What does voting for Gore have to do with whether there will be a
Democratic Congress? Nader voters will overwhelmingly vote for the
lesser evil candidate for Congress, in the great majority cases a
Democrat, and in some cases not evil at all.
Social Security and the right of labor to organize and
unemployment insurance and the Home Owners' Loan Act and the rest of
the New Deal were won precisely by direct action. Some of them were
literally drafted by organizations practicing direct action, and
introduced by sympathetic senators and members of congress. Of course
we who were Communists did none of those things on our own. Perhaps
our greatest merit was that we understood the need for coalitions (in
those days called United Front and, when even broader, People's
Front). The battle for unemployment insurance was won in the A.F.of L.
by a rank-and-file organization headed by a Communist house painter,
Louis Weinstock, against the A.F. of L. leadership. Once the A.F. of
L. officially accepted it, the Democratic politicians fell in line.
I was a very active teen-ager at the time, as knowledgeable about
the issues of my day as the marvelous 15-to-19-year-olds of Seattle.
Roosevelt's genius lay in the fact that he, a Hudson River Valley
aristocrat, understood the need for major concessions to what the
people wanted in order to save the entire system, at a time when the
most devastating of all depressions put its existence in doubt.
Bill Mandel
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