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must be a leader of that class which must now come forward as the master of history——the class of labor. Our leaders today must be those who are by their peculiar talents best able to serve the great guiding principle of the present time——by bringing about the unity of the masses in struggle——to establish the united front of labor and to crystallize around the forces of the labor movement the great popular mass that is the majority of our country. This, and the defeat of reaction, rather than immediate hope of electing a candidate to the Presidency, must be our purpose in this campaign. But to do this we must put before the public a candidate who in his person shows that he can be a great leader of the people. In this spirit I propose a man be nominated as our candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I propose a man who comes from the very core of the American people, and remains of them, and who has already in these times of mass distress arisen to heights of leadership in voicing their hopes and aspirations. The candidate I propose has often been called an "average American", and so he likes to be known. He does truly express within himself a cross-section of the people of the prairies and the woods and the mountains of America, and knows how to feel with them their joys and sorrows. If this man be the "average" - oh! what a magnificent promise he is of the genius that must lie unexplored in the American mass of which he is the "average"! The man I propose for nomination is one whose origins date to the beginning of this country - he is a true son of America, born on the prairies of Kansas, nursed upon our most heroic traditions. His ancestors fought in the armies of George Washington, but the greater distinction is that, unlike some other sons of the American Revolution, he is true to those traditions. At Cleveland a few days ago the Republican Party also named for the Presidency a candidate from Kansas. But between these two Kansas men - what a difference! It is the difference between the two sides of a tremendous struggle of life and death that our 4 country endures today. Yes, what a difference between the two men from Kansas! The entire life and thought and ambition of the one have been spent in the single concern to acquire and store up for his own private use all the wealth he could get in the various arts of exploitation of labor and farmers——a banker, and millionaire oil operator. The other, who will be the candidate of the Communist Party if I persuade you to accept my nomination, spent many of his earlier years as an obscure worker in a Kansas plant of the Standard Oil Company, and all of his spare time, night and day, in the hard and hazardous work of building up that great American labor movement which holds the future of our country in its hands. We may say the two candidates from Kansas represent the two opposite sides of the shield of America. The candidate that the Republican Party has named represents the sordid greed and brutish class privilege which, today, in the face of mass starvation, unemployment and devastation of American homes, can think of no other main necessity than to save money for millionaire taxpayers by reducing the desperately low dole of the unemployed. The candidate whom I propose to lead the Communist campaign represents another side of America; he represents the needs, the hopes, the aspirations and the glorious future of the vast majority of America's people that will in time ——not very long from now——find its independence, its mass self-expression and its heretofore hidden capacity to guide its own destinies. These two opposites come from Kansas, and each inherits the traditions of one or the other side of the issue of the 1850's when in "Bleeding Kansas" the first armed struggle took place between the forces of slavery and of anti-slavery in the decade before the American Civil War. The one candidate is called "The Kansas Coolidge". The candidate I propose may be called the new John Brown from Osawatomie. More than any other man in America today, this man possesses those qualities which alone can lead America out of ruin to progress 5
