America at war! (1941–) – Part 3

[NormanStewart]

Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller wins equal rights fight

Constitutional amendment battle won against Mrs. Roosevelt’s, Frances Perkins’ opposition
By Robert Taylor, Pittsburgh Press staff writer

Chicago, Illinois –
Mrs. Emma Guffey Miller, sister of U.S. Senator Joseph F. Guffey and Democratic National Committeewoman for Pennsylvania, won a hard-fought victory in the drafting of the 1944 Democratic platform. She obtained the adoption by the Platform Committee and the ratification by the party convention late yesterday, of a plank advocating approval by Congress of a constitutional amendment on equal rights for women.

Her opposition included Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of the President), Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, half a dozen leading women’s organizations, and a sizable part of the Platform Committee itself, who preferred to duck the issue.

Mrs. Miller, however, had taken steps to see that she got a voice on the Platform Committee. The Pennsylvania delegation had designated Mrs. Miller and Senator Guffey as the state’s representatives on the committee.

Senator Guffey was busy handling details of Vice President Wallace’s campaign for renomination during most of the platform discussions, but Mrs. Miller sat in on committee discussions and also appeared as a witness before her own committee.

Mrs. Miller, active in political affairs for years, is a legislative chairman of the National Woman’s Party, chief proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, but said she appeared in her witness role as a national committee member.

The National Woman’s Party contends that, despite legal guarantees, women still don’t have equal rights under many state laws in matters regarding property, employment, jury service and marital affairs, and that the way to correct the condition is by constitutional amendment.

Opponents objected that the amendment would sweep away laws for the protection of women in industry. Mrs. Roosevelt sent a message saying that, until they were more highly unionized, it would be a hardship on women in industry. Secretary Perkins called the proposed amendment “drastic and ill-considered.”

Mrs. Miller, however, pointed out that the Republican Convention last month adopted an equal-rights-for-women plank, and although other committee members tried to develop an acceptable substitute, she stood her ground.

“This is the happiest day for me,” she said as the convention approved the platform with her plank in it, saying:

We favor legislation assuring equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex. We recommend to Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment on equal rights for women.

[NormanStewart]

Poll: Two-party system favored by South

Believes it could gain more attention
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion

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[NormanStewart]

Port Chicago magazine to be reconstructed

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[NormanStewart]

Helen Gahagan accuses GOP of doubletalk

Says Democrats are conservative party

Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
Mrs. Helen Gahagan Douglas, national committeewoman from California, said last night in an address to the Democratic Convention that the Democratic Party is “the true conservative party” and the Republican leaders “are the dreamers.”

Mrs. Douglas, actress wife of movie actor Melvin Douglas, accused the Republicans of “doubletalk” and said the Democratic Party had conserved hope and ambition “in the hearts of our people.”

She said:

We have conserved the skills of their hands. We have husbanded our national resources. We have saved millions of homes and farms from foreclosure and conserved the family stake and democracy.

Conserve faith in government

We have rescued banks and trust companies, insured crops and people’s savings. We have built schools. We have checked the flooding rivers and turned them into power.

We have replanted the forest, re-fertilize the soil. Ours is the conservative party. We have conserved the people’s faith in a people’s government – a democracy.

‘GOP leaders are dreamers’

Mrs. Douglas said that because they are the conservative party, the Democrats reject “the hazy Republican dream” that the nation can get along “with its government dismantled, its housing programs destroyed, its wage and price controls thrown out the window.”

“The Republican leaders are the dreamers,” she said. “They have no contact with the people or with the realities of their wants and needs.”

Mrs. Douglas said the Republican program is a dream, “a nightmare of muddle and confusion.” She said there are not enough Democrats to elect a President, nor enough Republicans.

Best friend of GOP

She said:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been elected President for three successive terms – and each time the Republicans have helped put him into office.

The last three elections have shown that the Democratic Party has been the best friend the Republican rank-and-file voter has ever had: He knows it, and he has voted accordingly.

‘It’s doubletalk’

Criticizing the Republican presidential nominee, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, and the Republican platform, Mrs. Douglas said:

The Republican candidate has pledged himself to carry to Japan a defeat so crushing and complete that every last man among them will know that he has been beaten.

And at the same time, the Republican platform does not indicate by a single line – or a single word that there is any need for further sacrifice. That is doubletalk.

The Republican Party has pledged itself to reduce taxes to the normal expenditures of the government as soon as the war ends, and also has pledged itself to reduce the national debt. It has not explained how taxes and debts can be so reduced at the same time. That is doubletalk.

The Republican Party declares that it is the party of the Constitution, but its nominee declares that he will not participate in the active management of the war.

Argument called inept

This thoughtless and inept argument ignores the fact that our Founding Fathers carefully provided for civilian control of the military as the only possible safeguard of democratic life. The Constitution gave the people the right to elect a civilian Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.

