Editorial: Thanks for the kind words
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Background of news –
Labor in politics
By Bertram Benedict
Sidney Hillman and his CIO Political Action Committee, working ardently for the reelection of President Roosevelt, have become major issues in the 1944 election campaign.
On Wednesday, Senator Brewster (R-ME), mixing his metaphors a little, said:
Mr. Hillman is an albatross hung about the neck of the Democratic Party. He gave the Democratic Party in Maine the kiss of death.
At the annual convention of the United Mine Workers at Cincinnati on Tuesday, President John L. Lewis came out vehemently for the defeat of President Roosevelt. It remains to be seen whether the Democrats will be able to set off Mr. Lewis’ indirect support of Governor Dewey against Mr. Hillman’s support of President Roosevelt.
While Mr. Lewis was attacking Mr. Roosevelt at Cincinnati, the convention of the CIO United Auto Workers at Grand Rapids was evincing much enthusiasm for the President’s reelection.
All this contrasting pro-Dewey and pro-Roosevelt activity in the ranks of organized labor in the United States would seem strange in any industrial nation of Europe, for European labor normally tries to achieve its ends in the political field through a labor or socialist party of its own, instead of through a “capitalist” party.
The Workingmen’s Party
However, it was the United States which produced the earliest attempt at a labor party on something of a national scale. In 1828, the Workingmen’s Party was organized in most of the large Eastern cities. In some states, it formed political alliances with agrarian political groups. The new party won some minor political victories, but soon disintegrated.
After the Civil War came the National Labor Union, then the National Labor and Reform Party. These got tied up with the agitation for cheaper currency, and amalgamated with the Greenback Party. In 1878, Greenback-Labor parties polled about a million votes in the elections for Congress.
The 1880s were the powerful era of the Knights of Labor, which in the ‘90s was eclipsed by the newly-formed American Federation of Labor. The Knights in their period of decline had pinned their faith to political action, and that was incessantly pointed to by Samuel Gompers, presiding genius of the AFL, as one reason why the Knights were displaced by the AFL.
The Gompers policy
Mr. Gompers insisted that in the political field American labor should follow a policy of rewarding its friends and punishing its foes, instead of dissipating its strength by running candidates of its own.
In 1924, the AFL did join with the railroad brotherhoods, the Socialist Party, the Farmer-Labor Party, and certain agrarian and liberal groups to sponsor the presidential candidacy of the late Senator Robert M. La Follette. Although Mr. La Follette polled more than one-half as many votes as John W. Davis, the Democratic candidate, he carried only his own state, Wisconsin.
The La Follette defeat is always adduced by labor leaders who oppose a separate labor party with a separate labor ticket. They also adduce the failure of the Socialist Party to get anywhere in American politics. And, finally, they are adducing the growing political ineffectiveness of the British Labor Party, which today seems much weaker than when it took office (as the plurality, not a majority party) in 1924 and again in 1929.
Québec’s plan to speed war to be revealed
Roosevelt, Churchill to continue sessions
Québec, Canada (UP) –
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill today will reveal some of the decisions made in their momentous Second Quebec Conference on Pacific war plans and the Allied program for a Europe entirely freed of Nazi influences.
After announcing as much as military security and fluctuating international politics will permit, the President and the Prime Minister – according to hints by official spokesmen – will go to an undisclosed place to continue their discussions on a more intimate basis.
The new talks were certain to involve questions of a world peace organization, the future of Germany, and Anglo-American dealings with Russia.
In between military planning for the destruction of Japan, these other topics were touched upon during the week’s conference here.
Evidence of these political angles was found in the hasty trips here of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and his No. 1 assistant, Sit Alexander Cadogan, who has been heading the British delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks world security conference in Washington.
It seemed equally evident that Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill had not finished their business although the Québec phase of their conferences ended today.
Poll: Oregon switches to Roosevelt
Governor Dewey now trails by 2 percent
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Gorrell: Germans glad to be rid of Nazi masters
Border villagers welcome Americans
By Henry T. Gorrell, United Press staff writer
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Millett: Back up political ideas with supporting facts
Women are easily out-argued because they don’t inform themselves
By Ruth Millett
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Stokes: Dewey’s skill
By Thomas L. Stokes
With Dewey party –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey completed the farm and cattle-ranch and mining stage of his Western campaign, heading today into the Pacific Coast states, without getting into the trouble that lurks there for presidential candidates and more than once has tripped previous aspirants.
