Editorial: If evidence were needed–
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Trial balloon election held in Oklahoma
GOP tries to win Democratic district
Muskogee, Oklahoma (UP) –
Voters in Oklahoma’s traditionally Democratic 2nd district today chose between a Republican and Democratic Congressman in a hotly-contested special election that may prove a trial balloon for both parties.
The race for the House seat vacated by Democrat Jack Nichols was climaxed last night with speeches by Senator Alben W. Barkley, Democratic Majority Leader, on behalf of his party’s candidate, W. G. Stigler, and Senator E. H. Moore (R-OK), who spoke for the GOP nominee, E. O. Clark.
Cooperation stressed
Mr. Barkley, who spoke here and at Okmulgee yesterday, called for the election of a Congressman “who is in sympathy with the great objectives” of the administration and said that Congress must in future months give Mr. Roosevelt “a maximum amount of cooperation.”
Mr. Moore attacked the record of the Democratic Party, repeating his charges that bureaucracy threatens the foundations of American political and business life.
Mr. Barkley criticized Republicans for attempting “to mobilize every sore toe into an army of opposition,” by capitalizing on such war inconveniences as rationing, price control and heavy taxes, and branded his party’s opponents “diehards,” “obstructionists,” and “lying partisans” who “rail out as if they were permanent inhabitants of a national wailing wall.”
Elected only one GOP
The 2nd district gave Mr. Nichols a 20,000-vote majority over Mr. Clark in the 1940 campaign, but this was pared to 385 ballots in 1942 when Mr. Clark was again the Republican candidate.
The district has elected only one GOP representative. That was in the Republican landslide of 1920 when Miss Alice M. Robertson of Muskogee defeated the incumbent by 209 votes.
Bricker lashes Senator Barkley
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker was scheduled to make an address at Wichita, Kansas, today following his address at a Republican rally here last night in which he accused Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley of “taking orders from the New Deal on Capitol Hill.”
Governor Bricker, candidate for the Republican nomination for the Presidency, said Senator Barkley’s visit to Oklahoma on behalf of W. G. Stigler, Democratic candidate in today’s special election, was “an example of the inconsistencies in which New Dealers engage to retain power.”
Governor Bricker spoke here on behalf of his own candidacy for the presidential nomination, but took advantage of Senator Barkley’s appearance at Muskogee to snipe at the Senate leader and at the same time boost the GOP special election candidate.
New York elects convention delegates
New York (UP) –
New York State voters will elect 90 delegates to Republican and Democratic national conventions today, with neither party expected to experience opposition difficulties.
Principle interest in the presidential primary centers around the interparty American Labor Party committee election. Right-wing and left-wing opponents have wrangled bitterly and have drawn Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia into the factional dispute in the role of unsuccessful peacemaker.
New Deal leaders admitted that results of the ALP voting would have a definite effect on the fourth-term changes of President Roosevelt.
An ‘ambition-bitten aspirant’ –
‘Willkie Rides Again’ article tries to put Wisconsin ‘hep’
La Follette publication attempts to discourages Progressives’ support
By Daniel M. Kidney, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
“Wendell Willkie Rides Again” is the title of an article on the candidate’s Wisconsin tour appearing today in The Progressive, published at Madison, Wisconsin, by a company headed by Senator Robert M. La Follette (PR-WI).
The tone of the article is such as to discourage Wisconsin Progressives from following the editorial suggestion of William T. Evjue of The Capital Times of Madison to vote in the Republican primary in favor of the 1940 GOP presidential candidate.
The author of the Willkie article is L. T. Merrill, described in The Progressive as “a professor of American history and former Wisconsin and Washington newspaperman.”
Mr. Merrill writes:
American political history hardly affords any parallel spectacle of an ambition-bitten aspirant bumping around at such a hectic pace trying to reinflate his sagging pre-convention prospects.
All the more surprising are these highly organized personal forays and sorties in view of Mr. Willkie’s hardboiled air of assurance last fall when he laid down his policies at Washington with a take-it-or-leave-it air.
