Foster: At long last Orson Welles unveils his snub nose!
By Ernest Foster
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In Washington –
Returning Congressmen face disputed issues in brief, busy session
Prices, Lend-Lease, bonus, debt limit and appropriations are on schedule
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Farley heads harmony meeting of New York State Democrats
Fourth term endorsement seen in resolution urging ‘continued direction’ of war effort
New York (UP) –
The New York State Democratic Committee unanimously reelected James A. Farley as its chairman today and unanimously approved a resolution that was interpreted as an endorsement of a fourth term for President Roosevelt.
The resolution was proposed by former National Chairman Edward J. Flynn. Endorsing President Roosevelt’s administration, it did not specifically mention his renomination and reelection.
‘Continued direction’
The resolution said:
The inevitable victory of our righteous cause can best be assured the sooner by his continued direction of the great contribution that armed America, agricultural America, and industrial America are making all over the globe in defeating the forces of tyranny.
Mr. Farley had opposed Mr. Roosevelt’s nomination for a third term ands resigned as national chairman after the 1940 convention. Today’s resolution appeared to be a compromise with state Democratic factions wanting a specific endorsement of Mr. Roosevelt as a presidential candidate this year. The Albany O’Connell faction wanted to remove Mr. Farley as state chairman.
All in 40 minutes
Passage of the resolution, reelection of officers and the unanimous election of a slate of 20 delegates-at-large to the national convention took only 40 minutes at the meeting in the National Democratic Club.
Mr. Farley and the other committee officers were placed in nomination by Frank V. Kelly, Brooklyn leader, and were seconded by George B. Doyle of Erie County, who declared from the floor:
We are most fortunate in having such a great leader as Jim Farley as our chairman.
As chairman, Mr. Farley pushed through the regular order of business with no deviation.
He said:
No one can be more proud of his friends than I am now and have been through the years. I can assure you that I will never give you any cause to regret the confidence you have placed in me.
Wants no compromise
Tammany leader Edward V. Laughlin’s call for a fourth-term draft climaxed today by completion of the pro-Roosevelt slate.
Mr. Laughlin issued his Draft-Roosevelt statement in Washington last night through the Democratic National Committee which in a session last January “solicited” the President to seek another term.
As leader of Tammany Hall, the New York County Democratic organization, Mr. Laughlin said:
There can be no compromise with ivy-towered isolationism. The blood that has been shed by our boys on the battlefields must not be in vain. We Democrats in New York support without reservation President Roosevelt and his policies.
It is appropriate that New York should take the lead in the movement to draft Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His statement followed by 48 hours a bitter attack by two Tammany district leaders upon his leadership of the New York organization. John L. Buckley and Dennis J. Mahon are assailing Mr. Laughlin on charges of “trafficking” with Rep. Vito Marcantonio, American Laborite member of Congress from a Harlem constituency, whom they accuse of being a communist intent upon swelling American Labor Party strength at the expense of the Democratic Party.
Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mahon said Monday in New York:
The endorsement of President Roosevelt or whoever may be the nominee of the Democratic Party this year by the present controlling influences of our organization would be a travesty and a liability.
Mr. Marcantonio is leader of the left-wing American Labor Party element which captured party control throughout the state in last month’s primaries.
Poll: Governor Dewey boosts lead in Michigan
MacArthur, Willkie are tied for second
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Government by secrecy assailed by Bricker
Tacoma, Washington (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker, candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, blames “government by secrecy” for the creation of “suspicion and distrust of the administration in the minds of the people.”
Governor Bricker told the Pierce County Republican Convention last night that “everywhere I go I find people hungry for information.”
He said:
They are sick and tired of all the mystery and secrecy that covers so much of our national affairs. The people have been given only such news as governmental bureaucrats deem good for them.
Governor Bricker also declared that he favored an elaboration of the League of Nations and the World Court as a post-war peace-maintaining agency.
93 votes for Dewey expected in New York
Albany, New York (UP) –
Political observers believed today that New York State’s 93 delegates to the Republican National Convention would adopt a resolution next month formally endorsing Governor Thomas E. Dewey for the presidential nomination.
Louisiana Governor challenges Roosevelt
Baton Rouge, Louisiana (UP) –
Governor Sam H. Jones, long a bitter opponent of the New Deal administration, has openly challenged the power of President Roosevelt to refuse to let members of Congress serve in the Armed Forces unless they first resign their posts.
The Governor refused to accept the resignation of Rep. James Domengeaux (D-LA) who had passed his pre-induction physical examination and was scheduled to be sworn into the Army within a few days.
Domengeaux, 37, and single, sent his resignation to the Governor according to Louisiana law, several weeks ago.