He proved a cagey and skillful campaigner so far as the explosive issues in that area are concerned. His technique was carefully devised. He gathered information in conferences with all sorts of groups and then made himself the spokesman for their grievances against the New Deal through his press conferences.
But he always explained he was telling what they told him, and he took no responsibility for their appraisal of their problems and their proposed solutions.
He raised issues, but did not offer solutions. That must await later major speeches. But, at the same time, he spread criticism of the New Deal, the restless under war restrictions, far and wide for its effect among the voters, so that a bill of indictment was drawn up just as effectively perhaps as if he had said all these harsh things on his own. Some few times he did speak out for himself, seizing whatever occasion offered to strike out at what he bundles up as “general incompetency” in Washington.
Voices farmers’ complaints
He gave voice to the farmers and their chafing under price regulations and their fear of a surplus of food after the war that will give them competition unless wisely handled; to the cattlemen who likewise are restive under OPA and who are afraid of the present large surplus of beef cattle on the hoof, to wool growers who complain about the surplus of wool built up for war purposes; to sugar beet growers who are restless under production quotas.
It was a one-sided story naturally, this being a political campaign. But anyone who has even a smattering of these problems knows it is not all so simple, and Governor Dewey recognized this by not attempting to solve these problems, himself, with suddenly offered cures.
The men who filed in to see the candidate with their complaints were prosperous and well fed and represented prosperous people on the farms and ranches. They want to make more money, if possible; if not, to hold their present prosperous own. They want to shake off controls, some of them without taking account of consequences.
Once demanded controls
Hanging over their heads is that familiar old surplus problem. That is now their fear, as they enjoy prosperity. This problem, if past experience is any guide, does require certain controls. A few years ago, the farmers were demanding them, and loudly. Governor Dewey is conscious of the complications.
The other side of the argument – for continued efforts under the New Deal – is championed by some of the smaller farmers in the states through which Governor Dewey has passed, a minority which clings to President Roosevelt. They want a guarantee of some kind. In Montana, this element is particularly active politically and there, too, the CIO Political Action Committee is active, especially with the miners.
These are the forces that are boiling around and creating the ferment that is stirring underneath today in the farm and ranch country.
Governor Dewey must resolve these all into a design. He is smart to find out all about them first. For the farm problems, overall, have as many potential danger points as a porcupine has quills.
Ickes assails Dewey claims
Jackson Hole story called ‘untruthful’
Washington (UP) –
Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes was still bristling today over what he termed the “wildly extravagant and untruthful” statements of Governor Thomas E. Dewey concerning the government’s Jackson Hole National Monument in Wyoming.
Mr. Ickes spoke out last night against the Republican presidential nominee’s recent criticism of the Jackson Hole project, asserting that credit for the monument “belongs to the Republicans.”
He accused Mr. Dewey of “beagle-like snuffing about for votes” and charged that the New York Governor was “willing to enter judgment on any complaint against the administration, even without hearing the evidence.”
‘Land grab’ charged
Mr. Ickes’ charges were contained in a statement replying to Mr. Dewey’s Sheridan (Wyoming) press conference Statement describing the project – a recently-established national park under Mr. Ickes’ jurisdiction – as a “land grab” harmful to thousands of Wyoming residents.
Mr. Ickes traced the monument’s origin back to “the last known Republican Presidents” – the late Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, whom Mr. Ickes labeled “the political godfather” of the 1944 GOP nominee.
Mr. Ickes said Mr. Coolidge, when he was President, persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr. to purchase land in the Jackson Hole area for enlargement of the National Park System. Mr. Hoover encouraged Mr. Rockefeller to continue buying the land which eventually was offered to the government, Mr. Ickes said.
Land sale cited
Of the 220,000 acres comprising the monument, Mr. Ickes declared, 170,308 acres were already owned by the government when President Roosevelt took office. Mr. Rockefeller’s purchases pushed the total above 200,000.
