Editorial: Strength and versatility
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Editorial: Nepotism in high places
Putting one’s kinfolk on the public payroll is a common practice among politicians.
It has been indulged since the Roman Empire and probably will go on until Doomsday.
Oh, it goes on in private business, too. And likewise rankles the other payrollers, especially if the favored son or brother or uncle happens to be averse to work and gets special breaks over the heads of the common slaves.
But the politicians seem to have an extra weakness for the practice. Every so often a political adversary or the newspapers will list the nepotic beneficiaries and their benefactors – and it creates a great one-day sensation. But the practice keeps going.
Some of the politicians do it to get their poor relatives off their back, some to keep peace in the family and some just because they can’t resist looking out for their kinfolk. Occasionally, of course, there is real merit in those appointments.
Senator Truman, the vice-presidential nominee, explains that his wife is on the Congressional payroll at $4,500 a year because “she is my chief adviser,” who also takes care of his personal mail and helps him with his speeches. It can be said in rebuttal, of course, that she needn’t be on the payroll to do all those things.
In any case, nepotism is one of those phenomena of political life which never fail to stir up interest but don’t amount to much, either.
The public seems to regard it as a sort of snide practice. For this reason, the politicians generally agree it is not smart politics – but even the smartest fall for it.
Editorial: ‘Dangerous’ documents
Congress has a law which says that books which contain political opinion must not be mailed to our fighting men overseas.
In attempting to enforce this law, the War Department has issued a prohibition against such “dangerous” works as Catherine Drinker Bowen’s biography of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles A. Beard’s The Republic and the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s.
The War Department is doubtless acting in strict accordance with the law. But if it keeps on along this line, as it is presumed to do, it has its work cut out.
Potential political controversy can be found beneath the covers of many an innocent-looking book.
Here, for example, are a few bits of perilous propaganda that come immediately to mind. We pass them along to the War Department with best wishes:
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The Collected Works of Horatio Alger Jr. – These, of course, are out-and-out glorification of free enterprise, a strong Republican selling point in 1944.
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The Novels of Charles Dickens – Full of substantial wage scales, long hours with no overtime, and other examples of exploitation; many of these books attack capitalists as powerfully as anything Henry Wallace ever wrote.
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Robinson Crusoe – Unblushing argument for isolationism.
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Browning’s “Rabbi ben Ezra” – With its invitation to “Grow old along with me,” and its statement that “Youth shows but half,” this poem is clearly a pro-Roosevelt rebuttal to charges of an aging administration.
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“Jack and the Beanstalk” – A subtle allegory about the triumph of a smaller and younger adversary over a big, tough opponent, strictly pro-Dewey (David and Goliath will have to go too, of course). And that song, “Fe-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman,” is fiercely anti-British.
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“Mother Goose” – These verses are particularly insidious, and must be thoroughly purged. “Old Mother Hubbard” plays up the food shortage; “Little Tommy Tucker,” who sang for his supper and fared so badly, is a thinly veiled prediction that a similar fate awaits Tommy Dewey, one-time baritone; “A Dillar, a Dollar” and “Little Boy Blue” emphasize absenteeism, are definitely anti-labor.
This list must be carried on and on if our servicemen are to be isolated completely from all printed political opinion. The only alternative is to change or repeal the law and treat the soldiers as if they were mature, thinking humans who did not lose all power of independent judgment when they put on a uniform.
Heath: GOP waits for Willkie to hop on bandwagon
By S. Burton Heath
While Peter Edson is absent from Washington, Mr. Heath’s series from Albany is being substituted.
Albany, New York –
Apparently, Governor Dewey is either impervious or oblivious to the strain, if any. Perhaps Wendell Willkie is, too. But a lot of lay Republicans and probably some Democrats wish something would break the existing impasse and disclose what part the 1940 standard-bearer is going to play in the 1944 election.
Polls, primaries and the party convention appeared to demonstrate that the Republican electorate preferred Governor Dewey to Mr. Willkie. Nevertheless, there is a very large segment that respects the latter highly, and a substantial body of voters with whom his stand, if not compelling, might be influential.
Governor Dewey shies away from any attempt to get him to discuss the Willkie situation. It should be noted, however, that he does so without prejudice, leaving the door open for Mr. Willkie to do this year what Mr. Dewey did in 1940.
Then, it will be recalled, Mr. Dewey appeared to have the nomination pretty well sewed up. At the last minute, an almost evangelical wave swept Mr. Willkie into the candidacy and left Mr. Dewey gasping on the shore.
Among politicians and newspapermen, it was no secret that Mr. Dewey was burned to a crisp. For a few days he sizzled, off the record except for one betrayal of confidence. Then he calmed down and went to work for the man who had done him out of the nomination.
