Strikers again defy Army, refuse to end Philadelphia tie-up
Move comes suddenly after amiable meeting with officers; very few return to posts
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Ex-film star Jackie Cooper charged with delinquency
Three others also named in case involving 15-year-old girl and ‘wild party’
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I DARE SAY —
The shape of things to come
By Florence Fisher Parry
New York –
The New York papers have carried front-page broadsides about Mr. Dewey’s Pittsburgh visit, which only points the important place which Pittsburgh is regarded as occupying in the coming presidential campaign.
And this attached to the people of Pittsburgh a special responsibility. What we think, what we say, how we act, what example we set, has suddenly become important. It can easily add its featherweight to the scales of history. And to think and speak and act wisely, we must be informed.
So, it will behoove us to reach out, in a spirit of real humility and open-mindedness, for fair appraisals. Prejudices and bitter partisanship will not serve us now.
It will be a bitter enough campaign, even if waged upon its higher issues; it must not become contemptible. Already low malicious and utterly cheap campaign “material” is being circulated by unworthy members of both parties; vulgar verses, ugly stories, cruel caricatures; let us be quick to put this down and stamp it out, even when it purports to “promote” our own party and candidate. Such bad taste works always to the harm of the very one it seeks to elect.
‘State of the Nation’
On the other hand, the intelligent voter has need of greater equipment than ever before with which to stand his ground against the attacks of his assailants. Fortunately, there has never been accessible so much material for him! The bookstalls are crowded with stunning reading.
Particularly deserving are John Dos Passos’ State of the Nation, which gives a disturbing but accurate montage picture of the kind of country we are, at the most crucial moment of decision in world history!
Sumner Welles’ The Time For Decision is a masterpiece. His review of our national attitude during the “phoney” war is stunning; we read and cannot believe that we could have been so blind to the doom that was already swirling upon Europe and Asia. Particularly important is that portion devoted to Mr. Welles’ warning that it is the German General Staff which must be annihilated before peace can ever be secure. His sweeping blame of the military in Germany, which ever now has gone underground in preparation for its reassumption of power, mounts almost to a prophecy of doom! No other book upon the marts today gives so sharp reminder of how much greater our task, after the war.
John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching will be regarded as partisan writing. It draws a deadly parallel between Fascism as it first took shape in Europe and the pattern of our own government as it is functioning today; and so could well be repudiated as strictly as anti-New Deal book. Nevertheless, I recommend its reading to those who expect to vote the Democratic ticket this November, just as I recommend Henry Wallace’s handbook on utopia for the Republican voters.
Rest of their lives
It seems to me that Joseph Grew’s Ten Years in Japan should be considered required reading for all Americans; for there is still prevalent more inaccurate thinking about the Japs than any other distortion of opinion.
We hate Japs and we want to kill ‘em off – and we end right there. Well, it just won’t serve, when the war is over. We can’t kill ‘em off and they’re to be here, closer to us than ever before. Better learn something about them, then; and Joseph Grew is the one to tell us.
The Rest of Your Life, by Leo Cherne, provided me one of the most depressing evenings I have spent in an armchair for some time. Better rad it, though; for it’s high time we gave some thinking to what will be the mood and temper of our returning 11 million men now in the Armed Forces.
Let’s face it: they’ve been made over into a different breed. Listen to the conversation of those already returned from combat, as they try to talk with those they love but no longer understand…
“Skip it.”
“Forget it.”
“What does it matter?”
“Okay, okay!”
You feel this urgent nervousness in all of them. A kind of impatience, as though we were taking up too much time over nothing…
“Hurry!” they keep saying, “Let’s get a move on!”
As though life as they find it on their return has slowed up druggily…
Well, Leo Cherne tells it. It’s bitter reading. We’ve a lot cut out for us, here on the home front. Better get started knowing more about it.
In Washington –
Senate group set to push post-war bill
Reynolds calls his committee again
By John L. Cutter, United Press staff writer
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One-fifth of all land in U.S. now owned by federal government
New Deal encroachment program threatens existence of states, GOP governors warn
Washington –
The federal government now owns one-fifth of all the land in the continental United States.
Its holdings of about 384 million acres exceed in size the combined areas of 21 entire states – Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana.
