U.S. fliers rip France, Reich without a fight
Attack from British and Italian bases
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Tucker: Rangers unlock the door for newest Allied invasion
By George Tucker, representing combined U.S. press
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Misuse of soldier vote list charged
Trenton, New Jersey (UP) –
Governor Walter E. Edge charged today that confidential service voting lists had been used for political solicitation by Hudson County Democratic officials and pledged an investigation to determine responsibility for “this breach of faith and violation of trust.”
Millett: Single women think as ably as others
Just because a woman is married doesn’t mean she’s super being
By Ruth Millett
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Editorial: Removing a ‘verboten’
Soldiers, who have been privileged to risk their lives but discouraged from coming into contact with ideas, soon will have the official blinders removed.
The Senate yesterday, recognizing the silliness of that part of the Soldier Vote Act under which the Army has felt compelled to put certain books and other publications on a blacklist, quickly passed an amendment. The House may be expected to go along.
Thereafter, “nothing herein shall prevent the Army and Navy” from making available to members of the Armed Forces any book, magazine, newspaper, film or broadcast “as generally presented to the public in the United States.”
As to government-financed or government-sponsored publications, films and broadcasts, no such item is required to be withheld from the troops unless, when “considered in its entirety,” it contains political propaganda “obviously” designed to affect election results or obviously calculated to create bias for or against a particular candidate.”
Those are the principal changes, and they ought to suffice to undo a situation compounded of hasty legislation and strict service interpretation.
Senator Taft, father of the offending section thus amended, cooperated with Senator Green in sponsoring the revision, but hinted darkly that the War Department’s list of banned books was “a deliberate attempt to make Congress look ridiculous.” And he added, remarkably, that the Army was “certainly unduly anxious” to get out the soldier vote in November. Both remarks ill become the Senator, whose usual calm seems to have been disturbed by an acute case of pique.
Poll: Three more states in South go to Roosevelt
Strength in Virginia, North Carolina drops
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Truman plans short campaign
Washington (UP) –
Senator Harry S. Truman, President Roosevelt’s fourth term running mate who will probably carry the brunt of the party’s national campaigning, hoped today that he could limit the job to a half dozen major speeches.
The strategy for the Democratic campaign is expected to be worked out by Senator Truman and Mr. Roosevelt at a meeting either tomorrow or Friday.
Senator Truman would like to launch his part of the program with a speech at notification ceremonies in his native Missouri. He would like to make a labor speech at Detroit and a farm speech in Illinois.
Other appearances which he believes would help the Roosevelt-Truman ticket in November include one in Texas, one possibly at Salt Lake City, Utah, and another in California.
Roosevelt’s trip called ‘holiday’
Albany, New York (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee, said today “I don’t comment on Mr. Roosevelt’s holidays” when reporters asked him for comment on the President’s recent trip to Honolulu.
“Did you say holiday advisedly?” a reported asked.
“Of course,” the Governor replied.
Taft assails Army’s get-out-vote moves
Washington (UP) –
Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH) charged today that the Army was “unduly anxious about getting out the vote” for the November election and cited a War Department circular of June 13, 1944, to back up his assertion.
Whereas the Soldier Voting Act only instructs the War Department to “assist” soldier voters, Mr. Taft declared, the circular also urges commanders at all levels to “encourage” them.
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In Washington –
$20 jobless pay said to be Byrnes plan
Reported leaning toward George Bill
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Soldier vote amendment
Washington (UP) –
The Senate-approved amendments to the Soldier Voting Act, which would relax censorship restrictions on reading material for the Armed Forces, were passed by unanimous consent by the House today and sent to the White House.
House members approved the measures without comment, after Rep. Eugene Worley (D-TX) introduced the legislation which yesterday gained Senate approval.
“This is merely a qualifying amendment,” Mr. Worley explained.
Striking bomb workers offer to return to plant
But government has moved materials, equipment from Transformer Company
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Republicans missing fire?
