Since this piece is not signed, nor attributed to anyone else, I am assuming it was written by the editor, Mr. Crossett.
The Caddo Herald
November 2, 1928
The Turn of the Tide
Thus far Governor Smith has been campaigning in the States where he is least well known and therefore in territory where the underground propaganda has been most effective. His success has been amazing. No competent observer can have any doubt that the contrast between Mr. Hoover’s silences, evasions, and irrelevances on the one hand, and Governor Smith’s plain speaking on the other, has made a profound impression on the voters, declares the New York World.
Everywhere the question is being asked: What keeps Herbert Hoover from speaking his mind? Why can’t he say what he thinks about water power, farm relief, prohibition? Why does he have to make a fake issue out of the tariff? Why do his spellbinders have to misrepresent Governor Smith’s position on immigration? Why, when every intelligent business man knows it is absurd, does Mr. Hoover, who eight years ago appealed for a Democratic Congress, now pretend to believe that the Republican have a patent on prosperity? In less than a month of campaigning, Governor Smith has unsettled, exposed, and discredited the Republican campaign strategy. He has already reversed the whole trend of opinion in the South and West.
The Republicans, who thought that the South would change its allegiance to the Democratic Party at the behest of Southern bigots and fanatics, must know by this time that Bishop Cannon, Dr. Straton, and Mrs. Willebrandt have failed. Southern leaders know better than anyone else that to turn over their States to the so-called Hoover Democrats is to surrender to the worst elements in their communities. The border States from West Virginia to Oklahoma are fighting ground; the bigots and fanatics have done their worst and the liberals are on the offensive. In the West, from Wisconsin to Colorado, the whole Progressive vote, which followed Roosevelt, Wilson, and LaFollette, has been moving steadily toward Smith since the Omaha speech.
The Republicans know all this quite well, and in the last ten days they have done their best to conceal the greatness of the tide toward Smith by a propaganda of defeatism among the band-wagon voters.
For an historical parallel it is necessary to go back to the victory of Andrew Jackson in 1832 and of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. For today, as in those two epochal campaigns, a multitude of American voters, hitherto disregarded by the party in power, have found a champion and a program. No deposer studying the figures of 1924 and 1920 can possibly calculate the consequences of the uprising in the West and in the East of millions of silent voters whom the Republican Party has treated as second-class citizens.
All that anybody can say is that the tide has turned toward Smith and that with courage, intelligence, and candor, the victory can be won.
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