Yet the Republican nominee runs for the office of Commander-in-Chief on the solemn pledge that, if elected, he will not fulfill his duties. That is doubletalk.

[NormanStewart]

It’s no foreign war, Reynolds tells conclave

Correspondent replies to Clare Luce speech

Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
War correspondent Quentin Reynolds told the Democratic National Convention last night that American servicemen have learned “this was no foreign war,” and on foreign soils have discovered “an outpost of America where there are no barriers.”

“They learned this was no foreign war when they first landed in England,” he said.

There, he said, when American men saw the scars of war on the House of Commons, which “has always been the symbol of free speech in Britain,” and Westminster Abbey, which “has been the symbol of the Christian way of life,” they knew that Hitler was waging war against “our ideals and our way of life.”

Answer to Mrs. Luce

Apparently referring to Rep. Clare Boothe Luce’s “G.I. Jim” speech at the Republican Convention, Mr. Reynolds said:

I do not propose to speak for your son abroad, and I never would commit the unholy sacrilege of speaking for his dead brother who has been killed in combat. No man – or woman – can speak for him. We can only accept his sacrifice humbly and not presume to speak for him with our unworthy tongues.

No barriers at fronts

Mr. Reynolds, who has toured many of the battlefronts, said American men overseas had found out one thing about war… “There are no barriers at the front.”

He said:

Kids here at home grow up surrounded by barriers… all man-made.

Neighborhood barriers, city barriers, state barriers, social barriers, racial barriers, political barriers, barriers of wealth. You climb over one barrier only to find another ahead of you.

Then you find yourself at the front, thousands of miles from home. And suddenly, perhaps for the first time in your life, you realize that here on American soil, as an outpost of America, where there are no barriers. This was always the dream you’d had of America, a dream that never before has come quite true.

There are no Democrats or Republicans at the front; there are no Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans; there are no New Yorkers or Californians or Texans or New Englanders… Only Americans… Only Americans purged of the artificial barriers we still make so much of here at home.

A ‘G.I.’ has the answer

Mr. Reynolds warned that the nation’s fighting men abroad are so proud of their country they would “hate to see it tarnished by the sad spectacle of fellow Americans indulging in the childish pastime of name calling.” He said the reaction of men in uniform to a “smear campaign” by either party would be unfavorable.

Aboard a troopship on the way into Salerno last September, Mr. Reynolds said, a soldier best expressed what Americans are fighting for when he said:

“Added all together, and it means we’re fighting for the right to bawl out the umpire.”

[NormanStewart]

GOP, Democratic platforms have great deal in common

Comparison shows that trend of times has put its mark on both parties’ policymakers
By Raymond Lahr, United Press staff writer

Chicago, Illinois –
The Democratic Party hopes to win the 1944 campaign on its record of 12 years in power during war and peace and on a terse platform of 1,200 words set against a 4,000-word Republican declaration.

The party platform, adopted by the National Convention yesterday, began:

The Democratic Party stands on its record in peace and in war. To speed victory, establish and maintain peace, guarantee full employment and provide prosperity – this is its platform. We do not here detail scores of planks. We cite action.

That contrasted with this paragraph of the Republican platform:

Four more years of New Deal policy would centralize all power in the President, and would daily subject every act of every citizen to regulation by his henchmen; and this country could remain a Republic only in name.

Contain common pledges

The two platforms contain some common pledges, some divergent ones and some in sharp conflict. Here is a comparison of some of the planks.

Foreign policy

DEMOCRATIC: The party pledged “to join with the other United Nations and the establishment of an international organization based on the principle of sovereign equality of all peace-loving states… to make all necessary and effective agreements through which the nations would maintain adequate forces to meet the needs of preventing war and of making impossible the preparation for war and which would have such forces available for joint action when necessary. Such organization must be endowed with power to employ armed forces when necessary to prevent aggression and preserve peace.”

REPUBLICAN:

We favor responsible participation by the United States in post-war cooperative organization among sovereign nations to prevent military aggression and to attain permanent peace with organized justice in a free world. Such organization should develop effective cooperative means to direct peace forces to prevent or repel military aggression.

Race problems

DEMOCRATIC:

We believe that racial and religious minorities have the right to live, develop and vote equally with all citizens and share the rights that are guaranteed by our Constitution. Congress should exert its full constitutional powers to protect those rights.

REPUBLICAN: The party endorsed a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee, anti-poll tax and anti-lynching legislation, and an inquiry into discrimination in the Armed Forces.