Its land acquisitions in the last four years – about 15 million acres – almost equal the area of West Virginia.
This is the situation Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential nominee, and other Republican governors were talking about when they declared at St. Louis yesterday that:
If, under the guise of conservation as advocated by the exponents of bureaucracy and federal control, this acquisition and encroachment program continues, we shall soon find ownership of our lands lodged in the federal government sufficiently to threaten seriously the very existence of many of our states and the loss of local self-government to millions of free American citizens.
Senator Harry Byrd’s Economy Committee, the source of the above statistics, also found the extension of federal land ownership “alarming” when it reported on the situation to Congress last fall.
11% increase in six years
Since 1938, the Committee said, the area of federal land holdings had increased 11%. Much of this growth, it added, had been for defense and war purposes. By purchase, condemnation and other means, and by transfers of land from the public domain, the War Department had acquired more than 17 million acres in two and a half years, bringing the total area in war use by this and other agencies to 43,181,000 acres.
Charging that purchases had been excessive, the Committee recommended that federal agencies curtail plans to buy more land, begin immediate liquidation of surplus holdings, and centralize real estate functions to eliminate duplication and waste.
Loss in taxes cited
Nothing that the 384 million acres of federal land, plus more than 50 million acres under Indian ownership, are tax exempt, the Byrd group cited “growing concern in many states” over the loss of large amounts of taxable property to the central government, resulting in heavier burdens on local taxpayers, and worry over the effect that post-war “dumping” of large tracts might have on local realty values.
The major part of the government-owned land – 335 million acres – is in the public domain, and most of that is in use for forest conservation, grazing, national parks and the like. Uncle Sam has acquired the rest from private owners, at a cost, including buildings and other improvements, of $6.184 billion, according to the Byrd Committee.
Republicans offer solution
The 1944 Republican platform, which the governors in St. Louis cited as pointing the way to a solution of the government land problem, promises:
Consistent with military needs, the prompt return to private ownership of lands acquired for war purposes; withdrawal or acquisition of lands for establishment of national parks, monuments and wildlife refuges, only after due regard to local problems and under close controls to be established by Congress, and restoration of the long-established public-land policy which provides opportunity of ownership by citizens to promote the highest land use.
Simms: German routs in France, Balkans becoming distinct possibilities
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
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British rout Germans from hill defenses and fight into Florence
South Africans battling into art center from south find five Arno River bridges destroyed
By Eleanor Packard, United Press staff writer
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Enemy radio reports –
Fleet raids hit isles near Japan
By the United Press
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Nine ships sunk, Japs claim
By the United Press
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Navy long ready to repair ports
Men in Cherbourg before end of fight
By W. C. Heinz, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Canada buys installations built by U.S.
Pays tremendous sum for fields, telephones
By Hal O’Flaherty
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Quezon is given hero’s funeral
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Gains give ‘Monty’ chance to wind up his punches
Allied front in France now measures more than 140 miles with many bulges
By L. S. B. Shapiro, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Col. Starling, guard of Presidents, dies
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
Somewhere in Normandy, France – (by wireless)
One afternoon a couple of soldiers came around our camp to tell me about the strange, experience that had just happened to them. They were brothers, and the night before they had run onto each other for the first time in more than two years.
They are Cpl. John and Pvt. Edward O’Donnell of East Milton, Massachusetts. John is an artilleryman and has been overseas more than two years, all through Africa and Sicily. Edward has been overseas only a couple of months. John is 22 and Edward, 19.
The first Edward knew his brother was in the vicinity was when he saw some soldiers, wearing the patch of John’s division, getting ready to take a bath at an outdoor shower the Army had set up.
He asked them where the division was and then began a several hour hunt for his brother. John was attending an Army movie set up in a barn when Edward finally tracked him down. They sent in word for John to come out. When he got about half way out and saw who was waiting he practically knocked everybody out of their chairs getting to the back.
Their commanding officers gave them the next day off and they just roamed around with their tongues wagging – talking mostly about home.
*Ernie meets Pvt. Pyle
That same afternoon another soldier came by to say hello because his name is the same as mine. He is Pvt. Stewart Pyle of Orange, New Jersey. He is the driver in a car company, and now and then he gets an assignment to drive some very high officers. At least that will give him something to talk about to his grandchildren.