Lent advisers
When Mr. Willkie’s early campaign threatened to explode from the lack of management, like a tanker of aviation gasoline hit by a torpedo, Mr. Dewey gave leave of absence to his personal publicity man, Lemoyne Jones, to help out. He lent the services of his personal adviser on government finance, Elliott V. Bell, now his superintendent of banks.
He took to the stump for the Willkie ticket, making two speeches near New York City and two midwestern trips in the course of which he spoke in Saginaw, Pittsburgh, Peoria, Caldwell (Idaho), Kansas City and Cleveland.
The grounds for personal bitterness between the two men were no less then than they are now; the bases of their philosophical disagreement were probably greater inasmuch as Mr. Willkie was a foremost interventionist while Mr. Dewey at that time leaned against intervention.
Therefore Republicans, including many of Mr. Willkie’s more ardent adherents in 1940 and up to the time he stepped out of this year’s race, wonder what formula can be found for bringing the two men together now, for the good of the party, and, as they see it, for the good of the country.
Democrats want breach
Democrats and other Roosevelt supporters hope that the present breach can be kept open or even widened. They would like to see Mr. Willkie bolt back to his old party or take an ostentatious walk for the duration of the campaign.
Realists doubt that this will occur. Conceding that Mr. Willkie is utterly sincere and would subordinate personal advantage to principles, they insist that he would lose every possibility of putting across his beliefs if he were either to bolt or to walk. They point, as evidence, to the innocuous desuetude in which Al Smith and John W. Davis now stagnate politically.
The difficulty appears to be in finding a way to establish the first contact without embarrassment to either man. Deweyites appear to feel that their leader went as far as he well could when, at his first press conference after the nomination, he was asked: “Will Mr. Willkie be invited into conference on campaign strategy?”
He replied:
I certainly hope to consult all leaders of the Republican Party and receive the benefit of their advice.
“Including Willkie?”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Dewey.
Ferguson: Drafted candidates
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
I’m sick of the use of the word “draft” when applied to politicians. Mr. Dewey, we hear, was drafted by the Republicans. Going them one better, the Democrats say Mr. Roosevelt was “drafted” by the people.
Neither statement is true. Everybody knows that both men planned their campaigns far ahead and through their party emissaries strengthened their political fences.
For years, our candidates have connived for voting supremacy, have taken full advantage of every mistake made by the opposition, and have never for a moment considered leaving undone anything that might get them into the White House.
Applied to their case, the word “draft” is misused. In its military connotation, the word means a person is selected to perform military service. When he is placed in a position for action, if he dodges that duty, he may be shot.
But nobody would have gone gunning for Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Dewey if either gentleman had said firmly that he did not choose to serve. On the contrary, many people would have been relieved at the news. The parties would have found other candidates and no doubt would have gone to the same extravagant lengths in ballyhooing them.
Since it is generally conceded that the 1944 campaign will be a hard-fought battle, it is rather farfetched to say that President Roosevelt has been drafted for his fourth term. The people aren’t nitwits and so it’s time they raised their voices to repudiate all such ridiculous claims.
No matter who wins, his election will constitute neither a draft nor a unified will of the voters. It’s going to be the same old nip-and-tuck fight until November, which is our way of doing things – and a way that suits us. But in respect for the precise language, let’s use the right words.
Soldiers are drafted for military service. Candidates run for political office.
Background of news –
Politics four years ago
By Bertram Benedict
A political lull has set in following the two national conventions. It was not so four years ago.
Immediately after the close of the 1940 Democratic Convention, various eminent Democrats announced that they would support Wendell Willkie; Senator Burke, defeated for renomination in the Nebraska primaries several months previously; former Senator James A. Reed of Missouri, who called a meeting of anti-Roosevelt Democrats to map plans to defeat President Roosevelt; former Budget Director Lewis Douglas; former Under Secretaries of the Treasury John W. Hanes and Thomas J. Coolidge; former Democratic National Chairman John J. Raskob; Mrs. Al Smith.
President Roosevelt paid his respects to some of these bolters at a press conference at Hyde Park. He said the Democrats had repudiated Senator Burke rather than the other way around. He charged that Messrs. Douglas and Hanes while in government service had been found to be more interested in “dollars than in humanity.”
Pointing out that Mr. Reed had bolted the Democratic Party also in 1932, 1936 and 1938, the President intimated that by acting as legal counsel for a Kansas City garment factory owned by his wife and contesting a National Labor Relations Board order, Mr. Reed had tried to perpetuate sweatshop conditions.