Agriculture

Both parties endorsed support prices and crop insurance. The Democrats promised “to foster the success of the small independent farmer” and “to aid the home ownership of the family-sized farm.” The Republicans endorsed measures “to make life more attractive” on the family farm. The Republicans condemned the Roosevelt administration for “confused, unreliable, impractical price and production” policy during the war and implicitly accused it of regimenting farmers.

Labor

DEMOCRATIC: The Democratic platform contained no specific plank on labor, but promised adequate compensation to demobilized war workers and enactment of additional legislation or the amendment or repeal of existing laws as experience indicated the need.

REPUBLICAN: The Republicans charged the administration with “selfish and partisan control” over government labor agencies, with perverting the National Labor Relations Act, emasculating the Labor Department and undermining collective bargaining. They “accepted the purposes” of the labor relations, wage-hour, Social Security and other laws for the protection of workers.

Miscellaneous

Both parties pledged to support submission of a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women; equal pay to women for equal work; free access to world news; encouragement for risk capital; liberal benefits for war veterans; reduction in wartime taxes as soon as possible; encouragement for little business; expansion of foreign trade through reciprocal agreements (with the Republicans adding a proviso requiring approval by Congress); development of self-government in Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration.

[NormanStewart]

Defiant Texas delegates assail ‘power politics’

‘Regulars,’ pushed around in convention, say CIO and Communists ousted them

Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
“We ran into a buzzsaw of power politics,” members of the Texas delegation at the Democratic National Convention who walked out of the convention said today.

They made the comment in a statement addressed through Texas Democrats. A copy was sent to the Democratic National Committee. It was signed by the dissident members of the delegation who left the Chicago Stadium yesterday after the convention voted to split Texas’ votes between the “Regular” (anti-fourth-term) delegation and the rump delegation, which supported President Roosevelt.

Hot under the collar

The Texans said:

The bureaucrats, the CIO Political Action Committee, and a liberal sprinkling of Communists joined forces to tell Texas Democrats where they stand in national politics. The action of the Texas convention was thwarted by the Hillman, Tobin, and Browder followers who carried the ball behind the perfect interference of an army of bureaucrats.

The action of the Credentials Committee [which recommended splitting the state’s votes] was a deliberate slap at duly constituted authority. The trouble was the Regulars were not under the domination of the powerful elements that had control of the National Convention.

For this reason, it was necessary to discipline the Regulars and show Texas Democrats the consequence of disobedience to boss rule. That is exactly what the convention proceeded to do in a most arrogant and dictatorial manner.

A complaint was made that the convention’s Rules Committee turned “thumbs down” on the reinstatement of the two-thirds rule for nominations, and that the platform adopted by the convention was written “designed to secure the support of Negroes, the CIO, the Communists, and other radical groups.”

Texas planks turned down

Noting that every plank proposed by the Texas delegation was rejected, the statement complained specifically of refusal to recognize “reserved power of states to determine qualification of voters and to regulate public school attendance without interference from the federal government.”

“Worst of all,” it said, was refusal to approve passage of a law to prohibit management-labor contracts from requiring any war veteran to join an organization or pay a fee to get employment.

A special train leaving tomorrow will carry most of the Texas delegates from both Texas factions.

[NormanStewart]

Chaplin’s first wife, silent film star, dies

Mildred Harris was attempting comeback; divorce from Charlie created storm

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[NormanStewart]

Ration-free steaks may be delayed

Short postponement agreeable to WFA

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[NormanStewart]

On the Normandy front –
Casey: ‘Forgotten soldiers’ keep war machine in motion

Unrecognized, engineers and Signal Corps fight battle of communications and supply
By Robert J. Casey

U.S. front in Normandy, France – (July 19, delayed)
You don’t have to look at this war very long to realize that the most important part of it, aside from the riflemen in the frontlines, is to be found in the roads behind. Actually, it is here that you get some cohesive idea of the purpose and extent of the Allied drive.

Impressions of a battle, where it is fought behind dikes and hedges, necessarily must be isolated – a tank working here, infantry crawling through an orchard against machine guns there. But in the backroads and sunken lanes, you can see the war, terrible in its power, rolling forward with all the strange gadgets and accoutrements with which modern military science has equipped it.

No one who has not been tangled in it can envision the traffic on these channels from the beaches to the front. The principal routes are still good auto roads, or had been until D-Day changed the face of Normandy. Now, literally thousands of trucks, jeeps, tanks, halftracks, command cars, tractors, bulldozers, self-propelled artillery, motorcycles, mobile derricks and tank carriers pour over them 24 hours a day.

Pavements holding up

The pavements are holding up better than you would think. If any of them could be closed, a mile or two at a time for a few hours, the road crews that did the miraculous job of constructing airplane runways in England could lay new broad pavements over the old at an astonishing rate. But they can’t be closed and engineers work in disheartening competition with traffic.

