of their own Nation and then to purchase them in, and then to raise the price to the highest possible mark; then seize the products of the farmer from the farm, the results of the manufactures from the factories, at the very lowest prices to which they have been depressed, and then lift them to the very highest prices that monopoly will induce, and so sell them to the great profit of the manipulators? Is not that just what was done under the war days of 1914, following what was done under the war days in the time of Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 and 1907?

Now, what do we find? Is it possible, I ask, that these speculators have conceived that if they can start a policy in this Government of making every human being feel that whatever stock he possesses is already tainted with utter failure and dishonor and every form of undertaking is likewise, if you please, decreed to its death, that from this result they can frighten the body which we know as the Securities Commission from any further enforcement of the law that compels the showing of a just amount of property behind a stock before it can be issued? Is it possible these masters at last conceive again what they did in 1907 and 1914, and what we know they did in 1929—that by doing this they can have those who are possessed of anything dispose of it at any figure, and they can then issue new stock in the form of certificates with nothing to sustain it but water and audacity, and then sell those stocks to America under whatever guise they please, while their rottenness will rob the widows, cheat the poor, and leave the country bereft of its financial honor?

Let us have no misunderstanding. Let us have a true understanding. I propound to my honorable colleagues of whatever political faith, How could there have been in San Francisco in one night, in the city of New York the same night, in a town in New England the same evening, and in the city of Washington the same noon, the very same speeches upon the very same ground? I hope the honorable gentlemen of the press will not fail to note that I openly charge that it could not have been done without some understanding had preceded it. There is no system which the mind can devise and now pronounce that there could have been an induction of that nature to the undirected mind that such could have expressed itself in harmony of words except that their minds were completely dominated by suggestion or direction from some superior, subterranean, and controlling force.

We come to the point. Here are the businessmen of this country anxious to join with the President, the President anxious to join with them, in complete communion and harmony. There is not the slightest dissatisfaction among those who are the real business. The toilers heretofore seem to have smoothed out their conflicts in the unions and are living together again in harmony, while we stand before the world everywhere with credit undisturbed, with honor conceded, with the very highest degree of commercial grandeur. We are the one and only nation in the world wholly at peace with itself. There are no riots in our land among our people. There are no disturbances among our people from fright or terror. There is no sense of abhorrence or shuddering upon the theory we are on the verge of war. There is nothing that indicates an alliance, or can be, with foreign forces to join with them in controversies they may have with their neighbors in the prospect of war they may have with other nations.

Why should the countrymen in our own land choose to dishonor our own country by discrediting it upon a false basis and holding it up before the world as unworthy of legitimate confidence that attends all business enterprises? Who is it that will profit by this?

When those gentlemen, whoever they are, which have frightened the poor woman with a small security to have her sell it at a complete loss and robbed the estates of the little possessions which they may have from which income may have been afforded, and then the little-business man shall be compelled to get rid of what he possesses on the ground that what he has is a loss and then induced to enter doubtful investments again, this result will reproduce exactly the situation of 1929-30. Will those people who are the creators of the desecration have been rewarded when they have brought disaster upon their own people, set dishonor upon their own Nation. and brought disgrace upon their own countrymen?