President wrong on Farley
James A. Farley announced he would resign as DNC Chairman within a month. President Roosevelt called the rumor that Mr. Farley would also resign as Postmaster General “just another story out of Chicago.” Mr. Farley resigned as Postmaster General in the following month.
Wendell Willkie was vacationing in Colorado and writing his acceptance address to be delivered in mid-August. He journeyed to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to make a speech, and pledged that a Republican administration would hold down big government as well as big business. Mr. Willkie predicted that he would carry some Southern states. “Jeffersonian” Democrats set up a pro-Willkie organization in the South.
An American Institute of Public Opinion poll showed that 59 percent of the voters opposed, 41 percent favored, an amendment limiting a President to two terms. Another poll from the same source showed that 73 percent of American farmers thought that Henry A. Wallace had done a “good job” as Secretary of Agriculture. Congress was in session. There was talk of investigating alleged wiretapping by the office of District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey.
The Senate Military Affairs Committee was preparing to report out the conscription bill. President Roosevelt laid an embargo on exports of petroleum products and scrap metal. He was making plans to exchange 50 overage destroyers with Great Britain for leases on air and naval bases. He signed a bill to expand the Navy.
Just after Dunkirk
Americans were sobered by the recent surrender of France and the British evacuation at Dunkirk. In a radio address, Hitler called on Britain to surrender or be ruined. Lord Halifax, then the British Foreign Secretary, replied that the British would fight on; the Nazi press charged that the British had been encouraged by promises of support from President Roosevelt.
Germany launched the Battle of Britain, intended to crush Great Britain from the air.
Ambassador William C. Bullitt, returning from France, praised Marshal Pétain. He denied that the new French state was a Fascist one and that it was dominated by Pierre Laval.
The Soviet Union absorbed Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia; Under Secretary of State Welles denounced the move as “annihilating” the three Baltic states by “devious processes.”
Poll: Get-out-vote need faced by Democrats
Many not registered favor Roosevelt
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Flier’s air pal comes home to comfort hero’s widow
Cocker spaniel veteran of 48 missions in Pacific pines away after master loses life
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Millett: They find time to write and you let them down
Boys on fighting lines never forget but we at home are plain lazy
By Ruth Millett
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Normandy – (by wireless)
It was just beginning dusk when the order came. A soldier came running up the pasture and said there was a call for our ordnance evacuation company to pull out some crippled tanks.
We had been sitting on the grass and we jumped up and ran down the slope. Waiting at the gate stood an M19 truck and behind it a big wrecker with a crane.
The day had been warm but dusk was bringing a chill, as always. One of the soldiers loaned me his mackinaw.
Soldiers stood atop their big machine with a stance of impatience, like firemen waiting to start. We pulled out through the hedgerow gate onto the main macadam highway. It was about 10 miles to the frontlines.
“We should make it before full darkness,” one of the officers said.
We went through shattered Carentan and on beyond for miles. Then we turned off at an angle in the road. “This is Purple Heart Corner,” the officer said.
With an increasing tempo, the big guns crashed around us. Hedges began to make weird shadows. You peered closely at sentries in every open hedge gate just out of nervous alertness.
No dignity in death
The smell of death washed past us in waves as we drove on. There is nothing worse in war than the foul odor of death. There is no last vestige of dignity in it.
We turned up a gravel lane, and drove slowly. The dusk was deepening. A gray stone farmhouse sat dimly off the road. A little yard and driveway semicircled in front of it. Against the front of the house stood five German soldiers, facing inward, their hands above their heads. An American doughboy stood in the driveway with a Tommy gun pointed at them. We drove on for about 50 yards and stopped. The drivers shut off their Diesel motors.
One officer went into an orchard to try to find where the tanks were. In wartime, nobody ever knows where anything is. The rest of us waited along the road beside an old stone barn. The dusk was deeper now.
Out of the orchards around us roared and thundered our own artillery. An officer hit a cigarette. A sergeant with a rifle slung on his shoulder walked up and said, “You better put that out, sir. There’s snipers all around and they’ll shoot at a cigarette.”
The officer crushed the cigarette in his fingers, not waiting to drop it on the ground, and said, “Thanks.”
“It’s for your own good,” the sergeant said, apologetically.
Somehow as darkness comes down in a land of great danger you want things hushed. People begin to talk in low voices and feet on jeep throttles tread less heavily.
An early German plane droned overhead, passed, turned, dived – and his white tracers came slanting down out of the sky. We crouched behind a stone wall. He was half a mile away, but the night is big and bullets can go anywhere and you are nervous.
