Willkie flays backroom boys
Superior, Wisconsin (UP) –
Wendell L. Willkie was scheduled to end his two-week pre-primary tour of Wisconsin here today after blasting the “backroom boys” of the Republican Party who threatened to make the New Deal the “lesser of two evils” facing the nation in the November election.
Mr. Willkie told an Eau Clair, Wisconsin, audience last night that certain factions of the GOP “think you can be elected by telling one group one thing and another group something else.”
Stumping the state in support of 24 delegates pledged to him in Tuesday’s primary, Mr. Willkie demanded that the Republican Party and its leaders “take an affirmative stand on the issues of the house because when confronted by the lesser of these two evils, the people will continue to vote for the New Deal” rather than an undecided GOP.
He said:
The Republican Party is entitled to leadership. I would be ashamed to lead a party made up of Gerald Smiths, a party with no guts, whose leaders don’t want to be men when men are dying for us.
Earlier, Mr. Willkie told audiences at Chippewa Falls and Menomonie that “the very men who hate the administration so much that they cannot see its good points are actually proving to be its best friends.”
He said:
These men and these forces, such as The Chicago Tribune and the Hearst papers, hate the administration so much that they advocate always-negative policies which prevent the people from removing the New Deal from leadership.