The CIO in politics –
PAC enlists army of women for 4th term drive
Housewives, as canvassers, will serve as backbone of assault on GOP
By Blair Moody, North American Newspaper Alliance
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The CIO in politics –
America Firsters replace Bricker
Special caucus names ex-Coughlin aide
Detroit, Michigan (UP) –
Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the America First Party, announced today that his party, in a special caucus, had selected another candidate for Vice President, replacing Ohio’s Governor John Bricker, who indignantly repudiated the nomination yesterday.
The new candidate, Smith said, is Harry Romer, former Ohio leader for Father Charles Coughlin’s Social Justice group.
Smith said of Governor Bricker that “in repudiating the nomination, he has displayed the same weakness as at Chicago when he capitulated to Dewey.”
Answering Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s sharp attack on him, Smith said that:
Dewey has endorsed for Congress against Hamilton Fish the same candidate who is supported by Earl Browder… Dewey’s attack on Hamilton Fish established beyond doubt that Roosevelt, Dewey, Willkie and Browder are in the same bed together.
“I’m not afraid to take them all on at once,” Smith said.
Dewey offers 15-point policy on home front
Governors conference opens in St. Louis
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
St. Louis, Missouri –
The Republican Governors Conference convened today under the guidance of Governor Thomas E. Dewey, GOP presidential candidate, to establish a domestic program upon which to challenge President Roosevelt’s bid for a fourth term.
The conference will run through tomorrow.
Mr. Roosevelt is already under campaign charges of having failed to cope with pre-war depression and of bungling post-war economic plans.
Governor Dewey, backed by his running mate Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio, is presenting a 15-ooint program, for the consideration of the governors assembled here. They represent 26 states in which the Dewey-Bricker managers confidently expect to obtain more than the bare 266 electoral votes necessary to win the election.
The 15-point program follows: Public expenditures; public health; unemployment insurance administration; employment services administration; labor policies; public works; highways; insurance regulations; ownership and use of national lands; coordination of federal and state taxation; agriculture; National Guard policies; especially the extent of federal control; water, flood control and conservation policies; veterans’ affairs; and the question of the relationship between unemployment insurance and employment services.
Although the conferences are closed to the public, their progress will be reported in press conferences, the first of which will be shortly after noon today. They will deal with practically all phases of domestic problems where Governor Dewey charges the Roosevelt administration has failed, and will also give Governor Dewey a chance to talk grassroots politics.
Home front bungling
In this three-state swing, the young New Yorker has outlined the substance of his campaign strategy. It is to avoid any challenge to the conduct of the war and possibly to minimize foreign relations, but to denounce the Roosevelt administration’s domestic policies as a combination of bungling and shortsighted expediency.
The Governor came here from Pittsburgh and Springfield, Illinois, where he conferred with racial, political and other groups. Republican politicians have assured him so far that he will carry West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Illinois. He will hear today that Missouri can also be won by the Republicans.
Governor Bricker yesterday repudiated a move by Gerald L. K. Smith’s America First Party to nominate him for Vice President. Smith, a former associate of the late Huey P. Long and political spellbinder of experience, heads the America First ticket.
An American ‘Hitler’
Governor Dewey compared Smith to Adolf Hitler in his race prejudices and denounced him for a “sinister effort to smear” Mr. Bricker, who also answered Smith in bitter language.
Mr. Bricker said:
The act of Smith in associating my name with his on a spurious ticket, without notice of any kind, is the cheapest demagoguery. I denounce it and shall not have my name used in any such connection.
I hate demagoguery, religious intolerance and racial prejudice. They can destroy our free government as they have destroyed liberty around the world. I shall fight them as long as I live.
Springfield ‘crushes’ Dewey
Substantial crowds greeted Governor Dewey in Pittsburgh, but it remained for Springfield to pack crowds around the candidate until police were almost powerless and there was danger that women and children might be hurt in the crush.
Governor Dewey will confer with Missouri politicians and representatives of other groups before entraining Friday for a weekend at his Pawling, New York, farm, which he will reach Saturday evening.
Illinois veterans present request
Springfield, Illinois (UP) –
A four-point program to aid men and women in the Armed Forces was placed before Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential candidate, last night by representatives of Illinois’ war veterans.
Its major feature was a demand that the veterans be represented at the peace table by representatives of “their own choosing.”
Other phases include state and local planning for war veteran employment, operation of the “G.I.” Bill without red tape and that veterans receive full representations in political parties and governmental operation.
Dewey amends wage-freeze view given here
Springfield, Illinois –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential candidate, in a press conference here yesterday, said he considered an adjustable wage freeze was essential in time of war.
