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.”