Nobody thinks much about these forgotten men of the war, these pick-and-shovel soldiers, but as you follow the highway over newly-built bridges and past blasted villages and watch it widening and straightening before your eyes, you wonder how this battle, dependent as it is on mechanized material, could have been fought without them.

Wars in civilized communities seem to leave roads with typical scars, most of them on telephone and transmission lines. You’d naturally think wires strung on poles well away from the blasts on the pavement would suffer little damage from artillery or mines, but from every pole, festoons of broken wire hang like jungle growth. Flying fragments have found these impossible targets, cut the cables and shattered the insulators.

Other forgotten soldiers

So along with the engineers march other forgotten soldiers, the never-sleeping men of the Signal Corps. Along even the most remote lanes you are constantly passing signal trucks from which new wire is being reeled out in staggering quantities, thousands of miles of it.

You run into these men under shellfire at artillery observation posts and advance CPs enmeshed in communication webs that seem always a hopeless tangle, lifting wire out of ditches onto tree branches, hunting for breaks, making spices with no apparent concern for the death whistling over them or exploding around them.

The highways of the beachhead are marked with signs put there before the war by French touring clubs or local departments, more legible German markers and directions to American units, in a variety of colors and a jargon of codenames.

MPs on the job

Despite all this, a messenger might still have to go home with his important communication were it not for the MPs, who stand at every crossroads in the entire area. They are a remarkable set of men, these. Most of them never saw France until D-Day, but they can tell you which is the shortest road to any town you may name, where you make your turnings, which roads are well-paved, which under shellfire, and they have memorized more unit codenames and locations than you would find in a transatlantic cable book.

This is remarkable enough in itself. When you consider that command posts and dressing stations and such are constantly moving, it is something close to miraculous.

Civilians mingle oddly with the traffic along the roads and caravans of war give them priority. After all, whose country is it? Their carts and cattle mingle with artillery columns and families in horse-drawn buggies ride along with halftracks and tanks. Church processions and funerals go on as if there were no constant avalanche of transport on the throbbing pavements. As far forward as artillery echelons it is no uncommon thing to see them in silent ranks with front-bound doughboys.

Flags welcome liberators

War hasn’t displaced these people. It has merely infiltrated through them and the strangely incongruous lives of military and peasantry go their independent ways side by aide but never touching.

Since long before Bastille Day, flags have been flying from houses along the battle routes – French, American, English – most of them homemade and all of them odd to look upon. Over some doors in towns are banners bearing strange devices “Hail Roosevelt and de Gaulle,” “Death to the Boche,” “Welcome Americans our Liberators.” And, of course, there are always the inevitable children at every doorstep, waving two uplifted fingers at the soiled G.I.’s.

[NormanStewart]

Roving Reporter

By Ernie Pyle

In Normandy, France – (by wireless)
When the now-famous Gen. Karl Wilhelm von Schlieben was captured, I happened to be at the 9th Division command post to which he was first brought.

Maj. Gen. Manton S. Eddy, division commander, had a long interview with him in his trailer. When he was about finished and ready to send the captured general on to higher headquarters, Gen. Eddy sent word that the photographers could come and take pictures.

So, they stood in a group in an orchard while the photographer snapped away. Von Schlieben was obviously sourpuss about being captured, and even more sourpuss at having his picture taken. He made no effort to look other than sullenly displeased.

Gen. Eddy was trying to be decent about it. He had an interpreter tell the prisoner that this was the price of being a general. Von Schlieben just snorted. And then Gen. Eddy said to the interpreter:

Tell the general that our country is a democracy and therefore I don’t have authority to forbid these photographers to take pictures.

Von Schlieben snorted again. And we chuckled behind our beards at one of the slickest examples of working democracy we had ever seen. And Gen. Eddy had the appearance of the traditional cat that swallowed something wonderful.

Normandy land of rabbits

Normandy is a land of rabbits. You see them in the fields and around the farmyards. Most of them are semi-tame. Apparently, the people eat a great deal of rabbit.

When we first moved in and began capturing permanent German bivouac areas, we found that nearly every little group of German soldiers had its own rabbit warren. They raised them for food.

One day my friend Pvt. William Bates Wescott of Culver City, California, found a mother rabbit that had been killed in the shelling, and nearby, in a nest near the hedge, he found six baby rabbits, only a few days old.

Wescott took them to his pup tent, got a ration box to put them in and spent the afternoon feeding them condensed cream through an eyedropper. They went for it like little babies. Next morning, five of them were dead.

The soldier said the concussion of bombs falling nearby during the night had killed them. I said undiluted condensed milk had killed them. At any rate, the sixth one thrived and became cute and gay.

He followed Westcott around everywhere, and if the distance got too far, he would go hopping back to the pup tent and snuggle up in Westcott’s blankets. He was quite a little rabbit. Everybody was crazy about him. Then, after about a week, we found him dead out on the grass one morning.

