I do not minimize what our Party has done toward bringing about true equality, admitting no discrimination of race, color or creed in our ranks. But … - Ella Reeve Bloor

The organized pressure of the masses wrested more concessions from the New Deal than it was ever intended to give them and as soon as finance capital felt that the immediate danger of the collapse of its system had passed, it organized to throw overboard the progressive aspects of the New Deal. The mid-term elections in 1934 saw the formation of a coalition of finance capital against the President under the banner of the American Liberty League. The reactionaries of both parties rallied to the attack-Hearst and Al Smith, the Morgans and the du Ponts. But the outright reactionary appeal failed, the Democrats increased their majority in Congress in 1934 while big votes went to such movements as Upton Sinclair's EPIC party and the Townsend Pension Plan. The election results were less an endorsement than a mandate to Roosevelt further to develop a program to satisfy the burning needs of the people. Roosevelt, above all an astute politician, understood that having lost reactionary support, his only hope of re-election was to heed this mandate. Big Business turned more and more toward the methods of fascism as the only means left them to crush the growing militancy of the workers and secure their profits, pushing forward such dangerous demagogues as Father Coughlin and Huey Long, at the same time they continued their open attack on Roosevelt.

1943 began with the glorious victory at Stalingrad that turned the tide of the war, and ended with another decisive victory-the concord of Teheran, that turned the tide of history. I had seen the first socialist state come into being and watched with dismay how the other nations of the world had tried to crush it. I had seen our own country, after the years of reaction and depression, enter into a new period of democratic progress under President Roosevelt. And now, this supreme event, which meant an end of the division of the world into a socialist camp and a capitalist camp, and the promise of a world in which the socialist and capitalist democracies will work together to banish the evil of fascism and the scourge of war from the earth, and free the people everywhere from hunger and tyranny and fear.

And now, as I near the end of my first eighty-two years, the greatest joy of all is to witness the coming into its own of organized labor as the decisive factor in our national life. All sections of the American people are waking up to the fact that their own future well being and security are dependent not only on the goods produced by labor, but on the well being and security of the workers themselves. In other words, that prosperity, like peace, is indivisible! And the workers, by their willingness to forego the strike weapon and to give themselves unstintingly to the war effort on the battle field and on the home front, have certainly shown that they have no interests apart from the highest interests of the nation as a whole. The workers have grown in maturity and power, and they have demonstrated that they can be counted on to use that power not only to achieve the conditions of work and the standards of living that are their right but to advance the interests of all the people. And they know that the first job is to wipe fascism from the face of the earth.