Cites ‘truculent’ speed
The reference is to the speech Mr. Willkie made to freshmen Republican Congressmen which man who attended called “truculent.” The Progressive article continues:
All the subsequent traveling showmanship tends to belie a sense of genuine assurance on his part that he has the nomination in the bag or that millions of those he left holding the bag last time are as willing to hold it again.
Mr. Willkie’s current foray into Wisconsin follows a previous lure tour last November that apparently did not have all the desired effects, though it was carefully organized.
Mr. Merrill concludes that Mr. Willkie is winning more “newspaper decisions than anything else.”
Only one wants him
He writes:
Mr. Willkie’s checkup agent, who came into Wisconsin after he had left last fall, must have discovered that flattered or dazzled Wisconsin editors have given him a better “break” than any other GOP presidential aspirant – although this would not be the first time Wisconsin editors have climbed on the wrong horse and ridden off somewhere without great results in pulling their readers.
Despite the whooping and booming of which Mr. Willkie has been the beneficiary in some Wisconsin dailies, what are the results? A Gallup poll published Feb. 23 indicates only one of five Wisconsin Republicans wanted Mr. Willkie as their standard-bearer again.
Smoke still rising from Mount Vesuvius
Naples, Italy (UP) –
Smoke and cinders still rose from Mount Vesuvius today, although the volcanic eruption continued to subside.
Ashes showered the Salerno-Torre del Greco coastal highway, but observers believed the danger period had passed.
Competitors want co-ops to pay taxes
Unfair treatment on levies charged
By John W. Love, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With Allied beachhead forces in Italy – (by wireless)
When you get to Anzio you waste no time getting off the boat, for you have been feeling pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery.
But after a few hours in Anzio, you wish you were back on the boat, for you could hardly describe being ashore as any haven of peacefulness.
As we came into the harbor, shells skipped the water within a hundred yards of us.
In our first day ashore, a bomb exploded so close to the place where I was sitting that a fragment came through the window of the room next to mine.
On our second evening ashore, a screamer slammed into the hill so suddenly that it almost knocked us down with fright. It smacked into the trees a short distance away.
And on the third day ashore, an 88 went off within 20 yards of us.
I wished I was in New York.
Reporters under fire
When I write about my own occasional association with shells and bombs, there is one thing I want you folks at home to be sure to get straight. And that is that the other correspondents are in the same boat – many of them much more so.
You know about my own small experiences, because it’s my job to write about how these things sound and feel. But you don’t know what the other reporters go through, because it usually isn’t their job to write about themselves.
There are correspondents here on the beachhead, and on the Cassino front also who have had dozens of close shaves. I know of one correspondent who was knocked down four times by near-misses on his first day here.
Two correspondents, Reynolds Packard of the United Press and Homer Bigart of The New York Herald-Tribune, have been on the beachhead since D-Day without a moment’s respite. They’ve become so veteran that they don’t even mention a shell striking 20 yards away.
Nobody is wholly safe
On this beachhead, every inch of our territory is under German artillery fire. There is no rear area that is immune, as in most battle zones. They can reach us with their 88s, and they use everything from that on up.
I don’t mean to suggest that they keep every foot of our territory drenched with shells all the time, for they certainly don’t. They are short of ammunition, for one thing.
But they can reach us, and you never know where they’ll shoot next. You’re just as liable to get hit standing in the doorway of the villa where you sleep at night, as you are in a command post five miles out in the field.
Some days they shell us hard, and some days hours will go by without a single shell coming over. Yet nobody is wholly safe, and anybody who says he has been around Anzio two days without having a shell hit within a hundred yards of him is just bragging.
People who know the sounds of warfare intimately are puzzled and irritated by the sounds up here. For some reason, you can’t tell anything about anything.
The Germans shoot shells of half a dozen sizes, each of which makes a different sound of explosion. You can’t gauge distance at all.
One shell may land within your block and sound not much louder than a shotgun. Another landing a quarter mile away makes the earth tremble as in an earthquake, and starts your heart to pounding.
