The Pittsburgh Press (May 14, 1944)
Four other towns taken as Allies crack foe’s outer positions on 25-mile front
By Reynolds Packard, United Press staff writer
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63 German planes are shot down
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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Navigator on bomber which got through tells how desperate Nazis braved ‘licking’
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Hope fades for end of Packard walkout
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Conservative camp showing alarm
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
Washington –
The CIO, by taking a couple of scalps in the South, where they used to chase labor organizers out of town, has suddenly attracted attention as a political force to be reckoned with in this uncertain political year.
It is being given some credit for the defeat in the recent Alabama primary of Rep. Joe Starnes, member of the Dies Committee, for which the CIO has no affection. On the heels of this success, the word went around that the CIO was out to get the head man himself, Rep. Martin Dies
Now. Mr. Dies suddenly announces he is not going to run again. The reason given was ill health, but the CIO likes to think perhaps the threat of a campaign against the Texas Congressman had something to do with it. Whatever the reason, the jubilation was fervent.
Effective politically
The CIO’s unfriendliness to the Dies Committee was intensified recently when a Committee report attacked the CIO Political Action Committee because of alleged Communist affiliations.
It is news when a labor organization can be effective politically in the South, and the CIO claimed a share, too, in the victories of New Deal Senators Pepper in Florida and Hill in Alabama.
Only nine years ago, a labor organizer friend of the writer was shot in a Southern mill town and was chased away in a shower of bullets falling around the auto driven by his wife, who had to take him 7 miles to a hospital. There were mill towns where this organizer had to sneak down backstreets and slip furtively into the officers or homes of sympathizers.
This has all been changed now.
30 on ‘purge’ list
Emboldened by its success in the South, the CIO Political Action Committee has drawn up a “purge” list of 30 Southern Congressmen and Senators, which was read into the Congressional Record yesterday by Senator Eastland (D-MS) during debate on the anti-poll tax bill.
The organization’s apparent headway in the South is beginning to open the eyes of politicians elsewhere, particularly Republicans, for the CIO Political Action Committee, directed by Sidney Hillman, is going down the line for President Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Its theory is that it may prove the decisive factor in the big urban centers in the East and the industrial Midwest, which are touch and go this year. It is putting on an intensive campaign to register workers, particularly those who have moved into Eastern and Midwestern centers to work in war industries.
Conservatives alarmed
Labor is learning the primary lessons of precinct politics, with well-organized, doorbell ringing brigades. Checks are being made in war plants on registration, and workers are being pressed to become eligible. Labor leaders woke up after the 1942 Congressional elections to discover that many thousands of workers who had migrated to key Midwestern states had not qualified themselves to vote.
The fear of shrewd politicians in the conservative camp is already manifest in the noise they are making about the CIO Political Action Committee and by their attempts to circumscribe the use of a $750,000 fund subscribed by union members for use all over the country. The conservatives contend this is in violation of the Connally-Smith Act’s prohibition against acceptance of contributions by a political committee from a labor union or corporations.
Attorney General Biddle has held there is no violation of law by the CIO political adjunct.
Incidentally, that $70,000 probably would not cover the amount spent in only two states, Florida and Alabama, by anti-New Deal interests in the recent primary elections, which obviously came, although deviously, from corporate interests.
Pétain venerated by many people
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
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Milwaukee, Wisconsin (UP) – (May 13)
Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio said tonight that the United States needs a “change in leadership – a new President who is not afraid to speak for America.”
The Governor, who is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said:
We want a President who will speak for America’s rights, her convictions and ideals with the same force, the same sturdy voice and the same staunch determination with which Churchill speaks for England and Stalin speaks for Russia.
“If I am elected, that will be my policy,” he told Milwaukee’s Sunday Morning Breakfast Club, which sponsored the address.
He said:
We want cooperation with all friendly powers and are proud to fight beside our friends for freedom of the world. But we do not intend to underwrite any alien empire nor further any nation’s imperialistic ambition.