Governor Jones wrote the Congressman:
I know of now law of the United States that would bar you as a Congressman from serving in the Army of the United States and at the same time keep you from holding your office to which the people of your district have elected you.
Rep. Luce: Roosevelt losing hold on voters
Bridgeport, Connecticut (UP) –
Many a Democrat in Congress “is beginning to view his own bootstraps as a safer device for political levitation than President Roosevelt’s threadbare coattails,” Rep. Clare Luce (R-CT) told the Bridgeport Chamber of Commerce yesterday.
She said that Mr. Roosevelt has lost his vote-pulling appeal, and that in private, Democratic Congressmen and Senators “will tell you so.”
Ferguson: Better babies
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
There is a rising tide of public opinion in favor of a higher birth rate. The most recent champion of the cause is Mark Sullivan who draws horrific pictures of the future unless America and Britain keep pace with Japan in baby production.
And for what are all these children to be used? Larger families, it is said, will keep our supply of manpower so high that no nation will dare challenge us to war.
We are also reminded that the birth rate is low in well-to-do circles and that women college graduates avoided motherhood in the 20s and 30s, a fact which must be acknowledged and deplored. But in making that point the proponents of prolific breeding refute their main argument. For the point implies that the quality of human beings is more to be valued than their quantity, that it is better to have Grade A babies than Grade B.
Indeed, many countries which specialize in production of Grade B babies finally have such a preponderance of weaklings in their population that they can’t wage successful wars.
Our country easily could accommodate more children than we now produce. However, Army and Navy figures prove that if the present generation had had better food, better schools and better social backgrounds, its numbers would have been adequate for all military and civilian needs. The cold truth is that we have bred too many subnormal and diseased children in our slums.
Not more, but better babies should be our aim, babies whose parents will take the time to train them for citizenship and life.
Background of news –
Dewey and foreign policy
By Bertram Benedict
First of two articles.
With Governor Dewey away out in front for the Republican presidential nomination, and with the campaign likely to revolve around foreign policy, Mr. Dewey’s views on foreign policy in the past become of special interest.
Governor Dewey generally was classed as something of an isolationist prior to Pearl Harbor, but there was certainly nothing isolationist about the views on foreign policy he expressed on Sept. 5, 1943, at the meeting of the Republican Advisory Council on Post-War Policy at Mackinac Island.
On arriving to attend the meeting, he was asked about his views on foreign policy. Mr. Dewey presented reporters with copies of the foreign policy plank in the platform on which he was elected Governor of New York in 1942. Mr. Dewey was understood to have written much of that platform himself. It said:
The United States must be prepared to undertaker new obligations and responsibilities in the community of nations. We must cooperate with other nations to promote the wider international exchange of goods and services, to broaden access to raw materials, to achieve monetary and economic stability and thus discourage the growth of rampant nationalism and its spawn: economic and military aggression. As a further safeguard, we must join with other nations to secure the peace of the world, by force if necessary, against any future outbreak of international gangsterism.
De facto alliance cited*
On being interrogated Mr. Dewey then came out foe a foreign policy pretty much like that advocated in Walter Lippman’s U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, which had been published less than three months previously, Mr. Dewey said:
We have had a de facto military alliance with Great Britain practically ever since the War of 1812. In the two principal cases since, when war was made on Britain, we went to her defense… (That the United States and Great Britain will continue that alliance, and on a more formal basis, after this war) I should think very likely, and it would be in our interest… It would be hoped that in the working out of the peace Russia and China might be included (in that alliance).
However, prior to Pearl Harbor, Mr. Dewey seemed to wax isolationist or anti-isolationist according to circumstances.
In announcing, in December 1939, his candidacy for the 1940 Republican presidential nomination, he listed his principal advisers. At the top of the list was John Foster Dulles, who is understood now to be Mr. Dewey’s chief adviser on foreign affairs and who is even being mentioned as Secretary of State if Mr. Dewey should become President.
The statement explained that Mr. Dulles had been secretary of The Hague Peace Conference of 1907, had been attached to the American Peace Mission in Paris in 1918-19, had been a member of the Reparations Commission of the Supreme Economic Council.
Dulles’ opinion quoted
The Dewey statemen then went on to relate, obviously with approbation, that on Oct. 28, 1939, Mr. Dulles had said that he favored “some dilution or leveling off of the sovereignty principle as it prevails in the world today,” and that an orderly transition could be effected only under the leadership of the United States.
All this certainly did not sound isolationist. But in his 1940 campaign in the preferential primary of Wisconsin, heart of isolationist territory, Mr. Dewey uttered what sounded like an isolationist credo. He declared on March 30, after charging that the Roosevelt administration had turned to European affairs only because it had made a failure of domestic problems, that the United States should:
…keep its hands wholly out of the European war and out of any negotiations that may take place between the warring nations, now or at any other time… We must elect a Republican administration which will… keep completely out of the affairs of Europe.
