America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

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americavotes1944

Editorial: President and Congress

Now that Congress has overridden the President’s unprecedented veto of a tax bill, and Senate Democrats have endorsed Leader Barkley’s revolt against Roosevelt usurpation, where do we go from here?

The answer is far more important than the political fortunes of any man or party. Winning the war and winning the peace are at stake. There can be no national unity and no efficient war government as long as the President and Congress are fighting each other. Teamwork between the White House and the Hill, in the letter and spirit of coordinate constitutional powers, is the most acute need in America today.

Such cooperation will not be easy to achieve. Congress has been alternately ignored, smeared and bossed for so long by the President that its human temptation is to pay him back now that he has so grossly-overreached himself. Freedom that comes from successful revolt is a heady wine – Congress could get drunk on it.

Cooperation is even harder for the President. By temperament and habit, he is a one-man show. Moreover, as wartime Commander-in-Chief he is in a spot where even the humble Lincoln found it necessary to be dictatorial at times.

But above all other causes of growing conflict between the President and Congress is the fourth-term election. It is hard for him to divorce War President Roosevelt from Candidate Roosevelt, and still more difficult for Congress to do so. Even when he speaks with wisdom and selfishness, he is heard as a clever politician maneuvering for 16 years’ rule. And when he loses his poise – as in his recent insulting messages – he is jumped on as a blundering candidate, rather than helped out as a national leader who sometimes stumbles under the world’s heaviest load.

Despite all barriers, the President and Congress must get together.

Congress must forget and forgive his past usurpations, remembering its own frequent defaults of responsibility.

The President must learn, from the humiliation which he has just brought upon himself, that he no longer can drive the elected representatives. He must reason, if they are to follow. He must reason, if they are to agree. He must respect their constitutional function, if they are to work with him.

The present tax and foreign policy disputes are typical. The Constitution makes Congress chiefly responsible for taxation, and the President chiefly responsible for foreign policy, but both responsibilities are to be shared. We repeat here the proposals we and others have made so many times for joint executive-legislative committees. Unless the President and Congress can get together on a simplified program for increased taxes, the nation is threatened with inflation and worse. Unless they can get together on a foreign policy, the nation is threatened with another Wilson tragedy and loss of the peace.

They can get together, if they will.

3653

Ferguson: Refugees

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

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3654

americavotes1944

Background of news –
Divided Democratic Party

By Bertram Benedict, editorial research reports

In the House vote last Thursday to override the veto of the revenue bill, about 80% of the Representatives who stuck by the President come from urban areas. With the President were all but two of the Democrats from New York City, a large proportion of those from the West, a considerable number from Oklahoma and Tennessee, but only five from the Solid South (two on pairs).

The Democratic Party is an uneasy amalgam of the South and the large cities of the North and West. About one-half of the Democrats in Congress are Southerners; about one-third urban Easterners and Westerners, about one-sixth non-urban Easterners and Westerners.

In 1924, the party delegates split 50-50 at the national convention in New York on condemning the Ku Klux Klan by name, with most of the Southerners against condemnation, most of the Easterners for it. The convention deadlocked for over 100 ballots between the candidacies of Alfred E. Smith, supported chiefly in the East and in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and of William G. McAdoo, supported chiefly in the South and the rural West.

In the election of 1924, the Smith states gave little support of John W. Davis, the party’s compromise candidate. When the Smith camp demanded and got the nomination for their man in 1928, half of the Southern states voted for Hoover.

Alliance is nothing new

Today, the Northern and Western Democrats yearn to retain the labor vote and Negro vote, necessary to party success in many parts of the North and the West. Southern Democrats in Congress usually can expect reelection whatever the fate of the presidential ticket.

From its very beginning, the Democratic Party was a union of the South and large cities of the North.

Thomas Jefferson rode to power by dint of an alliance with certain urban political organizations of the North, notable Tammany Hall. The alliance ultimately came to grief, despite Jefferson’s attempt to hold the Northerners in line with patronage, and by the end of Jefferson’s administration, he had all but lost control over his party in Congress.

Even at the time of the Civil War, the Southern cotton planters were in close political alliance with Northern cotton manufacturers, and most of the considerable vote in the North against Lincoln for reelection in 1864 came from large cities and towns.

In Grover Cleveland’s second administration, he turned ultraconservative, according to the prevalent views in the South and West during the long depression of the ‘90s, and the South and West took control of the Democratic Party at the 1896 convention. Over Northern opposition, they put across a Free Silver plank and the nomination of Bryan, and the convention even rejected a proposal to commend the Cleveland administration.

Labor turns to GOP

With the Democratic Party in the hands of Southerners and Westerners, Eastern labor turned largely to the Republican Party, especially since the GOP “sold” labor, as we say today, on a protective tariff.