You can’t gauge direction, either. The 88 that hit within 20 yards of us didn’t make so much noise. I would have sworn it was 200 yards away and in the opposite direction.
Get weak in the knees
Sometimes you hear them coming, and sometimes you don’t.
Sometimes you hear the shell whine after you’ve heard it explode. Sometimes you hear it whine and it never explodes. Sometimes the house trembles and shakes and you hear no explosion at all.
But I’ve found one thing here that’s just the same as anywhere else – and that’s that old weakness in the joints when they get to landing close.
I’ve been weak all over Tunisia and Sicily, and in parts of Italy, and I get weaker than ever up here.
When the German raiders come over at night, and the sky lights up bright as day with flares, and ack-ack guns set up a turmoil and pretty soon you hear and feel the terrible power of exploding bombs – well, your elbows get flabby and you breathe in little short jerks, and your chest feels empty, and you’re too excited to do anything but hope.
Marines raise quota for women reservists
Call may be last for that branch
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WACs choose own training
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Stokes: Willkie on labor
By Thomas L. Stokes
Milwaukee, Wisconsin –
Wendell L. Willkie does not have the highly critical attitude toward labor now prevalent among some elements in his own party and in the Southern wing of the Democratic Party.
This attitude expresses itself in exaggeration about strikes, in minimizing labor’s contribution to the war, and in demands for enactment of a law by Congress to prevent strikes in wartime.
Mr. Willkie deplores these tendencies and counsels moderation in approaching the problem.
This was the spirit, a spirit of tolerance, in which he presented a program for labor last night at Milwaukee that is designed to attract to his side elements of labor that are becoming dissatisfied with the Roosevelt administration. He believes large groups of labor was included in that independent vote, still undecided, which he says the Republican Party must have to win, and to which he is making a studied appeal in his campaign for delegates in the April 4 primary election here.
He said:
You’d think from public statements that all labor is doing is striking. Its contribution in this war has been magnificent. One of the most magnificent stories that will come out of this war will be labor’s record of production.
Basic in appraisal of the labor problem, he holds, is recognition first that only in recent years has labor established its rights, and only recently has engaged in political activity to protect those rights.
Mistakes are natural
He said:
It has had less experience than other elements of society. It was natural that it should make mistakes, that its leaders should make mistakes. That must be expected.
For that reason, tolerance is needed, he explains.
He does not condone strikes in wartime. No one, he said, has been more condemnatory of strikes in wartime than he. Some of these have been wildcat strikes; some he attributed to a vacillating policy of the government.
Likewise, he is highly critical of some labor leaders. He condemns labor racketeering, but emphasized that this has been less than sometimes represented, and has not affected the great mass of union members.
He believes that labor, itself, must set its house in o5rder and must recognize its responsibilities, rather than seeking to accomplish this by issuing public statements and by having Congress pass laws.
For that he recommended a threefold program:
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Labor must remove from its leadership arrogant and corrupt leaders.
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Labor must develop more of a sense of responsibility in its economic and social relations.
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Labor must democratize itself, must give more power to individual union members, more participation for them in its activities and in the formulation of its policies.
Capable young men in ranks
In connection with the necessity of removing corrupt and arrogant leaders, Mr. Willkie said there are many capably young men in the ranks of labor who are qualified for national leadership, and these men should be recognized and given an opportunity for leadership.
As for government, he held that labor should not have to deal with a multitude of boards and commissions as now, and, to this end, he said much could be done by having real labor representation in the Cabinet, in the Secretary of Labor. The Secretary, he said, should recognize labor’s interest in international affairs as well as domestic affairs, in tax programs, welfare and the like. It should be developed into a real broad-gauge office.
Mr. Willkie deplored very much all the talk that this country faces some “inevitable, irresponsible conflict” between capital and labor. He doesn’t see any such inevitable, irrepressible conflict.
He gave his prescription for solving labor troubles.
He said:
You solve them by creating an atmosphere in which there is no occasion for them, and by a policy of government that is fair, firm and non-discriminatory.