“Not as a partisan but as an American and as a teacher of morals, I declare that the party in power deserves a crushing rebuke on Tuesday for the act of its leadership in inflicting the Harding – Coolidge ticket upon the nation,” said Dr. Stephen S. Wise in his first political sermon of the campaign last Monday morning in Carnegie Hall. “Let Harding pass, for he is dead. But Coolidge lives, and the ticket of which he was a part was nothing more than a ghastly joke, perpetrated by a group of leaders who knew that the America of 1920 was war weary and was sure to dismiss the party of Woodrow Wilson with a shrug of impatience. A great party, that is to say, a party with great and high leadership, would have been sobered and solemnized by its responsibility. Instead of that they ‘put something over’; that something which was ‘put over’ was the ticket of which the President of the United States is a surviving member, and the character of the men, who ‘put it over’ is revealed by the circumstance that the leader of the conspiracy was put out of the Cabinet a few months ago in very shame.
“Harding was the jovial figure-head of the group of reactionaries and corruptionists which, unashamed and unrebuked, as they ought to have been ere this, are about to reimpose upon the nation a saturnine figurehead, the difference between him and his predecessor being chiefly that the genial Harding trusted everybody, and the calculating Coolidge trusts nobody, least of all himself.
“The so-called ‘leader of his party’ is a piticaby inconsequent, though not uncalculating figure in the hands of men pitilessly and ruthlessly bent, for the most part, upon serving party policies, however unworthy, and personal ends, however selfish and corrupt. The President of the United States sat as a member of the Harding Cabinet. He retained the old Cabinet when he became President, and when the most shamless betrayal of their country was disclosed touching even members of the Presidential Cabinet, not one brave strong word was spoken excepting as against those men in both political parties who had the courage to speak out in condemnation of the nation’s betrayers.
“I grieve over the circumstance that we are asked to place at the head of the nation for another four years a man who, by his unworthy example, has brought it about that the American people seems for a time to have lost its capacity for moral indignation and even for moral discrimination. Shall the election of Tuesday register this verdict?
“In the matter of foreign policies, the Ad- (??……….)
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