Pvt. Pyle is married and has been overseas nine months. Try as we might, we couldn’t establish any relationship. That might have been due to the fact that my name isn’t Pyle at all, but Count Sforzo Chef DuPont D’Artagnan.
Our family sprang from a long line of Norman milkmaids. We took the name Pyle after the Jones murder cases in 1739 – January, I think it was. My great grandfather built the Empire State Building. Why am I telling you all this?
Department of Wartime Distorted Values – The other day a soldier offered to trade a French farmer three horses for three eggs. The soldier had captured the horses from the Germans. The trade didn’t come off – the farmer already had three horses.
And – at one of our evacuation hospitals the other day, a wounded soldier turned over 90,000 francs, equivalent to $1,800. He’d picked them up in a captured German headquarters. The Army is now in the process or looking up regulations to see whether the soldier can keep the money.
Paratrooper chaplains first
In the very early days of the invasion, I said in this column that Capt. Ralph L. Haga of Prospect, Virginia, claimed to be the first chaplain ashore on D-Day.
Well, I got into trouble over that, because he wasn’t. If I’d had any sense, I would have known better myself. The first chaplains on the beachhead were those who jumped with the paratroopers and there were a batch of them – I believe 17, altogether. They were in Normandy hours before Chaplain Haga touched the beach.
As one bunch of paratroopers wrote me, “Our chaplains had already rendered their first consolation service in France before Capt. Haga got his feet wet.” So all credit where credit is due.
One afternoon several weeks ago, I went into Cherbourg with an infantry company and one of the doughboys gave me two cans of French sardines they’d captured from the Germans.
Right in the midst of battle is a funny place to be giving a man sardines, but this is a funny war. At any rate, I was grateful and I put them in my musette bag when I got back to my tent that night. I forgot all about them.
The reason I mention it now is that last night I got a hungry spell, and was rummaging around in the bag for candy or something and ran onto these sardines. They tasted mighty good.
Pegler: Press propaganda
By Westbrook Pegler
St. Louis, Missouri –
At this distance it is possible to examine more clearly specimens of propaganda which, amid the general clamor of continentalism on the Eastern Seaboard, are indistinct noises in the campaign.
I should like to discuss a United Press dispatch published in today’s St. Louis Star-Times, a highly beholden New Deal paper and not Red, nor even pink, but of that pale orange hue which comes of mixing a very little red with a liberal splash of another primary color.
The UP reported that Russell Davenport would not support Tom Dewey for the Presidency.
Not one American in 100,000 ever has heard of Russell Davenport. He is identified as the editor of Fortune, which sells by subscription only for $10 a year and thus can hardly be called a well-known magazine. Mr. Davenport is qualified as a quoteworthy person because he was a “close associate” of Wendell Willkie in 1940.
“Millions of other Republicans will find it necessary to make that decision,” not to support Mr. Dewey, Mr. Davenport was enabled to say on crowded press wires and on scarce white paper, as though this man had a recognized right to speak for multitudes.
Represents no party
But has he? He represents no party. Even in the 1940 campaign, he had no position in the Republican Party. He was, at most, a sleeve-puller for a personal hero. Such advertisement as he has had, was derived from this association and the fact that he is the husband of Marcia Davenport who wrote some books.
Yet, by exercise of the suave effrontery of the con man who greets the sucker with a booming “Well, if it isn’t my old friend, Joe Butch,” the unsuspecting victim is given to feel that he really does know Russell Davenport. For the moment, through his own stupidity, he just can’t place him.
Mr. Davenport announced his decision at a forum of the newly-organized New York Liberal Party. The reader is too proud to admit that he doesn’t know what the Liberal Party is. It is what the Communists call a fraction, or ideological offshoot, of the Communist Party.
The American Labor Party, or Communist Party, now controlled by Frank Roosevelt’s henchman, Sidney Hillman, advocates the Russian type of dictatorship. Mr. Davenport’s friends of the Liberal Party prefer the Hitlerian type of dictatorship, but, of course, without antisemitism.
