Fourth respite given to three gangsters
…
Traffic moves on railroads as unions bow
Settlement still up in air for 18 that agreed late to work
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Congress gets two plans to check farm land boom
By Daniel M. Kidney, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Yanks tired of speeches, even those of First Lady
Invalided Army sergeant back from Pacific also says soldiers ‘fed up’ on Lewis
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In Washington –
FCC to oppose expansion of press in radio
New policy is said to put newspapers on spot, infer monopoly
…
Soldier vote support
Washington (UP) –
Democratic National Committee Chairman Frank C. Walker predicted that Congress will enact compromise legislation, making it possible for servicemen to vote in the 1944 election without controverting states’ rights.
He said in a telegram to Sidney Hillman, chairman of the CIO Political Action Committee, that he can conceive of no member of Congress being willing to deny the soldier the “chance to make his voice heard in a national election” since it would be “a strange democracy that singled out for disfranchisement the citizens who are giving the greatest service for democracy.”
He said:
What could be more absurd than to remove from the election the votes of 10 million of our most patriotic citizens?
Davis to seek state inquiry in Senate race
Probe of expenses in the 1944 primary will be requested
A Congressional investigation of election expenses in the 1944 senatorial primary campaign in Pennsylvania will be requested by Senator James J. Davis (R-PA), the Senator warned here today.
Senator Davis said that when he returns to Washington he will:
…ask the Majority Leader to have a resolution introduced immediately to oversee expenditures, particularly in the primary elections.
He added that Congress will also be asked to appropriate sufficient funds:
…to enable United States marshals to cooperate with the committee and a sufficient appropriation to supervise the votes.
‘Both sides guilty’
Senator Davis, who was declared for the Republican nomination for Governor in 1942, said:
I don’t want to see happen again what happened in Allegheny, Lackawanna, parts of Schuylkill County and Philadelphia in 1942.
Mr. Davis indicated that his proposed inquiry would include expenses of both the Republican and Democratic campaigns, declaring that:
It’s just as bad on the Democratic side as on the Republican side.
Strikes assailed
In a speech at Moose Hall last night, Senator Davis said that a shutdown of the nation’s steel mills or railroads would have been “a calamity comparable to Pearl Harbor.”
The Senator commended leaders of the railroad and steel unions:
…who, when they might have chosen to permit trouble and delay, chose rather to keep the men at work.
Editorial: ‘Dunce’ – ‘Picayune’
At a White House press conference some months prior to the 1940 conventions, Fred Perkins, Pittsburgh Press Washington correspondent, asked the President whether he would be a candidate for a third term. Mr. Roosevelt told Fred to put on a dunce cap and go stand in a corner.
This week, at another White House conference, after the President had boasted of the accomplishments of his administration and enumerated reasons why he wanted to abandon the “New Deal” label in favor of a new “win the war” slogan, Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune asked if all that added up to a declaration for a fourth term. Mr. Roosevelt replied that the question was “picayune.”
It’s too bad, Mr. President, but good reporters are just made that way. They are curious and inquiring fellows. They are interested in the same things newspaper readers are interested in – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be good reporters. So, they go about their job day by day asking questions, some of which may be embarrassing to those questioned, but all of which are designed to obtain news they think will be interesting to people who read.
Before 1940, and now again with 1944 approaching, Mr. President – though it may seem strange to you – reporters have thought that rank-and-file citizens who read the papers and vote in elections had, and have, a lively curiosity about your intentions.
It may in your view be dunce-like and picayunish of them, but reporters and the people they serve are interested in you as a personality and as their President, and they just can’t help wondering how long you want to stay in that White House. So, it is altogether likely – to borrow one of your phrases, Mr. President – that the question will pop up “again and again.” But the reporters don’t intend to be rude or to break the rules of lèse-majesté – they’re just curious.
Edson: Bureau of Census devises advanced sampling scheme
By Peter Edson
Washington –
1944 being one of those years when the polltakers will be abroad in the land, sampling public opinion and thereby predicting who is going to be elected dogcatcher where and by how much, it is worthy of note that the U.S. Bureau of Census has worked out some new wrinkles on straw balloting which have produced amazingly accurate results.
It should be made clear at the start that the Bureau of Census wasn’t and still isn’t interested in political prophesying, the work of the bureau being limited to strictly economic fact-finding. But the bureau used its new sampling technique so effectively in the recent survey of consumer requirements that it has set the private, non-governmental polltakers like Crossley, Gallup and Roper to studying the results to see if their own methods may not need some revision.
The possibility that changes in scientific sampling methods would have to be made from time to time of course has been admitted by the commercial poll-taking organizations. The old Literary Digest poll was accurate up to 1936, when it missed completely. Gallup’s organization was close in 1936 and 1940, but it was off in 1942.
Definite improvement
The new Bureau of Census technique may not represent as much of a refinement over the Gallup method as Gallup was an improvement over the Literary Digest, but it is hailed as an improvement.
The polltakers all get their results by gathering the opinions of only a limited number of people – from 3,000 to 60,000. In the first instance, that’s approximately one out of every 43,000 people in the country. In the latter, it’s one for every 2,150. In neither case is it a big sample and that may explain why you never knew anyone who was asked for his opinion in a poll.