Which is a lousy way to end the story, but that’s all there was to it.

The town of Montebourg on the Cherbourg Peninsula is one of the worst wrecked of the towns that were fought over and shelled by both sides.

We stopped at Montebourg one day after it was all over. On one side of the city square, there was a large collection of rusted farm implements – all kinds of plows, planters, mowers and things.

On one wrecked mowing machine was the familiar name “McCormick.” And near the machine was stretched out in pathetic death a big white rabbit.

Sergeant cooks on electric iron

One night I crawled down into an ack-ack battery command post, in a dugout. It was about 2:00 a.m.

Only two people were there – a lieutenant, giving orders to the guns by telephone, and a sergeant, getting ready to fix some hot chocolate. He asked if I would have some, and following the old Army custom of never refusing anything, I said sure.

He was Sgt. Leopold Lamparty, the first sergeant of this battery, from 916 Franklin Street, Youngstown, Ohio. He used to be a bartender, and already in France he has picked up several little antique whisky glasses of old and beautiful design.

But the reason I’m writing about Lamparty is his electric iron. He made the hot chocolate on an electric iron turned upside down. Each ack-ack battery has a portable generator, so Lamparty just plugs it in.

His sister sent him the iron two years ago when he was in camp near Chicago, and he has carried it ever since. There was a long time ago when he pressed his pants with it, but a guy with pressed pants over here probably would be shot as a spy, so now Lamparty cooks with his iron.

[NormanStewart]

Pegler: Democratic Convention Day 2

By Westbrook Pegler

Chicago, Illinois –
Up on the flying bridge which juts out from the platform where the giants sit to watch the antics of the little people, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, according to ancient formula, was viewing with pride and pointing with alarm.

The little people stirred restlessly like things on the quiet surface of a harbor. Down in the alley, beneath the stands, amid the picnic little of that ribald and yet solemn American political rite, the national nominating convention, the members of the band were disappearing around the bend to fall in for the great spontaneous ovation to the man-than-whom. The statesman on the bridge had been going on for a long time and the surprise was due any minute.

Senator Barkley is a man roughhewn like a preliminary study of one of Gutzon Borglum’s monumental great stone faces. He was standing to the microphones, gleaming with the sweat of his devotion and reading in enormous roars the script of a fateful act of American history, already confirmed by Frank Roosevelt’s demure acceptance of his fourth nomination. He was now getting around to the painful part in which he had to humiliate himself by eating the most awful words of his entire career, blurted last winter in honest anger at an insult to Congress delivered by the man whom he now had the privilege to nominate for an honor without precedent in the life of the American nation.

On that occasion, Mr. Roosevelt, rejecting the tax bill, for once went so far that even the docile Barkley, dull but hitherto always reliable, snarled back with an angry speech and, for a few hours, quit his position as Majority Leader of the Senate. In this sharp and sudden test of courage and conviction, both quit miserably.

The President, having fetched a calculated insult, crawled back, denying his obvious intention. And Barkley, reconsidering, accepted a sorry excuse instead of an apology.

Dispute well back in oration

Barkley was coming to that now. He had postponed the issue well back into his oration so that, in the published accounts, it would occur far down the text where few would read it.

Senator Barley might hesitate with his great leader on minor matters, he was explaining, in general terms, and he might disagree on procedure or method, for, thank God, in this great democracy, a man had a right to hold and express an opinion. As Voltaire had said, he might disagree with what you said but he would defend to the death your right to say it. A few words more and the insult to the legislative branch had been swallowed with a muscular gulp in public, diluted to be sure, with prideless phrases, in a scene so abject that a stranger could pity the man and fear for a country in such hands.

He whopped on now and, at the close, his nomination of “Franklin Delano Roosevelt” left the little people momentarily unprepared. They were not allowed to cheer a nomination. They could only cheer a fact accomplished long ago and acknowledged by the President in a letter last week to Robert E. Hannegan, the puppet chairman of the party, an affable handshaker in an empty job.

The music came on with a crash and they began to stretch in the aisles, carrying their blue and white legends on the winning of the war and the winning of the peace with Mr. Roosevelt, and bouncing their state standards on high in a trudging procession whose duration the reporters began to clock from force of habit. Barkley swabbed his face, stepped back and then stepped again to the fore to pose for the photographers standing on the press benches and clamoring, “Senator, this way, Senator. Just one more, Senator.”

Jackson gets into pictures

Barkley was good at this. He would throw out his right hand in an oratorial sweep and part his rugged features in a reasonably convincing grin. Now to the left of the bridge, for the photographers over there. Now back to the fight, with a different placard in his left hand. “Hold it higher, Senator, it hides your face. A little this way, Senator.”

