Evening star., 1937-12-31

With high-caliber administration guns
blazing away at big business with reck-
less fury, the old year fades out amid
grave anxiety over what betides for COM
merce, industry and finance. This week S
attacks by Assistant Attorney General
Jackson and Secretary Ickes plastered
with such epithets as "aristocratic
anarchists" corporate earls" and "ducal
economic -overlords" are a foretaste OF
what may be expected when President
Roosevelt himself unlimbers his own
batteries of rhetorical invective. White
House fire will open with his personally
delivered message to Congress on Mon
day. Less than a week later executive
guns will bark again when F. D. r. ad-
dresses the Jackson Day dinner. Both
presidential fusillades will be broadcast.
The fight to master" business-as Ickes
last night candidly epitomized the pur-
pose of the second Roosevelt administra-
tion-will then be on. BY every indica-
ton, the feud between the politicians
and the wealthy tycoons" (another
contemporary American history. The
pity, from the countrys standpoint, is
that while hostilities rage, business al
most certainly will drift from bad to
worse. Fear will not be banished, con-
f1dence restored. or frightened capital
released. The inevitable result can only
be more closed factories, greater unem-
ployment, less and less purchasing power.
and general aggravation OF the recess
sion.
These are anything but happy New
Year thoughts. but they are iron facts
which impel authorities like Col. Leonard
P. Ayres of Cleveland to predict that
the present decline will reach bottom
during the first half Of 1898 and that
next years results will be generally poor.
with recovery far slower than the recess
sion. Washington buzzes with theories
as to the administrators reason Tor
lambasting business at q moment when
everybody except New Deal zealots
thinks salve, not salt is what the Nations
economic wounds need. That the Roose-
veltians badly require an alibi for things
not having turned out 1.-The way we
planned them" is the commonest ex-
planation of the ferocity with which
business is to be pilloried and punished.
Messrs. Jackson and Ickes were the
Presidents fishing companions In Florida
last month. It's now plain as pike
stan that the anti-capital crusade was
plotted and prepared on that occasion.
jackson, Mr.. Roosevelt's reputed fair
haired boy for the New York governor
ship in 1898 and even for the presidency
in 1910, was apparently told OF to drag
out the monopoly" red herring as the
cause Of recession. while Honest Harold"
master phrasemaker Of the cabinet. was
assigned the task of stigmatizing the
"moneyed aristocracy Of America, which
constitutes an even greater menace to
our institutions than would titled class
with vintaged handles to their names
and whose corporate tentacles
stretch their strangling length into every
nook and Granny of the land"
It'll be interesting to see whether Con-
gress develops nerve enough to call men
and things by their right names, In con-
nection with the vendetta against busi-
ness. A third of the Senate and all Of
the House are even more directly inter-
ested in the 1888 congressional elections
than the New Deal high command.
which shudders to think what may
happen to Democratic candidates In the
midst Of an unchecked depression. Re-
sponsive to sentiment and conditions