The trick, of course, is to pick the right 3,000 to 60,000 people for the poll so as to get a representative cross-section of the population, correctly divided as to geographic areas, income levels, sex, occupation, age groups and other pre-determined classification. This is known as “purposive selection,” to get exactly a true percentage of each classification in the entire population. Where the Literary Digest went wrong in 1936, of course, was that all of the two million straw votes it received were cast by people whose names were in phonebooks or owned autos.
‘Cell’ system used
The Bureau of Census, for its recent poll of consumer requirements, went after the problem on a different basis from both these others. First, by running through its 1940 census returns, as corrected by all the intra-census studies it has made of population shifts since then, the bureau was able to select 68 areas or “cells” which were statistically representative of other similar areas in the United States. The determination was made as to location, population, division of rural and urban population, type of farming, and other occupation. Two counties representative of each of these areas were chosen. Then from the census listing of households in all of these counties, providing perhaps 10 times as many households as it was desired to survey, a random selection was made of every tenth household. The census enumerators were told to go to those specific addresses to ask their questions.
What the census poll came up with in the end was a list of roughly 4,900 households out of 36.5 million households in the country, or approximately one for every 7,400 families.
Unfortunately, they weren’t permitted to ask their 4,900 sample families who was going to be the next President.
Background of news –
Alaskan weather termed an asset
By Maj. Alexander P. de Seversky, noted aviation writer
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Wartime strikes increase sharply, statistics show
No-strike pledge violated 10 times daily during November; walkouts this year are double those in 1942
By Phelps Adams, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Steele: Yanks paving way for Army to crush Japs
Ex-engineer at Pittsburgh, now in India, demands results of aides
By A. T. Steele
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Taylor: Mediterranean hitchhiker employs devious devises
Brougham, Spanish boat, cycle sidecar, various autos and bomber take writer to Naples
By Henry J. Taylor, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Simms: Civil strife anticipated when war in Europe ends
Revolutionary forces already at work throughout continent; some have come into open
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
As far as we can observe, the Italian people have more to eat, and more goods, than the French did when we hit North Africa.
There is more in the shops to buy, and the better-off people seem to have a greater variety of food. Of course, the poorest people of both countries are pretty close to starvation, but that’s not a new experience for them.
The first American troops to hit Naples could buy fine watches and sweaters and carpenter’s tools and real silk stockings – I know of one officer who bought 50 pairs for $1.50 a pair. Good liquor is now almost exhausted and there is considerable bootlegging of very dangerous booze in the cities. But as time goes on, other types of merchandise come out of hiding and go on sale.
It seems the Italians hid a great deal of stuff while the Germans were here. Not that the Germans would steal it, but the German Army regulates prices strictly and the German price standard was below what the Italians wanted. So, they waited until we came.
Strange things in strange places
They say the Germans didn’t go in much for buying souvenirs and jewelry, as we do, but instead bought clothing and food to send home to their families.
Out of their fear of the Germans, these people hid strange things in strange places. The other day I talked with a soldier who said he had helped clean out the sewing machine an Italian family had buried in the bottom of the manure pile in their barnyard.
Some of our frontline troops, for the first time in many months, are not getting enough cigarettes.
In the middle and latter days of Tunisia we were issued up to five or seven packs a week. One outfit I’ve been with recently said that since hitting Italy they’ve been averaging only 3½ packs per man per week. Another unit not five miles away was getting more than a carton a week. Nobody seems to know the reason for it.
And speaking of cigarettes, the boys wonder why after all these months they must still be cursed with those three obscure brands that nobody likes. Washington could do several million soldiers a favor by either cutting them out entirely or else explaining why they have to be in.
One night before coming to the front I went to a USO show in one of the rest areas and was put in the bald-headed row up front, sitting next to a two-star general.
As part of the program, a girl came out and sang “Pistol Packin’ Mama.” The applause was scattered, and you could tell the tune was not too familiar.
The general turned and said:
That’s a new one on me; I never heard that before.
‘You’re a fortunate man’
To which I replied:
You’re a fortunate man. I never heard it either until I went home last fall, and then I had to listen to it 30 times a day. It was coming out of trees and water faucets. Even my dog was howling it at night.
So, you see there’s one advantage in being overseas and out of touch with things.
One night recently when I was with the artillery, we were rotted out of our blankets an hour before dawn to out down a barrage preceding an infantry attack.
Every battery for miles around was firing. Batteries were dug in close together and you could get the blasts and concussions from other guns as well as your own. Every gun threw up a fiendish flame when it went off, and the black night was pierced like a sieve with the flashes of hundreds of big guns.
Standing there in the midst of it all, it seemed the most violent and terrifying thing I’d ever been through. Just being on the sending end of it was staggering. I don’t know how human sanity could survive the receiving end.
When it was all over and daylight came with a calm and unnatural quiet, a rainbow formed over the mountain ahead of us. It stood out spectacularly against the moist green hillsides and drifting whitish-gray clouds. One end of it was anchored on the mountain slope on our side of the valley, while the other disappeared behind a hill on the German side.
And, as we watched, that latter end of the rainbow became gradually framed by a rising plume of white smoke – set by the shells we had just sent over. The smoke didn’t obscure the rainbow. Rather it seemed to rise enfoldingly around it, like honeysuckle climbing a porch column.
Men newly dead lay at the foot of that smoke. We couldn’t help thinking what a strange pot of gold such a beautiful window was pointing to.