Mr. Ickes said:
The balance of these lands are still privately owned and a good deal of the outcry to which Mr. Dewey listened with shocked but naïve attention was from these owners. The basis for their complaint is that Mr. Rockefeller refused to pay them the exorbitant prices for which they were quite willing to sell.
Terming Mr. Dewey a “Charlie McCarthy talking without his Bergen,” he advised the New York Governor to “listen to Herbert Hoover about the West instead of international affairs.” In that way, he said, Mr. Dewey “would not be making the blunders that he has chalked up to his credit to date.”
Texas Secretary of State scorns new elector slate
Court battle to decide substitution of New Dealers for rebel faction’s choices
Austin, Texas (UP) –
The battle for Texas’ 23 Democratic presidential electors shifted today from a political to a judicial fight, following Secretary of State Sidney Latham’s refusal to certify the slate of electors pledged to vote for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket.
Mr. Latham refused to certify the electors chosen at the tumultuous state convention this week and Harry Seay, newly-appointed chairman of the State Democratic Committee, said there will be a court test of the secretary’s action but it probably would not be started until Monday,
Mr. Latham said he would certify the slate of electors chosen at the Democratic State Convention in Austin May 23. Fifteen of that group have promised to vote for some other Democrat, other than Mr. Roosevelt, probably Senator Harry Byrd (D-VA).
The Secretary of State’s ruling leaves Texas an unknown quantity for the Democrats and if the court upholds him, it might cost the party the election, if it is a close one, or throw it into the House of Representatives for a decision.
The breach in the Democratic Party in Texas began May 23 when a resolution was passed releasing the presidential electors from their obligation to vote for the party nominee unless the national convention at Chicago reestablished the two-thirds rule for nominating a presidential candidate and endorsed a resolution permitting political parties to select their members. The latter was aimed at circumventing a Supreme Court decision permitting Negroes to vote in primary elections.
Pro-Roosevelt forces walked out on the convention and held a rump state convention in Dallas early this week, however, and immediately selected a substitute slate of electors, which Mr. Latham refused to certify.
Dewey’s tour stepped up to double tempo
Two conferences set for one day
Aboard Dewey campaign train (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, having promised a first-class fight from now until November, doubled the tempo of his Western campaign trip today.
Instead of the customary single stop for a conference with local business and political leaders, the presidential candidate scheduled two meetings today, one at Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and the other at Spokane, Washington.
One of the principal subjects of his conferences appeared to be the greater development of the West.
Scores ‘defeatism’
He took that line in a rear-platform speech at Livingston, Montana, last night when he assailed what he called “New Deal defeatism” and told a crowd at the station that:
You have only begun to develop the western half of the United States. we have a glorious development ahead of us and jobs and opportunity for more Americans than have ever seen this part of the United States.
First of all, we have got to get an administration which comes out and knows the problems of you people and says we are going ahead and not going back to the 10 million unemployed we had in 1940.
Talks with cattlemen
Mr. Dewey has spent the past week talking with cattlemen, agricultural experts, wool producers, labor leaders and other group leaders, gathering first hand material for his major farm speech. However, it was not known whether that address would be delivered from the West Coast.
Mr. Dewey said he had come to the conclusion that:
Never in the history of our country or of any other country did agricultural and livestock producers rise so heroically to the necessities of war under so many handicaps placed upon them by their own government.
Bricker call New Deal aimless
Parkersburg, West Virginia (UP) –
The New Deal administration, torn by “internal feuds, dissensions, jealousy and strife,” has become a purposeless administration which must be replaced by the Republican Party which will create a “climate of opportunity” to solve the basic economic problems of America, Ohio Governor John W. Bricker said here last night.
Speaking at the opening of the West Virginia state Republican campaign, the GOP vice-presidential nominee accused the present administration of becoming “content with day-by-day improvisations,” following upon its failure “to provide jobs in peacetime.”
Mr. Bricker departed from his prepared text to attack the Roosevelt administration’s “vicious allegiance with Sidney Hillman and his CIO Political Action Committee.”
Mr. Bricker said:
Hillman brought to his country his old-world concepts of power politics and class hatreds and they have no place in the American political future.
I condemn the President of the United States for dealing with Sidney Hillman, and I condemn Hillman himself for the harm he is doing organized labor in the United States.