Pegler: Poignant embarrassment
By Westbrook Pegler
St. Louis, Missouri –
Although the 26 Republican governors tactfully set the date for opening their unique political conference in St. Louis one day after the Missouri primary, the results have been such that their three days of deliberation have been a period of poignant embarrassment to statesmen of President Roosevelt’s party of humanity and of restrained exultation for the guests.
Tom Dewey spent Tuesday, Primary Day, in Springfield, Illinois, while others of the 26 either held themselves quietly incognito in St. Louis or put in the day traveling. Meanwhile, the citizens of Missouri were going to the polls and the governors’ congress opened Wednesday amid a scene of some confusion and sounds of recrimination.
For, on the Democratic side, Bennett Champ Clark, Missouri’s senior Senator and the colleague, personal friend and political choice of Senator Harry Truman, the nominee for Vice President, was beaten badly for renomination by Roy McKittrick, the State Attorney General, who had the export of Sidney Hillman’s Political Action Committee of the CIO-Communist front in New York. Senator Clark was, so to speak, the regular Democratic candidate, for he had the friendship and endorsement of Robert C. Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Yet Clark’s defeat was made certain in St. Louis, where he ran more than 17,000 behind McKittrick. St. Louis is Hannegan’s own hometown.
PAC and FSA
Hillman’s local agency was diligent here, especially among the workers in the war industries, many of whom, of course, are relative strangers in town, but active in the rural regions as well. Hillman’s assistant in the New York headquarters of the PAC is C. B. Baldwin, who left the chairmanship of the Farm Security Administration in Washington to help the CIO in the national subordinates in that powerful agency. The Dies Committee, recently through seizure of long-distance telephone slips in New York, was enabled to report that Baldwin’s New York political center had made a number of calls to FSA regional offices where the CIO was fighting to defeat for renomination Senators and Congressmen whom it condemned for excessive Americanism. Among them was a call to the FSA in Springfield, Missouri.
Clark’s defeat has created real bitterness among the Democrats of Missouri and, in view of his endorsement by Truman and Hannegan, plainly is a defeat for the two regular Democrats of the party who rank next to President Roosevelt. It was noted at the Chicago convention that Hillman, by his use of the taxing power over labor, conferred on him by the President, had become Hannegan’s equal, if not his superior in the party, although he holds no party position. Now by remote control he has humiliated Truman and Hannegan, who recently blocked his attempt to dictate the renomination of Henry Wallace.
The CIO modestly disowns credit for Clark’s frustration but, in reality, is mildly alarmed by its own success and trying to escape blame for a turn which may arouse regret among some who voted against Clark and anger among those who voted for him. For, while McKittrick, too, is a Missourian, he is not popular in the picturesque and sentimental sense, and the successful intervention in Missouri of an outside pressure group on his behalf will not endear him.
Clark frankly denounced the CIO as a group controlled by communists in a bitter statement accepting defeat but put his faith in the future.
Other matters may have contributed to his fall but the CIO undoubtedly made the decision.
The Republicans are thus greatly heartened and expect to win Missouri in the fall, defeating Truman in his home state. Their candidate for Senator is Forrest C. Donnell, the present Governor. Hannegan and McKittrick tried to keep him out of office when he was elected and did prevent his inauguration for two months. Now they are divided and Donnell meets the CIO’s candidate head-on in an election in which their own Bennett Clark warns the state that a vote for McKittrick will be a vote for Hillman and Communism.