Both groups agree, however, on all the essentials of totalitarian rule. They agree further on Mr. Roosevelt’s candidacy, and their only discord is a personal rivalry between Mr. Hillman and David Dubinsky of the Garment Workers’ Union, refugees both, who found here privilege, luxury and safety, but never have liked the way the Americans run their country.
No objection to persecution
Neither group has the slightest objection to persecution, of itself. Violence against American workers refusing to join a union, or to strike on the orders of union dictators, no less savage than the brutalities of Hitler’s Brownshirts, has left them calm.
Hideous slanders against decent Americans equivalent to Der Führer’s filthy anti-Jewish propaganda, is their common repartee. They force Americans who detest their ideas and candidates to attend their political rallies and contribute to their campaign funds.
Mr. Davenport announced his decision about the time that the primary returns revealed the nomination of Republican Ham Fish and Vito Marcantonio of the Communist front.
He said:
For weeks, Dewey resisted efforts to draw from him a repudiation of Ham Fish on the basis of his obstruction of attempts to prepare the country for war.
Mr. Marcantonio voted against every “attempt to prepare the country for war,” until Hitler attacked Russia. His Communist cohorts violently obstructed such efforts in the war plants. Mr. Fish’s obstruction consisted of his single vote in Congress. Mr. Marcantonio changed when Russia was attacked. Mr. Fish changed instantly when the United States was attacked.
Mr. Dewey did repudiate Mr. Fish. Mr. Roosevelt has not repudiated Mr. Marcantonio.
Yet here a political nobody is presented as a man of standing and a spokesman for millions in a dispatch from a reputable news agency, thus endowing him with a completely fictitious importance.
Editorial: By the CIO and for the CIO
Right while the CIO is starting the biggest campaign in union history to gain control of federal and state governments, one of its chief leaders has revealed how CIO officials regard public office when they hold one.
R. J. Thomas, president of the United Auto Workers, which with more than a million members is the largest CIO union, is also a member of the War Labor Board.
This is one of the most important of the agencies set up to prosecute the war – and its membership is based on that newfangled formula of equal division between representatives of labor, business and the public.
The idea, of course, is that these men of differing experience and viewpoint will be able to combine their talents and backgrounds best to serve the nation as a whole.
But Mr. Thomas does not regard his War Labor Board membership as a public service. Testifying in a New York trial, he candidly declared that he considers it a union responsibility and not a federal service.
“I am there to represent labor,” he said, and added that he thought it is his special duty “to nominate only CIO members to serve on WLB panels.”
Although paid $25 a day plus expenses for WLB service, Mr. Thomas said he didn’t regard WLB membership as “federal service or a federal job.” He is still working for the union even when Uncle Sam pays the bill.
The CIO, through its Political Action Committee, is now setting out to collect millions of dollars for political activity in the coming campaign.
“I hope we can get $25 million,” said David J. McDonald, its national finance chairman, before a meeting of 300 CIO representatives called to organize the Pennsylvania branch.
Mr. McDonald continued:
The more we spend, the better Congress we will have. The more we spend in Pennsylvania, the better state legislature we will have.
Treasurer McDonald made it plain that the organization of which he is financial head is working on the old theory that everything has its price – including Congress and legislatures.
And Mr. Thomas made it plain that as head of the biggest CIO union he operates on the theory that you’ll still working for the CIO even when you fill a public position on the public payroll.
The two theories joined together make an interesting explanation of how the CIO leadership would regard the government should it gain control of it by being the heaviest spender in a national campaign.
There is more than the Presidency involved in this vast, well-financed campaign by a single labor organization to gain control of the government.
Mr. McDonald made this quite plain by his reference to Congress and the Legislature.
The Presidency is far distant from the average man and woman. But the laws under which they live, the agencies and bureaus which enforce and interpret those laws, the county and ward and precinct bosses who are in power – all these are very close to the citizen in his everyday life. They are among the direct – perhaps the most desired – objectives of the CIO-PAC.
It wants CIO members or those who are dominated by the CIO in power – not for broad and even-handed public service, but directly to serve the CIO, as Mr. Thomas so plainly testified.
This is a campaign by a single labor group to elevate itself above all other groups – to initiate government of the people by the CIO and for the CIO.