Woodrow Wilson managed to keep the Southerners in line for the pro-labor program of his administration, but in those days, industrialization had made few inroads into the South, where the trade union movement was still more of an abstraction than a reality.

Today, the South has come to know at first hand the attempt to organize both industrial and farm workers for higher wages and shorter hours, and the South is cold to pleas of the Northern and Western Democrats that they need the labor and Negro vote for political success.

The South, on its side, insists that the Northern and Western Democrats don’t appreciate the excesses in Reconstruction days, when voting restrictions in the South were largely relaxed.

3655

In Washington –
Only 1 out of 100 Lend-Lease ships to Russia is lost

More than eight billion tons of goods delivered to Soviet Union, which gets 51% of food exports

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3656

Freedom of the press?
Post-war gains to widen news dissemination field

It is for that reason that U.S. publishers want ‘equality’ in radio ownership
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer

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3657

Ernie Pyle V Norman

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Italy – (by wireless)
When soldiers sit around during lull periods at the front, they talk about everything under the sun. Out of my recent times with frontline outfits, I’ve tried to remember some of the things they talked about.

Two things eventually come up in every extended conversation – the latest rumor about the outfit, and discussions of what home is like and when we’ll get home.

The latest rumor was that my outfit was to get no more replacements for men lost in battle, which led inevitably to a believe that they were to be withdrawn and sent him. nobody really believed it, but everybody wanted to believe it. there were also rumors that the outfit was going to England and to India.

Memories of what America was like are actually getting pretty dim to men who have been overseas two years. As one Iowa boy said:

Why, even England is dim in my memory now, and we were there long after we were in the States.

One boy said that no matter where we went was bad for him, because we’d have to go by ship and he had an absolute horror of ships. He didn’t exactly say so, but I believe he’s rather stay here the rest of his life than make that ocean crossing again.

Shell tagged ‘screaming meanie’

One night, in a group of some soldiers and officers, the question came up whether you should yell or not when making a close-in attack.

An officer thought it was good psychology because the Germans are afraid of night attacks, and a good barrage of Indian yells would further demoralize them.

But the soldiers mainly disagreed. They said Jerry didn’t scare so easily as all that, and when you yell you just give your position away.

Speaking of noise, you’ve probably heard the term “screaming meemies,” for a certain noisy type of German shells. The boys at the front call them “screaming meanies” instead, and brother, they are bad indeed to listen to.

The Germans call the gun the nebelwerfer. It is a six-barreled gun which fires one barrel right after another, electrically. The gun doesn’t go off with a roar, but the shells swish forward with a sound of unparalleled viciousness and power, as though gigantic gears were grinding. Actually, it sounds as though some mammoth man were grinding them out of a machine with a huge crank.

Whenever a shelling starts, we always stop and listen, and somebody makes a remark like, “Grind ‘em out, boy; keep on turning!” or, “Boy, Jerry’s getting’ mad again!”

The “screaming meanies” are frightful in sound when they’re coming at you, and even when they’re going off at an angle far from you, they make a long-drawn-out moaning sound that is bloodcurdling.

Prefer Italy to Africa

The soldiers talk about the Italian people, and on the whole the average soldier doesn’t dislike the Italians too much. Nine out of 10 much prefer Italy to Africa. And the sight of the poor children always gets them.

At an Army chow line near a village or close to farms, you see a few solemn and patient children with tin buckets waiting to get what is left over.

One soldier said to me:

I just can’t bear to eat when they stand and look at me like they do. Lots of times I’ve filled my mess kit and just walked over and dumped it in their buckets and gone back to my foxhole. I wasn’t hungry.

Don’t want to go to Pacific

Bad as this war is, the average soldier hopes he’ll never be sent to the Pacific. He hates the Japs more than the Germans, but he has heard about the horrible jungle fighting and the Jap beastliness, and he prefers to fight somebody of his own kind.

One night, a colonel was talking offhandedly about the war, and how people felt and everything, and he said:

The whole trouble with everything is vitamins. We got along all right before everybody had to have so many vitamins a day.

Very often the rotation system of sending one-half of one percent of the men back to the States each month comes up in the conversation. The boys in my company were all upset because a sergeant in another company had just been taken who had much less time overseas than they.

And a soldier said:

You, know, I’ve never yet seen a battlefield after we passed over it. We always just keep going ahead. Sometime I’d like to walk over the country we fought over. I said walk, not run.

3658

pegler

Pegler: Rebellion in Congress

By Westbrook Pegler

Kansas City, Missouri –
There is no excuse for anyone to believe that President Roosevelt has learned a lesson from his fracas with Dear Alben Barkley. There was no indication of reform in his telegram. He just realized that he laid the whip a little too heavily on an old servant, who then blew the job and threatened to picket the premises.