On ahead there were single rifle shots and the give and take of machine gun rattles – one fast and one slow, one German and one American. You wondered after each blast if somebody who was whole a moment ago, some utter stranger, was now lying in sudden new anguish up there ahead in the illimitable darkness.
That old familiar wail
A shell whined that old familiar wail and hit in the orchard ahead with a crash. I moved quickly around behind the barn.
“You don’t like that?” inquired a soldier out of the dusk.
I said, “No, do you?”
And he replied as honestly, “I sure as hell don’t.”
A sergeant came up the road and said:
You can stay here if you want to, but they shell this barn every hour on the hour. They’re zeroed in on it.
We looked at our watches. It was five minutes till midnight. Some of our soldiers stood boldly out in the middle of the road talking. But you could sense some of us, who were less composed, being close to the stone wall, even close to the motherhood of the big silent trucks. Then an officer came out of the orchard. He had the directions. We all gathered around and listened. We had to back up, cross two pastures, turn down another lane and go forward from there.
We were to drag back two German tanks for fear the Germans might retrieve them during the night. We backed ponderously up the road, our powerful exhaust blowing up dust as we moved.
As we passed the gray stone farmhouse we could see five silhouettes, very faintly through the now almost complete night – five Germans still facing the gray farmhouse.
We came to a lane, and pulled forward into the orchard very slowly for you could barely see now. Even in the lightning flashes of the big guns, you could barely see.
Pegler: Union menace
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
Up to date in this campaign for the Presidency, neither candidate has expressed any intention to work for legal reforms which would free the American worker from the oppression of the union movement. It has been a long time since Tom Dewey signified that he was even aware of the unions’ menace to individual, human freedom and, thus, to the collective freedom of us all, within our own country.
It may be taken for granted that Mr. Roosevelt will not even mention the subject, for he successfully has ignored it for years and has actively thwarted several attempts by Congress to establish legal standards and restraints with which the unions would have had to comply for the protection of the whole people.
Mr. Dewey operates under a handicap, because the Roosevelt propaganda has created a thoughtless belief, or superstition, among millions of voters, that he is pro-labor, whereas, in fact, he is free labor’s worst enemy. Therefore, Mr. Dewey, or anyone else who would impose on unions fair obligations to the whole community, would be falsely depicted as a man hostile to labor.
That, however, is Mr. Dewey hard luck. It sets for him a test of debate and statesmanship in the campaign which, however, for expediency and votes, he may decide to ignore with a mental reservation that, if elected, he would take it up later in recommendations to Congress.
Immune to legal restraints
Whatever candidates may say, the fact remains that the unions are out of control of their members and immune to legal restraints. They are a powerful anti-labor movement with absolutely no obligation to hold free elections of their officers, or any elections at all, to account for their funds, to limit the salaries and graft of their officials, to admit qualified workers to membership, to limit their activities to collective bargaining or to exclude criminals and alien Communists from official position in their councils.
They have forced unwilling workers to accept representation by henchmen of President Roosevelt’s own political machine in contempt of the Wagner Act, the very law which they hailed as labor’s Magna Carta. By this process, workers by millions have been forced to contribute to the Roosevelt campaign funds through collections taken up by his own political agents under compulsion and threat.
This method is almost identical with that of Benito Mussolini in Italy, and it may be that the workers are too stupid and too emotional in their politics to care even though this is demonstrated to be so.
Mussolini won the Italian workers with the same bait that Mr. Roosevelt has used in chumming up the suckers of American labor, and up to this time the American worker has not shown himself to be any more intelligent or careful of his liberties than his Italian brother who sold out for a little more cheap, paper money and the promise of an old-age pension which is now still pie in the sky.
Right to commit robbery upheld
Roosevelt’s Supreme Court has established for union bosses the right to commit highway robbery in the guise of soliciting employment for their subjects. Highway robbery is a crime which calls for a low, criminal character and it was shown in the Supreme Court case that most of the defendant union men were not workers or chosen labor agents but common, underworld jailbirds.
If a union boss will rob an employer on the highway, he will have no compunction to rob his own subjects in the union through shakedowns or theft of their money from the treasury. Yet, Mr. Roosevelt prevented the adoption of a law to forbid highway robbery in the name of unionism.
Just how far gone is the American worker in his cynicism, political emotion, prejudice, docility and ignorance of his actual condition one can only estimate. At times, he seems to be hopelessly persuaded to Fascism because it doesn’t hurt much, yet. Mr. Roosevelt won’t try to arouse him, for it was he who put the spell on him.
Mr. Dewey might try, but if so he would run the risk of losing the faceless American’s vote and all chance to save him from his own greedy, selfish immediate delight in war wages and the right to tell the boss, but never the union agent, to go to hell.
