Tule Lake inmates face liquor charges
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Farley sees New Deal as in its last days
Denver, Colorado (UP) –
James A. Farley, former chairman of the National Democratic Committee, said today that “the people are tired of being pushed around.”
He said the election of many Republicans was evidence of that fact, and indicated that he believed the New Deal was in its “last days.”
Mr. Farley said:
It is up to the American people to say when they have had enough pushing around by the bureaucrats. They and they alone will settle the issue.
O’Mahoney appointed
Washington –
Senate Democratic Leader Alben W. Barkley (D-KY) today named Joseph C. O’Mahoney (D-WY) as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, succeeding Joseph F. Guffey (D-PA).
U.S. casualties in Italy are 23,407
Washington (UP) –
U.S. casualties in Italy since the landing at Salerno last September and including the current drive on Rome total 23,407, Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson announced today.
The casualties include 3,384 killed, 14,879 wounded and 5,114 missing.
Willkie calls for high taxes to pay for war
Lower living standard must be accepted, candidate says
New York (UP) –
Wendell L. Willkie, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said last night that Americans must submit to “ruthless” taxation and lower their standard of living or else “we shall lose in debt the victory we have gained in blood.”
Predicting a post-war public debt of more than $300 billion at an interest cost of $6 billion a year, Mr. Willkie told a meeting in the New York Times hall that:
We should pay now for as much of the war as we possibly can.
He assailed the administration’s tax program as “unrealistic” and said President Roosevelt’s request for more than $10 billion in new taxes should be doubled.
He said:
Every dollar of war cost that we pass on to the future thins the financial bloodstream of the future.
There is only one principle to apply to war taxation, and that is a hard principle; we must tax to the limit every dollar, corporate and individual, that is capable of bearing a tax, particularly those corporate and individual earnings which are created by the war itself. That limit is reached only when the war effort itself is threatened. All else must be sacrificed and all must share the sacrifice to the bone.
During a question-and-answer period, Mr. Willkie reiterated his demand for close international cooperation in boundary disputes such as the present Polish-Soviet one.
Wants Soviet friendship
He said:
Let’s still try to find a method of cooperation because millions of lives are involved in our finding it.
The 1940 Republican candidate, who leaves Friday on a speaking tour of Western states in connection with the 1944 campaign, criticized “so-called political experts” who contend that the American people “will never stand for a tough tax program.”
He said:
Give the people an understanding of the issues involved and they will do their duty by their country, however incredibly painful it may be.
Editorial: Unpardonable cowardice
The freedoms of a democracy which we in America enjoy were not won through political cowardice.
Men like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Hancock and Patrick Henry had the courage to speak their minds and to “stand up and be counted” even though profession of their convictions may have resulted in death.
Similarly, the freedom of a democracy cannot be preserved through political cowardice.
Yet 233 members of the House of Representatives have demonstrated political cowardice in refusing to make known their positions on the question of giving servicemen the right to vote.
In a democratic legislative body, the members may vote as they see fit on any issue. But the citizens to whim they are responsible have an equal right to know how each representative votes on every issue.
Democracy falters when those entrusted with carrying out the grave responsibilities of government don’t have the courage to stand up for their convictions.
It is disturbing to record the tactics of the Republicans on this issue.
One of the vital strengths of a democracy is a strong, aggressive, intelligent, constructive minority – a “loyal opposition.”
By secreting their obstructionism behind an artificial parliamentary rule, the Republicans are attesting to the common charge that they have a peculiar talent for doing the wrong thing.
Favor within CIO for service bill called ‘Red line’
AFL spokesman demands delousing before labor unity is possible; Curran, Bridges cited
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
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Hero ends own life
Los Angeles, California –
Staff Sgt. Floyd L. Evans, 37, who held three citations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, was found dead today in a downtown hotel, his wrists slashed.
Civil affairs Marine teams run Marshalls
Islands are first Jap territory placed under U.S. control
By Charles Arnot, representing combined U.S. press
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Yanks face a mighty task in invasion of Marshalls
Japs have had 22 years to fortify islands, and nature also plays a big hand
By Morris Markey, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Dopking: Navy’s guns blow Japs sky-high on Kwajalein
Marines meet only sporadic resistance after shelling levels enemy blockhouses and pillboxes
By Alva Dopking, representing combined U.S. press
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Finch: 3-day shelling and bombing crushes atoll
Ships ring island with fire; planes rain down blockbusters
By Percy Finch, representing combined U.S. press
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
The British Army recently announced a new system of wound and foreign-service stripes, similar to ours of the last war. I’ve wondered for a long time when we would get around to doing it ourselves, and if you ask me the sooner the better.
The new British wound insigne is to be straight up-and-down gold strip an inch and a half long on the left forearm. There will be one for each wound. Similar stripes of red will be granted for each year of service in the war.
Ours of the last war was a golden “V” on the right sleeve for each wound, and the same on the left sleeve for each six months of service abroad.
A little thing like a stripe can do wonders for morale. And certainly it’s pointless to wait till everybody gets home, for the average soldier will get into civvies the moment he gets his discharge. Over here and right now is when wound and service stripes would give a guy a chance to get a little kick out of wearing his record on his sleeve.
In fact, I wouldn’t mind parading a few stripes myself. Very shortly I’ll have a total of two years overseas since World War II began, and since I’m now at the age where hardening of the arteries may whisk me off at any moment. I’d like somebody to see my stripes before it’s too late.
Typewriter breaks down
A thing I’ve always feared in war zones has at last happened – my typewriter has broken down.
A certain metal bracket has cracked right in two, and you can no longer turn the cylinder and make a new line by hitting the little lever on the side.