Perkins: Two labor developments give Democrats edge on GOP
Roosevelt coal program woos UMW; Dewey ‘too busy’ for AFL Labor Day message
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
Washington –
Two developments on the labor front here today were favorable to the Democrats, indicating that if the Republicans intend to try to crack the organized-worker vote they had better move fast:
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President Roosevelt, it was learned, has signed a letter advocating enactment of a new law for stabilization of the bituminous coal industry – this legislation being desired by the United Mine Workers as well as a large group of coal operators. The Roosevelt letter might have the political effect of cramping the style of John L. Lewis in getting the coalminers to change their habit of voting pro-Roosevelt.
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The American Federation of Labor leadership was reported by a spokesman to have a pronounced case of peeve with Governor Dewey because the Republican candidate, pleading pressure of other business, has declined to write a Labor Day message for the AFL weekly news service and the 300 labor papers which it serves.
Held for right time
On the coal matter: The Roosevelt letter is said to be in the possession of Rep. John W. Flannagan Jr. (D-VA), who will make it public when he thinks the time is ripe. Mr. Flannagan is one of eight Congressmen who have introduced identical bills on the subject.
There is a ninth coal bill in the House, by Rep. Jenkins (R-OH). It differs from the others in that it would set up a commission to stabilized and regulate the coal industry, the commission plan being favored by Mr. Lewis. The other bills would leave regulation in a bureau of the Interior Department.
UMW opposes ‘domination’
The Roosevelt letter is said to straddle on the point of Lewis controversy, and to leave that decision to Congress. A Lewis spokesman says, “We will never consent to bureaucratic domination” – meaning by a bureau in the Interior Department. Lewis’ foes have charged he prefers the commission plan because a UMW representative would be included in the membership.
The Lewis union is reported incensed about the Bureau of Mines. UMW spokesmen say it is steadily becoming “more bureaucratic,” doing less and less of what the Lewis union thinks it ought to do.
On the AFL matter: AFL columnist Philip Pearl, who is regarded as an indicator of the thinking of AFL President William Green, recounts with apparent pain that his request for a Labor Day message from the Republican candidate brought the reply from a Dewey assistant:
Due to the pressure under which Governor Dewey is working at the present time, it is impossible for him to meet the requests for specially written messages, and I am sorry to say it will not be possible for him to write one at this time.
Mr. Pearl wonders, if Mr. Dewey can’t find time to write a Labor Day message, how much time he would be able to spare for labor if and when he is elected; and also whether Mr. Dewey’s assistant “considers us naïve enough to believe that Governor Dewey prepares his own messages.”
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
The other soldier had a white bandage around the calf of his left leg. He had loosely laced his legging back over the bandage.
He said the wound “didn’t amount to a damn” and he wished they hadn’t sent him back from the lines. He said he had gone through Africa and Sicily without getting wounded, and now he’d got nicked. He was disgusted.
You could sense that this guy was a fine soldier. He looked old, but probably wasn’t. I took him to be a farmer. He talked like a hillbilly, and beneath his whiskers you could tell he had a big, droll face.
He had found some long, crooked, raggedy French cigars, and he kept lighting these funny-looking things and putting them about three inches into his mouth. He wasn’t nervous in the least.
Capt. Lucien Strawn, the battalion surgeon, started to put him in a jeep to go back to the aid station, but the soldier said:
Now wait. I know where there’s two more men wounded pretty bad. One of them is a lieutenant who just got back from the hospital this morning from his other wound.
The soldier said they were right up where the bullets were flying, but that if the aidmen would go, he could walk well enough to guide them up there. So, the doctor named off half a dozen men to go with him.
Shells start hitting again
The doctor also told the unwounded German to go along and help carry. But one of the aidmen said:
We better not have him with us. Our own men are liable to start shooting at us.
“That’s right,” the doctor said, “Leave him here.” And he named off one other American to go. After they had left the doctor said, “that’s the truth, and I never even thought of it.”
The doctor and I sat a while on the stairway inside the farmhouse, for shells had started hitting just outside again. But in a little bit the doctor got up and said he was going to see how the stretcher party was getting along. I said I’d like to go with him. He said OK.
