Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents Dear Mr. President: Your letter coming yesterday gives me a deep sense of responsibility in the feeling that I represent voices near to the ground, in as much as these are the voices I hear. In reply to your request, therefore, I shall try to let you hear as near as I can, what I hear those voices saying. I think you should know that they are fearfully confused, uncertain voices, saying one thing one minute and another thing the next, since the speakers fail to put things together correctly. These people only know that they are in trouble. Yesterday I called on a family where the father is slowly recovering from a terrible automobile injury which he received in May. He is not yet able to work. He lost a good job a year ago after working at it for many years. The family is now living with the wife's mother, who is herself in poor circumstances. Just now the grown son is working. He labors around fourteen hours per day, six and seven days per week, for a large piece of it goes for processing taxes, plus three percent on all they buy. Now this is not my voice; it is one voice from the people, which I hear almost everywhere I go. The people on relief are better fed than those whose wages have been so our that their earnings fall below what they would receive were they on relief. Hundreds of people not on relief because parents and near relatives have taken them in; thus families are living on one already sadly depleted income. Many of these people might have lived for weeks on the products of acres not planted and of feed animals slain to appease a few who shout loudly and effectively politically, but forced millions whose predicament gave them no voice at all, to pay prices that bring them to the verge of starvation. The very common people are happy when they have wherewith to eat and wear; unhappy when they have not these things. Just now most of them are unhappy, dissatisfied. They suffer, but they know now why. More people are working to be sure, but take these receiving wages from the Federal payroll off the list, and there would be little if any difference. There is a feeling, too, of political favoritism; that the friends of the administration are being cared for; that the rest do the best they can. The precinct captains see that their friends are taken care of, they say. During my vacation when I drove some fourteen hundred miles in nearby states, I talked with farmers, salesmen, merchants, lawyers, clerks and housewives. I must tell you that since you ask, they are not satisfied. The farmer feels that if farmers have been benefitted, it is the millionaire land-holder, not the eighty-acre farmer. My friend, the auto mechanic complains because his line of work has practically fallen into discard through back alley repairs by neighbors out of work. My friends of the building trades have had no work at all worth speaking of. My friend, the farmer told me the unfairness of a law that gave him his flour free from tax while his one employee who helped raise that wheat and was harder up than the farmer himself, had to pay that tax. My friend the meat dealer complains that due to the multiplicity of taxes many people refuse to buy meat at all; the fact is they cannot. On top of that the administration has forced back the tavern on us, that the wives and children go breadless and shoeless, so that the father--often with the help of mother--may spend the nest part of their meager weekly wage, in an effort to drown their troubles. Mr. President, there is a feeling abroad that our political leaders have lost their souls, that they are insincere, attempting to be acutely politically minded, but absolutely conscienceless so far as the real welfare of the homes of our nation are concerned. Most sincerely yours,
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