Fortunately, you can still turn the cylinder the old-fashioned way, but that’s like a soldier with a machine gun who has to stop and load every bullet separately. It will be possible to get the little gadget welded the next time I get to an airfield, but jumping around as we d that may the weeks away.
Still, all in all, breakdown could be much worse, and I don’t know that a broken typewriter makes so much difference anyhow to a correspondent who is unable to think of anything better than his broken typewriter to write about.
That bet on beer bottles
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the boys in a certain artillery battery were betting on whether Schlitz beer ever came in green bottles or not.
Well, R. Ray Parsons of Indianapolis writes that the Schlitz bottle was brown for many years but that because of the wartime bottle shortage it is now often put in green bottles. That settles the argument but the best part is yet to come.
Mr. Parsons was a private in the AEF in the last war and he is a Schlitz salesman. He now has and his enthusiasm for the ripe quality of his own suds, that he offers to buy the two artillerymen all the beer they can drink in a week after they get back to America. If they’ll write him, he’ll make the date.
That would be fine but, Mr. Parsons, what the artillerymen and everybody else want is beer over here right now. Everybody but me, of course.
Must cut voting red tape
All America seems to be worrying about whether the soldiers are going to get to vote. It sounds as though Congress is practically in fistfights about it.
Well, if you’ll met have the platform a moment, I think I can tell you how it is. I can’t answer for the Army which is either in training or in behind-the-lines routine jobs, but I think I can answer for the frontline combat soldier, and the answer is this:
Sure he wants to vote, if you ask him he’ll say yes. But he actually thinks little about it, and if there’s going to be any red tape about it, he’ll say nuts to it.
The average combat soldier is so consumed with the job of merely keeping alive, and with contributing what bare little he can to his own miserable existence, that he has little room in him for thinking about the ballot. If you offered him his choice between voting in November and finding a dirty cowshed to lie down in out of the rain tonight, the cowshed would win.
Won’t fuss with questionnaires
If the Army could set up the machinery and some day all of a sudden tell every soldier in the combat zone to step up and mark his “X” if he wanted to, then 99% of the frontline troops would vote.
But if soldiers have to full out long questionnaires from their home states, sign affidavits, and fuss around with reading and writing out complicated lists, then I think 99% of those same frontline troops would say:
To hell with it, he’d rather have a cigar ration at suppertime instead.
Pegler: Dewey’s record
By Westbrook Pegler
Albany, New York –
It would be foolish to pretend that the rising interest in Tom Dewey’s work as Governor of New York is limited to just that.
Although he is not a declared candidate for the Republican nomination for the Presidency nobody is naïve enough to think he would refuse to and that is why his work as governor, the adoption of a short, understandable state income tax form, his determination to make the cities meet their financial responsibilities so as to reduce their debts, the better to meet post-war conditions, his attitude toward the people whom he regards as citizens, not wards of the government, are of national interest.
This new state income tax form consists of just one page, for taxpayers whose income consists of wages, salaries, commissions, pensions, interest, dividends, partnerships, estates or trusts. It contains only 22 questions and schedules from A to I, such as “Were you married and living with your wife or husbands?” and “if so, state name and did your wife or husband have a separate income and if so, it included in this return?”
There is a reverse side, but half of that is taken up by instructions and the blanks on the top half are for the explanation of deductions claimed on page one. It can be used for incomes up to any amount derived from the sources specified, by contrast with the idiotic federal return required of individuals above a certain rather modest bracket.
Duplication in taxes
Moreover, although Mr. Dewey has not attacked the subject, his tax department is imbued with the idea that the federal and state governments should divide the tax field by agreement and avoid duplications. The income tax is the horrible example of this duplication, because the New York law compels the citizen to pay a state tax on money already paid to the national Treasury, a plainly cynical imposition.
The question may be raised, for example, whether the federal government has any right to collect amusement taxes inasmuch as amusement is a strictly local occasion. A man takes a girl to the movies. In what respect is that an interstate transaction? If the federal government may tax tickets, why may it not tax real estate? But if it confines itself to its own traditional American responsibilities it won’t have to collect local taxes.
The Dewey administration’s tendency seems to be toward restoration of the responsibility of the subdivisions of government and the division of taxing powers so that the federal government will not be collecting from the people to finance local improvements and assuming the function of the subdivisions without reducing their wasteful rapacity. Similarly, the state would operate in its own well-defined tax field and the cities and other inferior subdivisions would have to make their own way on their own revenues.
Old bonds for sale
Recently, Mr. Dewey’s controller, Frank Moore, has been telling careless cities that they can’t refund old bond issues but will have to pay them of. There is political risk in this because it means higher immediate local taxes in some cases but Mr. Dewey pointed out in a speech to a meeting of publishers that one city has repeatedly refunded an issue of bonds sold to raise soldier bounties in the Civil War and is still paying interest on them although the payments have amounted to many times the original amount. In another case, Boss Tweed in 1868 sold a bond issue paying 7% to pay for a sidewalk in the Bronx. The sidewalk is gone and probably no man lives who remembers it.
He said:
Some of the bonds will mature in 1975, but some cannot be paid for another 100 years since they are not callable. The bonds go on and on. These stories could be multiplied by the hundred.
There is no Harry Hopkins anywhere in the Dewey state government, nor a Henry Morgenthau or Randolph Paul. there are no timeless moochers’ quarters in the Governor’s mansion or embittered failures in the battle of life striving to revise the rules in favor of the incompetent to the detriment and discouragement of those who are able.
That simplified tax return is a bright example of the new type of New Deal. The old one, including instructions, contained six pages.