We struck out across a sloping wheatfield. It was full of huge craters left by our bombings. There was a lull in the shelling as we crossed the field, but the trouble with lulls is that you never know when they will suddenly come to an end.
As we picked our way among the craters, I thought I heard, very faintly, somebody call “Help!” It’s odd how things strike you in wartime. I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, pooh, that would be too dramatic – just like a book. You’re just imagining it.”
But the doctor had stopped, and he said, “Did you hear somebody yelling?”
So we listened again, and this time we could hear it plainly. It seemed to come from a far corner of the field, so we picked our way over in that direction.
Finally, we saw him, a soldier lying on his back near a hedge row, still yelling “Help!” as we approached. The aidmen who had started ahead of us had got down in a bomb crater when the shelling started, so the doctor now waved them to come on.
Making an awful fuss
The wounded soldier was making an awful fuss. He was twisting and squirming, and moaning “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” He had a bandage on his right hand and there was blood on his left leg.
The doctor took his scissors and cut the legging off, then cut the laces on the shoe, and then peeled off a bloody sock and cut the pants leg up so he could see the wound. The soldier kept his eyes shut and kept squirming and moaning.
When the doctor would try to talk to him, he would just groan and say, “Oh, my God!” Finally, the doctor got out of him that he had had a small wound in his hand, and his sergeant had bandaged it and told him to start to the rear. Then, coming across the field, a shell fragment had got him in the leg.
The doctor looked him. over thoroughly. There were two small holes just above the ankle. The doctor said they hadn’t touched the bone. I think the doctor was disgusted.
He said, “He’s making a hell of a fuss over nothing.” Then to one of the aidmen he said, “Better give him a shot of morphine to quiet him.”
Whereupon the soldier squirmed and moaned, “Oh, no, no, no! Oh, my God!” But the doctor said go ahead, and the aidman cut his sleeve up to the shoulder, stuck the needle in and squeezed the vial.
The aidman, trying to be sympathetic, said to the soldier, “It’s the same old needle, ain’t it?” But the soldier just groaned again and said, “Oh, my God!”
Our hillbilly soldier lit another skinny cigar, as though he were at a national convention instead of a battlefield. Then one set of the litter-bearers started back with our new man, and the rest of us went on with the soldier to hunt for other wounded.
Pegler: Fellow traveler Frankfurter
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
During the last two or three years, it has been bruited about Washington that Felix Frankfurter has lost much of his old power in the New Deal.
If this be true, the fact remains that many of his old pupils from Harvard, men indoctrinated by Frankfurter during their impressionable years, are still planted in government positions in which they can impart to their judgments and interpretations the Frankfurter twist, which, in the minds of some, seem to give the law a meaning contrary to the intent of Congress.
It is a fact worth noting, too, that the Communists have a way of “going underground” as they put it, when they feel that they have made themselves too conspicuous. The entire Communist Party of the United States did this a few months ago when it disbanded and assumed the harmless guise of an educational society.
A year before, the International Communist Party or revolutionary movement, always directed from Moscow, went underground by means of a complicated and deliberately confused document which appeared to announce its dissolution but actually announced no such thing. However, the world reading the document, carelessly, believed it had dissolved itself.
Mr. Frankfurter’s apparent retirement from politics and informal but effective government administration may be a similar stratagem.
Accused by Theodore Roosevelt
In his reply to the late ex-President Theodore Roosevelt’s letter accusing him of writing a misleading report to President Wilson in the Bisbee deportation case, Mr. Frankfurter denied that the men deported from Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917, were planning insurrection. He went into a discussion of organized opposition to social justice in the copper mines which seems to have been beside the point on which Mr. Roosevelt had challenged him.
Mr. Roosevelt’s point was that there was imminent danger to an unarmed community, and this contention was supported by much testimony of reputable men and finally proved in a trial in the state court, of one of the deputized citizens.