Sam Jackson, another obscurity like Hannegan, hailing from Indiana, crowded the old hack for a place in the pictures. He is new and this convention gave him a miraculous chance to get into the papers. He smiled importantly, imitating Barkley’s wave and, once when Barkley paused for a drink of water, pulled our a low-comedy brown derby which he cocked on his head to solemnize a historical even while the little people shuffled by below.

The little people do not know how very little they were. Many of them never had seen a convention before and they came determined to enact their spontaneous demonstration. They seemed to believe literally that they were deciding nominations and policies not knowing that Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray long ago determined that they should nominate Henry Wallace for Vice President and were insisting on this choice against any other preference of the little people.

[NormanStewart]

Allen: Texas afraid Roosevelt will steal Lone Star title

Good thing GOP held convention first, may not be Stadium when Democrats finish
By Gracie Allen

Chicago, Illinois –
Wow… It’s a good thing the Republicans held a convention first… There might not have been any stadium left for them to meet in. Those Democrats really lifted the roof and made the walls bulge when Senator Barkley nominated President Roosevelt for a fourth term. But for some reason, the Texas delegation didn’t exactly approve. In fact, they got up and walked out, led by Mr. Moody. As they filed past, I got to look at Mr. Moody – and he certainly was.

I don’t know enough about politics to be able to tell you just why the Texas delegation doesn’t approve of Roosevelt, but maybe they’re afraid he’ll steal their title. After all, if he’s President for 16 years, he’ll have been the “Lone Star” almost as long as Texas.

Democrats livelier

It’s a shame that President Roosevelt couldn’t have been here in person to make his acceptance speech. But then I guess he could make a fine acceptance speech from almost any place – he’s had so much experience.

As a reporter, I’m completely nonpartisan and nonpolitical. But I must say the Democratic Convention is much livelier than the Republican Convention was. The donkey is giving a more exciting show than the elephant did. In fact, one Democrat told me he had a new answer to the old question – “Where do elephants go to die?” The answer – “Chicago.”

Very disquieting rumor

There are some wonderful personalities here for the convention. I was particularly interested in talking with Helen Gahagan Douglas. She’s the wife of movie star Melvyn Douglas. Believe me, I know what it’s like to have a career and also be married to a handsome, talented star… Mrs. Douglas told me. By the way, I just heard a very disquieting rumor. Someone said that if Dewey wins the election, the Roosevelts will have to move to Hyde Park. My goodness, I didn’t dream they were so bad off they’d have to live in a park.

That’s all for now – more political news tomorrow.

[NormanStewart]

In driver’s seat at convention –
Hillman must give the nod before wheels turn at Chicago

Political Action chief holds court and Democratic bigwigs seek favor
By Henry J. Taylor, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Chicago, Illinois –
Sidney Hillman is granting no interviews here. “No publicity about Mr. Hillman,” is the word passed along by Clark Foreman, secretary of the Political Action Committee.

The man who vetoed President Roosevelt’s blessing of James F. Byrnes for Vice President, who allowed Senator Harry S. Truman to enter the race by agreeing not to oppose the Missourian if Henry A. Wallace could not make the grade, and who must give the nod before any wheels really move inside the Democratic National Convention, is operating in privacy at the Ambassador Hotel.

Mr. Hillman enjoyed similar privacy in the 1920s when he was in Russia learning about Russian peasants by living in a villa on the bank of the Moskva River opposite the Kremlin.

Associate of Browder

Earl Browder was Mr. Hillman’s associate then and Earl Browder is closely related to Mr. Hillman’s work today. So was Paul Robeson, then a Communist speaker between performances at Moscow’s Metropole Theater and now a leader in Mr. Hillman’s committee and chairman of the Communist-surrounded African Affairs Council in the Institute of International Democracy in New York.

That was a return trip to Russia for Mr. Hillman. He was born in 1887 at Žagarė, Lithuania, then part of Russia. He first came to the United States in 1907 at the age of 20. After organizing immigrants and refugee garment workers from Middle Europe into the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which now has 325,000 members, the man who is saying “yes” and “no” to the convention here really got rolling in American politics.

Collects $2 million

President Roosevelt appointed him to work closely with Mrs. Anna Rosenberg in a series of New Deal executive posts. Mrs. Rosenberg and Mr. Hillman quarreled, she reportedly feeling that Hillman double-crossed her, and ousted her from the White House inner circle. But Mr. Hillman went on.

A year ago, he founded the Political Action Committee at the CIO’s Philadelphia convention. The fruit of that work gave him the Democratic leadership he is exercising here today. In Philadelphia, he outlined his plan to raise $5 million to defeat certain members of Congress. Mr. Hillman had his own clothing workers pledge $102,000 the first day. Before the convention adjourned, he had $2 million in hand collected by union officials, and he had made no statement of how much money he has collected since.

