united-states-presidential-candidates-1928

"In a thoughtful request, Johns’s fellow Comrade Stromquist asked that the funeral service be held at the public library. He said of the unusual appeal "the library is a temple of knowledge; it was to this place that Comrade Johns often came not only in his capacity of a teacher of science in the lecture rooms, but to seek knowledge. I can think of no place so appropriate to bury him from.""

"I am a real representative of the working class because I earn my living by my actual manual labor."

"I believe in the use of the ballot, but, if the will of the people who are workers cannot prevail, then let us apply force. By force I do not mean physical force, such as shooting or mob attacks, but rather the use of industrial pressure by means of one big union."

"The young presidential candidate, representing an obscure branch of socialism, died in a failed effort to save a drowning boy in the cold waters. While Johns’s political party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) — a distinct and separate entity from the better-known Socialist Party of America (SPA) — is little more than a footnote in American political history, the man died a hero and was posthumously awarded the Carnegie Medal."

"For weeks afterward, memorials flooded into the offices of The Weekly People from around the country. "Now Johns has left us — left under circumstances so heroic, so humane, and so dramatic that, however much we may futilely rebel at the combination of events that conspired to snatch him away, we still dare not regret the event itself," wrote a contributor to one such memorial. "To wish that Frank had in that moment done otherwise than he did would be to wish he had been another than he was. Being the Johns we knew, fearless, noble, unselfish, and self-sacrificing for humanity’s sake to the very depth of his being, he could not have done otherwise.""

"There will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the separate alliances through which in the unhappy past the nations strove to safeguard their security or promote their interest."

"A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on."

"Perhaps the real fantasists were the Americans, who adopted a remarkably confrontational stance in the final pre-war months, given the vulnerability of their own military installations in the Pacific, particularly the Philippines. The British were markedly more conciliatory, even temporarily closing the Burma Road - 700 mostly mountainous miles along which supplies were travelling to China - in response to Japanese pressure. For reasons that are not easy to fathom, Roosevelt consistently exaggerated the actual economic and future strategic importance of China and underestimated the perils of war with Japan. He declined an invitation from Konoe to attend a summit conference in the summer of 1941. Secretary of State Cordell Hull wanted complete withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Indo-China; he would not hear of any suspension of US aid to Chiang, which the Japanese demanded. In his fateful note of November 26, Hull even proposed a mutual surrender of extraterritorial rights in China - an end, in effect, to the old Open Door system - and recognition of the Guomindang government. With some justification, the policy of the United States towards Japan in this period has been likened to her policy towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War."

"Hull has passed most of his threescore years and ten in useful service to his country and to the world. His rank in history will depend on the fate of democracy, for he has been one of its most ardent champions. If democracy should fail and disappear at this critical point in its history, he will be forgotten as a minor prophet of an unimportant illusion in the development of the human race. If democracy emerges triumphant from the tempering furnace, he will be hailed as a major prophet whose words have lighted his fellow men to hope and progress."

"I think it would have been humanly impossible for two people, over a period of eight years, to agree more consistently and thoroughly than Mr. Hull and I have done. There has never been the slightest important difference of opinion between us, and so far as I am personally concerned I think it would be impossible for any man in my position, who has been so closely associated with the Secretary- who has had the opportunity of being associated wuth a man of his extraordinary moral courage and consistency, and I think an almost unique intellectual integrity- to have anything except very deep devotion for him."