In this test case, tried in 1920, Harry E. Wootton, a Bisbee hardware dealer, was acquitted in 16 minutes by a jury from which employees of the railroads, copper companies and other big interests were barred.
The charge was kidnapping. The defense was imminent danger to the community.
Judge Samuel L. Pattee told the jury they could acquit Wootton if they believed there was a “real, threatened and actual danger of immediate destruction of life and property.”
Mr. Frankfurter ignored, or gave no weight to, powerful evidence that many strangers had sifted into Bisbee, that men and women had been threatened, and that the International Workers of the World, the predecessors of today’s Communists, were violently obstructing this nation’s war effort in many western areas.
Tried to promote revolution
The IWW had seized upon this country’s intense preoccupation with the war against Germany as an opportunity to make a revolution here at home. There were many Germans, Austrians and other continentals among them and, in the Bisbee trouble, there were many Mexicans. The sheriff insisted that these Mexicans included former Villistas who, of course, were violently anti-American.
TR wrote to Mr. Frankfurter:
The apologists for anarchy are never concerned for justice. They are solely concerned in seeing one king of criminal escape justice precisely as certain big businessmen and corporation lawyers have in the past been concerned in seeing another kind of criminal escape justice.”
He did not call Mr. Frankfurter an apologist for anarchy in so many words but he did say, flatly, “You are engaged in excusing men precisely like the Bolshevik who are murderers and encouragers of murder.”
A recent issue of the Catholic Worker, a radical, but, of course, not Communistic paper, the organ of the Catholic worker movement, discusses Mr. Frankfurter’s friendship for Harold Laski, the English Communist whose writings attack religion and who, also, is well received in Washington, and is more influential there than any other Englishman except Churchill.
Arthur Sheehan, the editor, who spent a long time in Boston, writes that in 1937 he went to a forum at Ford Hall, Boston, to hear Mr. Laski. He reports that Mr. Frankfurter introduced Mr. Laski to the audience with the remark that the day he looked forward to in the year with the most joy was the day when Mr. Laski came to stay with him in his home in Massachusetts.
Stokes: Initiate told facts of life about GOP House control
Martin tells Rowe such things just aren’t being done despite Democrats’ weakness
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
Sometimes it takes an initiate, still fresh in the order but with a naïve sort of insight, to rise up and tell the old hands what’s what.
Ed Rowe, freshman Republican Congress from Akron, did that for the House, and for the Senate, too.
Observing how things are working at the Capitol, with Republicans and Southern Democrats actually running the show, big Ed Rowe wondered why House Republicans just didn’t take over control, put their man in the speakership, seize control of the committees and assume responsibility.
Alarmed Republicans
He alarmed his fellow Republicans, particularly Boss Man Joe Martin, Minority House Leader, by his bright thought.
Joe Martin, of course, called in Mr. Rowe and explained the facts of life, how such a thing just isn’t done. Republicans don’t want to take over responsibility yet. They were nervous for a day or two after the 1942 elections when it seemed they might win the House and have to run it. With a Democratic administration in power, that would have put them on the spit continually.
Republicans don’t have an actual majority. But neither do the Democrats. Republicans have 212 members. Democrats 216 members. A majority is 218. There are four members of other parties, and three vacancies.
GOP in actual control
There’s no question that the Republicans exercise actual control, with the help of conservative Southern Democrats, on most domestic issues. A showdown over organization of the House would be very close. But on the issue of control the Democrats, even rabid anti-New Dealers, would be found standing with their party because nice plums are involved, such as committee chairmanships.
So Congressman Rowe’s one-man revolution won’t come off. But he did frighten the Republicans for a moment, and he contributed the strange situation in Congress, in both branches.
The truth is, no party controls either House or Senate for practical purposes.
Democrats split
A coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats, largely Southern, now controls on most any matter of domestic policy, as in the soldier vote bill a few months back, and in reconversion bill a few days ago in the Senate.
The Democratic Party in Congress is split wide open.
The only appearance of unity comes on war measures, which have the support of all factions, though this is about over as the work of Congress moves toward post-war problems.