He discussed the question to amend somewhat the version of his view made public Monday in Pittsburgh by Thomas Mallon, regional director of the American Federation of Labor and spokesman of the labor group which conferred with him in that city.
Governor Dewey said:
I told him that I felt the wage freeze was essential, with such adjustments as should be made from time to time for the rising cost of living. And I said the Office of Price Administration had done an incompetent, bungling job which has brought chaos. A better job of that must be done.
Governor Dewey was asked whether adjustments should be made at once. He said the labor group in Pittsburgh had asked him about the wage increase now sought by steel workers.
Governor Dewey said:
I explained that I had not had an opportunity to read the voluminous testimony and therefore could not pass judgment on that.
Ex-U.S. payrollers with PAC named
15 subject to Hatch Act investigation
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Carolina storm moves westward
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Pegler: Dewey in Springfield
By Westbrook Pegler
Springfield, Illinois –
In the hearing of about a thousand men and women and some Whitcomb Riley types of Midwestern boys and girls, most of them carrying small political placards on sticks, Tom Dewey intimated on his arrival in Springfield yesterday that his journey from New York to St. Louis for a conference of 26 Republican governors is, in fact, a campaign trip.
He said he and Illinois Governor Dwight Green, who met him at the railroad station, were engaged in a great campaign, a continuation of their war on gangsters in which both took part 14 years ago.
This was a reference to Green’s prosecution of Al Capone which condemned Capone to long, pensive years in Alcatraz and to continuing oblivion in Miami, and his own attacks in New York on the underworld alliance of Tammany and the racketeers of unionism.
Up to this point, the Dewey party had preferred to pretend that he was not campaigning just yet but only conferring with other leaders of the Republican Party. It is a fine point but he did campaign today, both in his small oration to the crowd at the station and in the press conference at the Executive Mansion.
This, incidentally, is a large and remarkably tasty house which markedly excels the equally large but monstrous old heap in Albany which, nevertheless, has served four New York governors, to date, as a prep school for the White House.
Mr. Dewey’s precise mind apparently has it that a campaign doesn’t begin until the nominee actually starts throwing volleys of lefts and rights to the face and body in prepared speeches. In that sense, he is still doing calisthenics and working out on the heavy bag in the gym, for he refused to elaborate on his reference to the continuing war on gangsters, just now.
Will open up at the bell
This may be taken as an intimation, however, that when the seconds are out of the corners and the bell rings, he will tear into Franklin D. Roosevelt as the protector of some of the foulest criminals of the age who, in turn, in this contest, are supporting Mr. Roosevelt both financially, out of the colossal treasuries, which he helped them to amass, and, politically, through the organizations which, in the guise of labor’s gains, he helped them to create.
The mention of gangsters and the continuation of the old war against them refers to the legal protectorate which was maintained for highway robbers of the criminal underworld of unionism, when Congress tried to pass laws against union racketeering, and to the late Lepke Buchalter, whose field of operations was that section of the New York needle trades dominated by Sidney Hillman.
Mr. Hillman, the boss of the CIO-Communist Political Action Committee, is politically and personally in Roosevelt company, and Dewey is thoroughly acquainted with the career and associations of Lepke, whom he once prosecuted for extortion. And he has neither awe of nor illusions about Roosevelt as a machine politician.
Mr. Roosevelt will not come into the ring as Commander-in-Chief in this phase of the campaign, but as one who befriended the oppressors and dictators of the labor movement on a quid pro quo understanding which reduced labor to helplessness.
Will stress private jobs
Mr. Dewey’s themes apparently will be jobs under private enterprise when peace comes, as distinguished from public employment at dole wages, and the exploitation of the worker by subsidiaries of Roosevelt’s party through racketeers and manipulators in the unions. He has returned to the thought, first expressed in his acceptance speech in Chicago, that until the war created millions of jobs at public expense, Roosevelt’s only solution for the unemployment of 10 million workers had been government-made work projects.
Wendell Willkie refused the issue four years ago but this year, for the first time, the subject of real jobs and law-abiding unionism, all for the benefit of labor, itself, is coming to challenge.
Frank Simpson, a Negro employed in the Governor’s office in Albany, is a member of Dewey’s staff on this trip. As the party drove to Abraham Lincoln’s tomb this afternoon, he remarked gravely that this pilgrimage stirred in him feelings which he could not well express. His grandfather came North with Gen. Sheridan.