Millett: Note to clinging vines: Grow up before war ends
Army nurse says soldier-husband will want wife to face realities
By Ruth Millett
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
With 5th Army beachhead forces, Italy – (by wireless)
I suppose there is no custom in our Army more adhered to than the one of brewing some coffee or hot chocolate just before bedtime, whenever soldiers are in a place where it is possible.
It is especially the custom here on the Anzio beachhead, where nearby everybody is dug in and you can have a fire in places. The little Coleman stove is perfect for that.
And since we’ve mentioned it, real coffee is one gift the boys over here always like to receive, now that coffee rationing is ended back home.
One night I was bunking in a grove with a company of tank crewmen and they asked me along to one of their dugouts to have coffee with them. Others followed until there were 10 of us squatting on the floor of the little dugout.
This dugout was of the average size for two men, but three men were using it to sleep in. It was about shoulder-deep, and had straw on the floor, but of course no furniture at all.
The dugout was inhabited by Pvt. Ruben Cordes of Gasper, Alabama, and Pvt. Norman Cormier of Leicester, Massachusetts, both assistant tank drivers, and Pvt. Henry Sewell of Buechel, Kentucky, a tank gunner.
Company wit is whittler
Pvt. Cordes is the company wit. The boys kid him and he kids himself. When I met him just before dark, he was sitting on a kitchen chair tilted bac against a tree trunk in good Southern style, whittling silhouettes out of a piece of board.
He whittles all the time. The boys laughed and said:
You should have been here a few minutes ago. The captain was right here under the tree, chopping his own firewood, and Cordes just sat there and whittled and let him chop.
Cordes never can find anything he owns, especially his whittling knife. But now that they have moved into this dugout, he has a simple system. Whenever he loses anything, he just gets down on his knees and feels in the straw until eventually he finds it.
Most of the boys got packages from home the evening I was there. When the others saw that Cordes had a package, they started giving him cigarettes, holding lights for him, brushing his shoes and sticking lifesavers in his mouth. It turned out his box contained seven pairs of heavy wool socks which he had written home for, and he was going to keep them.
Cordes is also the pinup champ of the entire Army, as far as my investigations go. I know a bunch of Air Force mechanics who have 34 pinups in their room, but Cordes has 38 on the walls of his little dugout. “I’m glad we’re ahead of the Air Force,” one boy said.
In this feminine gallery, there is one pinup girl who me3ans more than the rest. That is Norman Cormier’s wife. Somebody did a pencil sketch of her at a party back home, and she sent it to him. It hangs on the place of honor among all his roommate’s unknown beauties.
The boys were all good-natured. When I was taking down their names and ranks, Cormier laughed when he gave his as private first class, and somebody said:
What are the people of Massachusetts going to think about you being only a pic?
They talk about ages
The other tank men in our little evening snack party were Sgt. Thomas Simpson, a tank commander, of Louisville, Kentucky; Sgt. Ralph Sharp, a tank driver from Strathmore, California; Pvt. Paul Cummins, assistant driver, from Sharonville, Ohio; Cpl. Max Hernandez from Delmar, California; SSgt. Michael Swartz, a farmer from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and may own dugout mate, Sgt. Bazzel Carter of Wallins Creek, Kentucky.
Cpl. Hernandez, a halftrack driver, describes himself as “one of those guys who wanted to see action, and now look at me.” And the others chimed in that now he was “one of those guys who wanted to see home.”
We sat there in the dugout for two or three hours, cooling our canteens with our hands and drinking sweet coffee and just gabbing. The boys pumped me about America and what I thought of the western invasion and what I knew about the authenticity of the latest crop of rumors, and how I found life on the beachhead.
Finally, it was getting late and Pvt. Cummins stretched and said, “I feel like I was 45 years old.” So I said, “Well, I feel like I was, too, and I damn near am.”
Then Sgt. Swarts asked how old I was, and I said 43, and he said he was 30, and that if he knew he’d live to be 43, he wouldn’t have a worry in the world. But I said:
Oh yes you would, you’d be just like I am, worrying whether you’d ever get to be 44 or not.
And Pvt. Cordes said he had nothing to worry about along those lines, since he didn’t have sense enough to get killed.
That’s the way the conversation goes around a dugout at nighttime – rumors, girls, hopes of home, jokes, little experiences, opinions of their officers, and an occasional offhand reference to what may happen to you in the end.
OWI’ll tell the world –
Lucey: U.S. strikes and political feuds told ‘in context’ for propaganda
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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