MEMBERS OF CONGRESS: The editors of The Nation take the liberty of addressing this message to you. This is the first session in eight years not completely dominated by the shadow of the depression, and therefore one in which you can build a program of progressive legislation in more permanent terms. You will be told on all sides to be hard-headed and practical, not to go chasing after Utopias. We agree. But our social system is confronted today by certain hard facts which make their own demands and set their own pace for solution.

We shall waste no time in rhetoric. In the modern state the dispatches to a legislative assembly should be as brief and clipped as communiqués from a battlefield. We are setting down therefore a fourteen-point program, which represents not an ideal social system but the next steps that must be taken in social advance for America.

1. Relief and Unemployment. There must be no curtailing of work relief except as the unemployable are put on direct relief and the unemployed but employable are absorbed in industry. Until the end of the fiscal year the estimate of $877,500,000 made by the relief survey of the Conference of Mayors must be accepted as a minimum. A permanent relief and employment policy must be accompanied by a census of unemployment and the setting up of an adequate system of government employment exchanges.

2. Social Security. The present Social Security Act needs revision as follows: (a) Establish immediately federal health insurance; (b) provide for the inclusion of agricultural workers, domestic servants, and other exempt employees under the unemployment and old-age provisions; (c) eliminate employee contributions from both the unemployment and old-age provisions, and make up the difference with federal funds drawn from progressive taxation; (d) substitute a state-subsidy plan for the present cumbersome tax-offset plan for unemployment insurance; (e) eliminate the huge reserves contemplated for the old-age annuity plan, future deficits to be made up by taxation; (f) provide for an increase in the benefits under both plans, and advance the effective date for the old-age annuity plan to January 1, 1938.

3. Housing. A long-term program of low-cost housing construction, to be financed by federal subsidies to municipalities, trade unions, and public-housing groups, and to be carried on under the final control of a Federal Housing Corporation, but to be immediately subject to decentralized supervision. The construction is to be done under union wages and working conditions, with tenant and labor representation on the supervising groups to insure that rents will remain low.

4. Labor Standards and Labor Relations. To carry out President Roosevelt's expressed determination that "something must be done" to end child labor, starvation wages, and long hours in industry, we recommend: (a) a federal licensing measure, on the lines of the O'Mahoney proposal, whereby firms whose products enter into interstate commerce will be licensed by the federal government and must comply with child-labor provisions, minimum-wage rates, and maximum-hour and collective bargaining provisions; (b) a plan of control in particular industries, as coal and textiles, unless it injures the consumer interest; (c) a constitutional amendment.

5. Trade Practices. While the existing anti-trust laws are not adequate and have never really been enforced, the present pressure to suspend or repeal them is dangerous. Pending more adequate legislation, it is imperative that a strong food-and-drug act be passed to protect the consumer, and that methods be studied for protecting the low-income consumer, both as to price and quality, in such basic necessities as milk and coal.

6. Public Utilities. The Wheeler committee's evidence of recklessness in the financial control of railroads should be gravely weighed, and the problem raised whether government control of railroads can be effective short of nationalization. Similar studies should also be made for the public utilities in gas and electric power. The control of holding companies in public utilities should be protected from judicial assault. We favor taking air-transport regulation from the Commerce Department and placing it with the Interstate Commerce Commission.

7. Power. Ratification of the St. Lawrence waterways treaty will reduce the cost of power in the region affected. In the TVA controversy, principles must be placed above personalities, and every effort made to preserve the government's most promising experiment in making increased power available at low rates.

8. Security Control. The powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission in ordering the segregation of brokers and dealers, and in developing control of the over-the-counter operations should be supplemented by (a) legislation empowering the commission to regulate the activities of protective committees and other groups in reorganizations; (b) regulation of investment trusts.

9. Budget, Taxation, Monetary and Credit Policy. It is desirable to have a balanced budget, but no fetish should be made of it, and balance should not be achieved at the cost of necessary social services. The corporate surplus tax should be retained. The need for increased revenue should be met by strengthening the income tax in the intermediate brackets. No great harm will be done if the President's power to fix the value of the dollar is allowed to lapse. The great danger now is from too rapid monetary and credit inflation, which should be discouraged as a concealed form of taxation resting on manual labor and the white-collar groups.

10. Agriculture and Land Settlement. While soil conservation and crop insurance are both desirable, amendments to the Soil Conservation Act are required to restore an adequate measure of federal control. The work of the Resettlement Administration must be continued in giving immediate aid to the landless in our derelict areas and to the impoverished landowners in drought-stricken and eroded areas. For a more permanent program we favor a government corporation as provided in the Bankhead bill, with adequate annual appropriations and power to finance the taking up of land by sharecroppers and tenant farmers. But this should be only part of a larger program of agricultural education, public health, and cooperation.

11. Personnel and Government Service. In effecting a reorganization of government agencies, care should be taken that, in the interest of either economy or efficiency, essential social services are not sacrificed or placed in hostile hands. The formation, by a regrouping of existing agencies, of three new Cabinet departments—Public Welfare, Public Works, and National Defense—is desirable. Government employees not under the merit system should be placed under it.

12. Civil Liberties. We favor (a) additional grants for the La Follette civil-liberties investigation; (b) legislation to insure greater freedom on the radio, the treatment of controversial subjects from all sides (as in political campaigns), and the exemption of the radio stations from libel suits; (c) an adequate anti-lynching bill, on the Wagner-Costigan model, providing federal prosecution of lynchers where the states fail to act; (d) legislation providing for jury review of the decisions of the Post Office Department solicitor banning material from the mails on the grounds of obscenity and sedition; (e) legislation to give the Labor Department wider discretion in handling "hardship" deportation cases; (f) repeal of the Blanton "red rider," muzzling the freedom of teachers in the District of Columbia.

13. Neutrality, Munitions, National Defense. We favor, as a neutrality policy, an embargo on the sale of munitions and basic war materials or the extension of credits to belligerent nations. Such an embargo should be imposed at the outbreak of war, but the President is to be empowered to suspend the embargo in case the majority of the signatories of the Kellogg Pact find that a country has been attacked in violation of the pact. We favor also the Nye plan for the nationalization of the munitions industry, and legislation "freezing" war profits in other basic industries to a minimum rate. We favor a unified national-defense policy which shall be restricted to the defense of the continental territory of the United States, and we ask a special Congressional investigation to determine a reasonable budget for such a policy.

14. Court and Constitution. We do not believe that action looking to a constitutional amendment precludes Congressional action regulating the exercise of the judicial power. Otherwise steps toward an amendment could be used as a screen to postpone indefinitely action to curb the Supreme Court's power. We favor therefore (a) a clarifying amendment, stating that the commerce clause shall apply to industry and agriculture wherever the products cross state lines, and giving Congress thus clear regulatory power; (b) a wages-and-hours amendment for the states, if later decisions should prove it necessary; (c) legislation either giving Congress the power to override a Supreme Court veto by two-thirds' vote, or providing that the court shall not invalidate an act of Congress except by at least a two-thirds' vote.