He was invited to join the party entering the tomb of the man whom he reverently regards as his emancipator and was shocked to hear that, back in the ‘70s, after Lincoln had been moved 20 times from one more or less temporary resting place to another, a gang of criminals tried to snatch the body, intending to hold it for $200,000 ransom. That was why now it was encased in solid concrete and steel, deep in the ground.
On the way to the tomb, Simpson, who sees Tom Dewey every day, very full of his feelings, heard two little boys playing near the cemetery. One of them yelled to the other: “Did you see Tom Dewey? I saw him good.”
Political action boomerang –
Now they say CIO ballyhoo did most to bump Wallace
By Daniel M. Kidney, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
The big ballyhoo of the CIO Political Action Committee in Chicago did more to bump Vice President Wallace off the Democratic ticket than any other thing, many Democrats and labor representatives here believe.
Convention chairman Senator Samuel Jackson (D-IN), answering the criticism of Mr. Wallace might have been put over by the PAC demonstrators had he not adjourned the convention session July 20, summed up the Democratic viewpoint:
There was no favoritism shown in adjourning at that time. Senator Guffey (D-PA), a Wallace manager, urged me to do so. Had we remained in session, the demonstrators might have gotten out of hand, but the result would have been just the same.
CIO dictation refused
I am convinced the Democratic Party was determined not to take the Vice President against after that showing. Many felt it would mean that the CIO had taken over the part, and they would never stand for that.
Perhaps President Roosevelt’s dictation of a Wallace nomination might have won out, but the party refused to accept such dictation from the CIO.
Senator Jackson conceded that when he was selected as permanent chairman he had the definite view if not the understanding, that Vice President Wallace would not be put in second place on the ticket again.
Poor impression noted
Martin Miller, legislative representative of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, expressed a similar viewpoint about Mr. Wallace and the CIO.
Mr. Miller said:
The convention was poorly handled, so far as making a good impression on the country.
But it soon became obvious that the one determination of the majority of the delegates was that they were not going to be dictated to or dominated by the CIO. That was why Wallace couldn’t win, despite the demonstrators.
Editorial: The Republican danger
One specific and practical result which most observers saw in Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s visit here this week was the substantial unity among Republicans.
Everybody knows the Republicans are not all of a mind on the issues of the day, on campaign methods, on governmental administration or on any other subject.
Some of them are as far apart as the poles as far apart, for instance, as the CIO Political Action Committee and the Southern “bourbons” in the Democratic Party.
Nobody expects them to get together on any given question, and it probably would be an unhealthy thing if they did. But it is a wholesome situation when they can, for the nonce, shelve some of their personal grudges, pet schemes, ambitions and philosophies in the interest of a greater objective.
In this year’s elections, there are only two choices for President – Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Dewey.
You’ve got to take one or the other. That’s our American system. And when you take Mr. Roosevelt, you take him with all his faults and peculiarities, whatever may be your opinion of any one of them. You take the whole.
It is the same with Mr. Dewey. Lots of people who may vote for the Republican nominee may disagree with many of the things he has done, will do or may stand for. But they will have to weigh him, his policies and record of the present Washington administration, as a whole.
So, there isn’t any point in professional Republican politicians bickering among themselves over leadership, local policies, patronage or any other matter. Either they are for Mr. Dewey or they are against him. In either case, nothing else, for purposes of the election campaign, can count for very much.
Mr. Dewey, by his conduct immediately after the Republican Convention, and by his conferences here Monday, seems to have instilled the idea concretely among Republican organization workers. For the moment, he has broken the moorings of petty factionalism – at least on the surface.
This will help the party and, more important, it will help the voters see the issues of the campaign in a clearer light – uncluttered by internal quarrels and scuffles.
Mr. Dewey also impressed the Republicans and others who saw him with the idea that it is he who is the candidate. He displayed a willingness to hear all sides, to listen to all arguments, but at the same time made it eminently clear that it is he who will weld the decisive policy, he who will assume the responsibility.
The clearer that picture becomes, the better it will be for Mr. Dewey – and for the Republican ticket.
For there are conspicuous affiliates of the Republican Party whose philosophies are retrogressive, whose influence, if given free rein, is a liability. The less the evidence that these back numbers can speak for the nominee and his ticket, the more confidence the candidate and his running mates will receive and earn from the public.
No candidate for major office can be responsible for the conduct of all of his support. But he can minimize the significance of that support if he demonstrates, as Mr. Dewey seems to be doing, that he can stand on his own feet – that he can lead, and not be led.
How G.I. Bill of Rights works –
Chance for education rates highest among veterans’ benefits
Every man whose schooling was interrupted is entitled to at least one year of study
By Robert Taylor, Press Washington correspondent
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