Willkie: People forced Big 4 sessions
Now they must demand economic, political pacts
New York (UP) – (Jan. 8)
Wendell L. Willkie said today the Moscow, Cairo, Tehran conferences had “established effective military coordination and cooperation of the four great Allies” but had not “produced sufficient political and economic and moral understandings.”
The 1940 Republican presidential nominee told the sixth Victory Rally of the Metropolitan Opera season that:
The force of the peoples’ opinion was responsible for the very fact that the conferences took place and for such progress as has been made.
Pravda criticism ignored
He said:
The people must now assert their opinion clearly to bring about those political, economic and moral understandings which alone can make real the great principles for which we fight.
Mr. Willkie did not refer to the criticism of him by Pravda, Moscow-published official Communist Party publication, which called him a “meddler” because of a magazine article in which he referred to boundary lines in territories Russia recognizes only as its own.
Casualty lists will be “heartbreakingly long,” he said, “unless internal collapse comes soon in Germany.”
He focused his remarks regarding the home front on the Roosevelt administration.
Seizures are disturbing
He said:
In 1933, it was pointed out our specialist was Dr. New Deal; today, he is Dr. Win-The-War. Now this idea – even though facetiously suggested that American people are always sick and are not robust individuals is an insidious doctrine – a doctrine that would make morale hypochondriacs of us all if we accepted it.
Mr. Willkie said:
The recurrent seizures of factories and mines and the recent seizure of the railroads are disturbingly present in all our minds. Those were the drugs prescribed by the doctors when the case became too painful. But the disease remains, and it will not be cured by giving drugs to the people. For it is a disease of the doctors, not of the people. And it will only be cured by attacking its fundamental cause – maladministration.