The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and PoliticalLane, Franklin K.
History
The Letters of Franklin K. Lane, Personal and Political
Lane, Franklin K.
United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
And the thing to be against is the man who is looking backward,
who talks of the "good old days," meaning (a) money in politics,
buying votes in blocks of five; (b) human beings as commodities,
Homestead strikes, and instructions how to vote in the pay
envelop; (c) privately controlled national finances as against the
Federal Reserve System; (d) taxation of the poor through indirect
taxes on pretext of protecting industry; (e) seventy-five cent
wheat; (f) dollar a day labor; (g) the saloon-bossed city; (h) no
American Merchant Marine; all goods carried abroad under foreign
flags--those were the "good old days," for which the Standpat
Republican is sighing.
But the world has moved in the past twenty-five years, and America
not only has moved it, but has kept in the lead. ...
WHAT WE WANT
A greater America--that is our objective.
We want our unused lands put to use.
We want the farm made more attractive through better rural
schools, better roads everywhere, more frequent connection between
town and farm, better means of distribution of products.
We want more men with garden homes instead of tenement houses.
We want our waters, that flow idly to the sea, put to use; more
stored water for irrigation, more hydroelectric plants to supply
industries, railroads and home and farming activities. There
should be electric lights upon the farm, and power for the sewing
machine and the churn. It can be done because it is being done on
the best farms of the far West.
We want our streams controlled so that they do not wash away our
cities, farms, and railroads, and so as to redeem the submerged
bottom lands for the next generation. ...
We want fewer boys and girls, men and women, who can not read or
write the language of our laws, newspapers, and literature, ...
that those who live with us may really be of us. ...
We should dignify the profession of teaching as the foundation
profession of modern democratic life. ...
We want definite and continuing studies made of our great
industrial fiscal and social problems. The framing of our policies
should not be left to emotional caprice, or the opportunism of any
group of men, but should be the result of sympathetic and deep
study by the wisest men we have, irrespective of their politics.
There should be industrial conferences, such as those recently
inaugurated, to arrive at the ways by which those who furnish the
financial arm of industry and those who furnish the working arm of
industry may most profitably and productively be brought into
cooperation. ... Through the study of what has been done we can
give direction to our national thought and work with a will toward
a condition in which labor will have recognition and be more
certainly insured against the perils of non-occupation and old
age, and capital become entitled to a sure return, because more
constantly and productively USED.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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