4-year battle against Nazi slave-masters told in dispatch secreted from Belgium
Resourceful Belgians find ways to escape Germany’s labor draft
By a Belgian journalist
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Soldier Voting Act broken, Navy officials admit
Marked federal ballots received in violation of Oct. 2 deadline set by Congress
Washington (UP) –
The Navy Department acknowledged today that a few marked federal ballots have been received from naval personnel overseas in violation of the Oct. 2 deadline set forth in the Soldier Voting Act.
The Navy said it has mailed some sealed federal ballots overseas but that no ballots have been distributed within the United States. Those shipped overseas, it said, were plainly marked “not to be opened until or after Oct. 2.” These instructions were apparently ignored, it added, and a few ballots opened and returned to home states.
Probe demanded
The Navy statement was issued after California Secretary of State Frank M. Jordan charged that some California servicemen overseas had been issued federal ballots for the November election without being given an opportunity to use state ballots.
Republican National Committeeman Raymond Haight of Los Angeles called for a Congressional investigation. He said:
On the basis of the facts available, it is too early to conclude how much is fraud and how much is stupidity. In any event, our Armed Forces are the victims.
The War Department said ballots have been received prematurely in Iowa, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and California. Investigation, however, showed that none was marked by Army personnel, he said.
To get another chance
The Navy Judge Advocate General’s Office said an inquiry had determined that the men who had mailed ballots prematurely may be given another chance to vote, since the ballots already received cannot be counted.
A total of 7,600,000 federal ballots were printed, of which 3,800,000 are for the Army, 3,400,000 for the Navy and 400,000 for the War Shipping Administration. The Soldier Voting Act provides that they are to be distributed only to servicemen unable to obtain ballots from their home states. In no case are they to be distributed prior to Oct. 2.
Stokes: Party heads fear Willkie and Wallace
Both may influence independent voters
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
Two gentlemen who have been kicked and cuffed by the regular politicians of their parties are likely to have more to do with the November election than some practical politicians seem to suspect.
One is Wendell L. Willkie; the other, Vice President Henry A. Wallace.
Both have an appeal for the independent vote which, as of today, seems unusually large. A recent Gallup Poll estimates that about 25% of the voters have not decided yet whether they will vote Democratic or Republican.
Their doings important
This element probably comprises representatives of all classes and categories. In such an independent group, you are likely to find political and economic progressivism, with a strain of idealism, and considerable concern for a forward-looking program, both domestic and international. Sensible and sound argument, coupled with vision, will be needed here, not partisan denunciation and political hogwash.
What Messrs. Willkie and Wallace do and say will be important with this independent element. Each man is ahead of his party and its platform on both domestic and international issues, and each speaks plainly.
Vice President Wallace will support the Democratic ticket. There is no question about that.
Willkie delaying decision
Mr. Willkie has not indicated what he will do about the Dewey-Bricker ticket and, it is understood, will not until he finds out how Governor Dewey stands on several major issues, which probably will not be until the Republican candidate’s main campaign speeches some weeks hence.
Incidentally, such forthrightness as Governor Dewey’s flat repudiation of Rep. Ham Fish is the sort of thing that impresses Mr. Willkie, and a continuation of such straight talking might be persuasive with the 1940 Republican candidate.
While Vice President Wallace will support the Roosevelt-Truman ticket, the caliber and tone of his support may become important. He said in his convention speech that the party could continue only as a progressive party.
Wallace ousting raises question
Mr. Wallace has a large following, because he stands for something which appeals to so many ordinary folks. This was attested by his rank-and-file support for the nomination, as revealed in a Gallup Poll prior to the convention, by his showing in the convention when you consider that the game was stacked against him, and by reactions since. His ousting by President Roosevelt and the party bosses has raised a question in the minds of many voters.
To one who has watched the cold-blooded operations of the party bosses against both the Vice President and Mr. Willkie, and who has heard the bosses’ private cynical remarks about the two men, it seems the politicians have not yet caught on to what is going on in the country, have not caught the note of yearning among the people for a different order of things out of the suffering of this war, both in this country and all over the world.
Both stand as symbols
The people are ahead of the politicians. So are Messrs. Wallace and Willkie. That’s why both men have become symbols.
Republicans try to dismiss Mr. Willkie as of little influence, but they don’t seem to believe it even as they say it. Publicly, they express confidence he will come along, but they really don’t know, and they seem embarrassed that they can’t tell for sure.
Their attitude indicates they are afraid of Mr. Willkie. They would like so much to have him in their side. His word that the Republican ticket is OK might help a lot with the independent vote.