The original insult to Congress was written with deliberate intent, and with obvious pride in the cheap and sneering flippancy about need and greed and its meaning was not altering by the President’s wheedling mash note to a man whose sense of honor was less alert when he was being elected Senator from Kentucky by WPA money in a hard contest.

He meant to insult Congress and he did, nor was this the first time a recent similar instance being his charge of fraud in the controversy over the soldiers’ vote.

Before that he had threatened to take action himself if Congress failed to pass a law to his liking by a certain deadline. Before that he had, by stealth, attempted to impose a $25,000 limitation on the salaries of civilians unconnected with the war effort or any public project, after Congress, knowing that this would lose, not gain money for the Treasury, and for other reason, had deliberately and pointedly refused o comply with a suggestion first tossed off by Mrs. Roosevelt, who may or may not have known that it had been an article in the platform of the Communist Party.

Return to manhood, decency slow

Of course, he wanted to insult Congress. What other regard would he have for a body which early in his rule, delivered itself into a condition of helplessness, servility and mockery by handing him, without restriction, billions of dollars in the naïve belied that he would hold himself above politics in its distribution?

What other regard would he have for a man who would not only accept the sort of election help that Barkley received from money voted to relieve human misery but offer the cynical justification that, after all, this was politics?

The return of manhood and civic decency to Congress has been slow, and, to the credit of the House of Representatives, it must be acknowledged that the blush of reviving self-respect first tinted the frog-belly pallor of the national legislature there.

It was in the House that a number of bills were passed in defiance of the White House and the entire Fascist movement in Washington two years ago, only to be strangled in the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, which would have brought within the rule of law the terrorists, brothel-keepers, gangsters and Communists of President Roosevelt’s following in the union movement.

But the House, too, had been bad enough and had earned over a number of years of miserable and corrupt betrayal of the whole American concept of government that contempt which Mr. Roosevelt revealed in the “take-a-law” days when Tommy the Cork, Jimmy the Eaglet and other White House walking delegates, in swaggering impudence, stalked the halls giving orders to men elected by the people.

Rebellion long overdue

This rebellion against the New Deal and pointedly against the sneering arrogance of the Treasury in its assumption of the power to make, not merely recommend or request taxes, has been long overdue, but its effect will be lost if any important section of Congress permits itself to be seduced again by the backslapping which has followed.

The whole history of the Roosevelt administration stands against any hope that the dominating personality and his ideological advisers and coaches have the slightest respect for the constitutional status of the Legislature.

Mr. Roosevelt gave orders to Congress too long to be able to change now and restore to the men who always before touched their caps to him in return for handouts and political backing, the rights, duties and prerogatives which their oath, their citizenship and their self-respect lay open them. He just doesn’t think that way.

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3659

Maj. Williams: Starters

By Maj. Al Williams

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3660

Annapolis at war!

Pearl Harbor defeat brought many changes to Naval Academy
By Jess Stearn

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3661

americavotes1944

Barkley still a progressive –
Revolt gives little comfort to anti-Roosevelt forces

By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Washington –
A second look at the “Barkley Affair” indicates that the anti-Roosevelt forces have perhaps drawn mote comfort than is justified from it. Already the Senate Democratic Leader’s deft of President Roosevelt has been toned down somewhat by the exchange of friendly letters between the two.

In judging the incident, this has been overlooked: Senator Barkley has never been among the conservatives, is not among them now, and is not likely to be found among them.

Anybody who expects him to abandon the progressivism that he has followed during his 31 years in Congress and overnight step out as the front man of the conservatives and anti-Roosevelt forces is due for a letdown. That is, unless the basic character of the man is other than it has appeared to close friends and associates for years.

“Alben Barkley was a progressive long before President Roosevelt,” is the wat one of them out it, pointing back to the Kentucky Senator’s record years ago in the House.

He has never aligned himself in the Senate with the Byrds, the Georges, the Baileys, the “Cotton Ed” Smiths.

Nor does he seem to possess the temperament of other outstanding men who, along the war and through the years, have “broken” with President Roosevelt and become deeply embittered as a consequence – Al Smith, James A. Farley, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, to mention three. They have joined up with the anti-Roosevelt forces to topple the President from the White House.

Learned to adjust himself

Senator Barkley has weathered all the vicissitudes of politics. He’s been in the minority and in the majority. He has learned to adjust himself, to roll with the punch, to compromise personal differences of opinion, to take orders and to accommodate himself to party discipline.

The difficulties of his job as leader during the last few years can be appreciated only by those who are familiar with the day-by-day, week-by-week ordeal.

There are two things that might work to sour Senator Barkley, a naturally genial gentleman, and throw him into the camp of the enemy.