Group changes name

On June 14, appearing before the Senate Campaign Investigating Committee, Mr. Hillman conceded the illegality of union contributions to the election or defeat of federal officers. Out went the words CIO. Mr. Hillman changed his committee into the National Citizens’ Political Action Committee, as it is called today.

Mr. Hillman hands over no contributions. He spends where and when he wants to spend. Mr. Hillman uses $50,000 in one Congressional district, $70,000 in another, for newspaper advertising, organizing in the wards, operating political clubs on behalf of Mr. Roosevelt’s fourth term as the No. 1 declared objective, and supporting a corps of heavily-handed troubleshooters who filter through local areas visiting local voters and candidates alike. Mr. Hillman never delivers anything. He keeps control of the support he lends. And as both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Wallace know, you can’t call on Mr. Hillman once for help and have it over with. You have to keep calling back.

Leaders come to call

The coming-back process is in full swing here, with Mr. Hillman holding court at the Ambassador Hotel. On a telephone message from Hillman, Mr. Wallace paid a two-hour call. Attorney General Francis Biddle, of Montgomery Ward fame, followed suit. Secretary Harold L. Ickes followed Mr. Biddle.

Calls went out and the others came: National Chairman Robert E. Hannegan, Senator Harry S. Truman and Sam Rosenman of Hillman’s own inner circle at the White House, and numerous others of the favored few. Mr. Hillman likes to stay cozy at the Ambassador.

Guffey in attendance

Senator Guffey of Pennsylvania and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida are acting as Mr. Hillman’s right and left bowers in the apartment. You’ll find it a spacious place with a beige-carpeted sitting room, deep red draperies and paneled walls, which are a soft white under the indirect lights. Visitors sit in heavy red leather chairs or on an empire sofa covered with striped silk, waiting for Mr. Hillman to get off the telephone. This is no smoke-filled room. It is air conditioned.

Spreading from top down, Mr. Hillman roots his influence in weird assortment of political action groups similar to the Institute of International Democracy. And the men on his Political Action Committee know their business, which is how to organize to deliver the vote. Here are the few leading members of the CIO Political Action Committee who supply the steam behind the decisions Mr. Hillman makes in the Ambassador Hotel today.

• Zlatko Balokovic functions as president of “the United Committee of South Slavic Americans,” New York City. His division operates mostly around the coal mines and steel mills.

• Zarko M. Bunzick operates the “Serbian Vidivdas Congress” from headquarters in Akron.

• John D. Butkovich works mostly in Pennsylvania as president of the Croatian Fraternal Union.

• Leo Krzycki, headquarters in New York is president of “the American Slav Congress” for that state. Dr. W. T. Osowski has the same job in Michigan, while V. X. Platek is president of “the National Slovak Society” with headquarters in Pennsylvania.

• James Loeb, as press secretary of the “Union for Democratic Action”, ties in at New York with Clifford T. McAvoy (president of the “Council of Pan-American Democracy”), who was forced to resign as New York City Deputy Welfare Commissioner after his Communist-front activities were exposed.

The assembly point here for such of the group as are in Chicago, is Room 1889 and adjoining rooms at the Hotel Sherman. Mr. Hillman is not mingling there. He calls them, when convenient, to the Ambassador.

[NormanStewart]

Maj. Williams: Weight elimination

By Maj. Al Williams

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[NormanStewart]

Stokes: Wallace gives rare demonstration of honesty

He disregards foes to speak his mind
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Chicago, Illinois –
Somebody throws a bomb at Hitler. The Japanese Cabinet falls. The deadly circle closes in on the dictators.

Beating in on them too, are the shouts from assemblies of free people, such as that in Chicago’s great stadium. There a great political party goes through those contortions typical of a democracy in its trial-and-error method – a method which seems crude and cumbersome, but which leaves men free.

A man stands before them. He is the antithesis of Hitler and Tōjō. He grins shyly. He raises his hand as the crowd roars, in an awkward sort of wave. There is nothing mechanical about it. It is grateful.

He looks like Iowa

His hair is lopping, and he presents that ruffled appearance, which causes a wife always to say afterward, “Why didn’t you comb your hair? I wanted you to look nice before all those people.”

His tie straggles.

Henry Wallace is from Iowa, and he looks every inch of it.

He stands there and he talks, talks in simple, direct sentences, and suddenly you feel that you are hearing the voice of the plain people – the plain people of this country and of the world.

Here is honesty

And as you watch and listen, something tightens in you. You brush at your eye, and something cold chases up your spine.

Here, you think, is honesty. Here is decency. And as he goes on, here is a demonstration of “guts.”

This man is doing no ordinary thing. He is Vice President. He wants to be renominated, for in that way he can best carry on the fight for human justice, but not at the sacrifice of any convictions.