One would be an attack of ambition, and that means one ambition, the Presidency. That was at the back of the clash between President Roosevelt and Al Smith, and between the President and Jim Farley, though other factors were also involved. This ambition seems to change the whole scheme of a man’s thinking – toward himself and toward others.

Mentioned for Presidency

Senator Barkley is being mentioned for the Presidency now. How seriously he takes it has not been revealed.

The other thing would be the species of persecution of which some of the zealous New Deal aides have shown themselves capable when someone raised his hand against the President. They work up a vengeance that the President himself undoubtedly never felt.

One disagreement on fundamental policy with the President, one speech of protest, and this group classifies the dissenter as 100% in the enemy’s camp.

This noisy and vicious little claque thus carried on their vendetta against Jim Farley and Burt Wheeler and others. It might happen with Senator Barkley.

3662

americavotes1944

Willkie hits veto message

Blames administration for ‘inadequate’ tax bill

New York (UP) –
Wendell L. Willkie, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, today assailed President Roosevelt’s veto message on the tax bill as “violent and ill-tempered” and said that the administration is to blame for the “inadequate” tax bill.

In a speech here Feb. 3, Mr. Willkie said that if President Roosevelt meant by a “realistic” tax program the $10-billion plan proposed to Congress by the Treasury, then the administrations fiscal estimates for paying the costs of the war were “far too low.” Mr. Willkie proposed instead a tax program “more than double” that of the administration.

Need additional revenue

Mr. Willkie said in a statement today that the administration:

…has so extravagantly and wantonly wasted the people’s money that many Americans see the payment of additional taxes as merely providing additional funds for more profligate government spending.

If it had not been for this record of extravagance, the need for additional taxes now would be both obvious and accepted by all Americans. The American people recognize that a hard war must be fought the hard way – that it must be an all-out war. They are eager to match at home, as best they can, the sacrifices being made by our fighting men who are risking and giving their lives.

The additional income that the war has created should be taxed and taxed heavily. For we need this additional revenue to pay for the war – to pay for as much of the war as possible while we fight.

Must pay now for war

But we need additional revenue now for another basic reason. We must pay now so that after the war is over, taxes may be lowered in order to give that stimulus which lower taxes always give to our economy – the stimulus necessary to provide jobs and opportunities after the war for our present war workers and our returning soldiers.

The violent and ill-tempered presidential veto message advanced none of these causes.

3663

CANDIDLY SPEAKING —
Post-war opportunity

By Maxine Garrison

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3664

Völkischer Beobachter (February 29, 1944)

Drei Londoner Stimmen bestätigen jetzt:
England und die USA müssen sich Stalins Diktat beugen

‚Aus Rücksicht auf die Sowjetforderungen‘ wird die Atlantik-Charta fallen gelassen

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3665

Starke Brände im Hafen von Anzio –
Alle Feindangriffe bei Kriwoi Rog abgewiesen

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3666

Zu den Kämpfen am Monte Cassino –
Völkerchaos brandet gegen deutschen Sperrriegel

Von Kriegsberichter Lutz Koch

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3667

Großer japanischer Erfolg bei den Marianen –
Flugzeugträger und drei Kriegsschiffe versenkt

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3668

U.S. Navy Department (February 29, 1944)

Communiqué No. 507

Pacific and Far East.
U.S. submarines have reported the sinking of 14 enemy vessels in operations in these waters, as follows:

  • 1 large tanker
  • 1 medium cargo transport
  • 1 small cargo vessel
  • 11 medium cargo vessels

These actions have not been announced in any previous Navy Department communiqué.

CINCPAC Press Release No. 287

For Immediate Release
February 29, 1944

Aircraft of the 7th Army Air Force and search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two on February 26 and 27 (West Longitude Date) bombed and machine­gunned Japanese‑held positions in the Caroline and Marshall Islands.

Army Liberator bombers hit Ponape with 30 tons of bombs on February 27, causing fires and explosions. Navy search planes strafed dock areas and a small ship at Kusaie on February 26.

Nearly 50 tons of bombs were dropped on seven enemy‑held atolls in the Marshall Islands on February 27 by Army Liberator and Mitchell bombers, Army Warhawk fighters, Army Dauntless dive‑bombers and Navy search Venturas.

Several of our planes were damaged by anti-aircraft fire, but all returned to their base.

3669

The Pittsburgh Press (February 29, 1944)

DRAFT DEFERMENT CURB ORDERED
Boards to revoke all ratings based on non-vital jobs

Crackdown to become especially drastic on all under 26 years of age; family status disregarded

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3670

Fortresses hit Germany unopposed

Americans again plaster Brunswick to finish off plane center
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer

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3671

Big guns break lull at Anzio

U.S. dive bombers pound Rome’s airfields
By Robert Vermillion, United Press staff writer

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