There are some sitting before him who hate him for the things he believes. But Wallace is no politician. He nits clean from the shoulder, and he smiles as he strikes – a friendly smile, not a taunting or belligerent smile. The iron is not on the surface. That’s underneath.

If telling the truth as he sees it means the end of political hopes, well and good.

“This is the way I see it,” he says in effect. “Do with me what you please.”

There are Southerners sitting before him, many of them. They don’t like him. There are others before him who represent economic interests that would be disturbed by the things Mr. Wallace would do. He knows that, he knows his political fate is in their hands, but he strikes:

In a political, educational and economic sense, there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Equal educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work, regardless of sex or race.

Then he says – what many realize who sit there before him – many who saw the party go down to defeat because it took the easy way and stood for nothing.

The Democratic Party cannot long survive as a conservative party.

I go away knowing that this is the greatest speech I have heard in 20 years of covering national political conventions.

[NormanStewart]

South’s revolt given new life by convention

All-out drive mapped to avert fourth term
By Marshall McNeil, Scripps-Howard staff writer

Chicago, Illinois –
This one-man Democratic convention has given enthusiastic new life to the Southern revolt which can now conceivably result in the defeat of President Roosevelt in November.

It has refused the demands of Texas’ Regular Democrats.

As a result, the Democratic presidential electors of Texas are instructed to vote against the President in the Electoral College.

If the election is close enough, Texas’ 23 electoral votes – to say nothing of the possibility of nearly as many more from other Southern states – may hold the balance of power and throw the election to the House of Representatives.

Looking toward that end, Southern Democrats who detest the fourth term were to begin laying their plans here today.

Their nucleus is the Texas group, which was so incensed in the convention’s decision to seat their pro-Roosevelt opponents that they walked out of the stadium in disgust.

All-Southern convention

Around this group, now prepared to go home and fight throughout the state against the reelection of the New Deal, an all-Southern convention will be called within a few weeks, perhaps at Shreveport, Louisiana.

That convention will nominate its own presidential ticket, headed perhaps by Senator Harry Byrd (D-VA).

The large majority of the Texas “free” electors, if elected in November, will cast their votes for the Byrd ticket.

This, at least, is the plan which anti-fourth-term Democrats – among them E. B. Germany of Dallas and former Mississippi Governor Mike Connor – were scheduled to discuss today.

They’re determined people

These anti-Roosevelt Democrats of Texas and the South are determined people. In the face of the convention’s action, they have dispelled the feeling, current before this meeting began, that the Southern revolt might peter out.

One reason it didn’t was the inept handling of the convention’s Credentials Committee by Senator Abe Murdoch (D-UT).

It was his job to lead his colleagues toward a decision on whether to seat the Texas Regulars or the Texas rump delegates. Obviously, national party leaders here wanted the Regulars seated, for they knew the danger of adding to the discontent in Texas.

Senator Murdock chose to compromise by voting to seat both delegations, dividing Texas’ 48 votes between them.

Tempted to march out

The Regulars came here backed by their convention’s pledge that if any rump delegates were seated, their (the Regulars’) presidential electors would not support the nominee of this convention.

At the convention hall, the Texas Regulars, learning of the decision, were tempted to march out of the hall at once, but at the insistence of state chairman George Butler of Houston, they decided to act in an orderly way.

Texans cry ‘insult’

How the national party leaders felt about the situation was shown when Chairman Bob Hannegan sent word through Ed Pauley of California that “he hoped no matter how your deliberations end, that your conduct on the floor will be orderly.”

“Insult!”, several Texans cried. Mr. Pauley said he meant no insult.

Finally, the decision was reached: If the convention upheld the Murdock Credentials Committee report, each Regular Texan could decide individually whether to stay in the convention – or leave.

Boos and applause

The issue was taken to the platform. Hart Willis of Texas appealed to the delegation to seed the Regulars from their own legal convention in Texas. He told what seating of the rump delegates would mean in freeing Texas electors from voting for FDR. There were boos and applause.

The convention voted to approve the seating of both delegations – and the Texas Regulars, with very few exceptions, walked out.

Later, the joint Regular and rump delegation cast 36 votes for Roosevelt and 12 for Byrd.

[NormanStewart]

Citizenship claim of half-Jap upheld

Philadelphia judge upsets two rulings

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[NormanStewart]

DEMOCRATIC PARTY NOMINATES ROOSEVELT-TRUMAN TICKET

Franklin Delano Roosevelt for President!

Missouri Senator Truman for Vice President!

[NormanStewart]

Völkischer Beobachter (July 22, 1944)

Zwei Männer vom Tenno beauftragt –
Koiso und Yonay bilden das japanische Kabinett

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