I DARE SAY —
The great oaks…
By Florence Fisher Parry
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Chief of WLB defends board, cites work
‘Stalling’ charges by Dewey denied
Washington (UP) –
Chairman William H. Davis of the War Labor Board today replied to Republican charges of WLB “stalling” by stating that the board has already settled close to 300,000 wage cases and will clear its docket of pending voluntary cases in four weeks, and of dispute cases in 19 weeks.
Mr. Davis said in a formal statement:
Newspapermen have asked me to comment on certain statements regarding the work of the War Labor Board made by Thomas E. Dewey [the GOP presidential nominee] in his speech at Seattle on Monday night.
Since Jan. 12, 1942, the Board has settled 9,983 disputes involving eight million employees. Since Oct. 3, 1942, when wage stabilization went into effect, the Board has disposed of 275,000 voluntary applications involving more than 11 million workers.
4,262 a week
National and regional boards, he declared, are disposing of voluntary cases at the rate of 4,262 a week and dispute cases at the rate of 153 a week.
Mr. Davis’ reply to Governor Dewey was issued together with the report of a special WLB factfinding panel set up to hear the demands of the United Electrical Workers (CIO) for wage increases of 17 cents an hour in 81 plants of the General Electric and Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Companies.
The panel, noting that employees of the two concerns, had already been granted all raises allowable under the Little Steel wage formula, said any further increases would require “a revaluation and reformulation” of the national wage stabilization policy.
Public hearings scheduled
Therefore, the panel said, a final settlement should be held up until the WLB decides what action to take on the Basic Steel and American Federation of Labor panel reports on revising the wage policy.
Public hearings on those reports will begin next Tuesday.
On the cost-of-living increase, which forms the basis for the unions’ wage demands, the panel said it was “apparent” that living costs between Jan. 1, 1941, and Dec. 31, 1943, rose somewhere between 1.4 percent and 28.5 percent over and above the 15 percent in wage raises allowed by the Little Steel formula.
The panel held that no increases could be given the workers under the present wage stabilization policy, adding, however, that there was no action either of the President or Congress preventing the Board from recommending, and the President from modifying, the Little Steel formula in the light of living cost rises.
Row between AFL, CIO causes West Virginia war plant shutdown
Dispute over use of glass cutting machine makes 1,000 men idle in vital factory
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Truman belittles ‘indispensable’ talk
New York (UP) –
Democratic vice-presidential candidate Harry S. Truman said today he agreed with Republican presidential nominee Governor Thomas E. Dewey that no man was an “indispensable man” for President.
Republicans – not the Democrats – Senator Truman said, originated the “indispensable” argument. He said:
We never said there was an indispensable man. We say we believe a man of experience should be in the White House.
Senator Truman charged that Governor Dewey in his “interesting pictures of a President and Congress of the same political faith,” had exceeded the “limits of veracity.”
He said that Governor Dewey knows that election of a Republican Senate this year “is a mathematical impossibility,” and “the boast that the Republicans can win control of the House is almost as baseless.”
Simms: Palau called key to Japan’s defense line
Foe soon may risk all to stop Yanks
By William Philip Simms, Scripps-Howard foreign editor
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Yanks close on key pass in Apennines
Fifth Army drives on Bologna, Italy
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Death demanded for two Fascists
Ex-Rome police chief and aide on trial
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Report of warning denied by Stimson
Washington –
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson today denied Republican assertions in Congress that the War Department received a warning from the Australian government prior to Dec. 7, 1941, that a Jap task force was headed for Hawaii.
He added, at his news conference, that he would answer no further questions about the Pearl Harbor attack until the Army’s current investigation is finished.
Nazi bombers rain death on Dutch fete; 65 killed
Raid stops Eindhoven liberation celebration; resident says freedom’s price not too high
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
Eindhoven, Holland – (Sept. 20, delayed)
This debris-littered town of 100,000, whose celebration of liberation by the Allies was cut short by a German air raid, dug out today after its worst beating of the war – but still believing the price of freedom was not too high.
Sixty-five of the inhabitants were killed, 150 wounded seriously and damage was estimated in millions of dollars.
Site of an important radio works, Eindhoven had known air raids before, both German and Allied. None matched the one last night for suddenness and savagery.
Thirty minutes before the raid, crowds were cheering American and British soldiers who entered the town Monday.
Flags, bunting shredded
Dutch flags, which had been brought out of hiding after four years to fly for 24 carefree hours with bunting in bedecked streets, hung in burned shreds today from charred poles.
Streets where children had danced to accordion music, where crowds jammed around American vehicles so thickly that traffic was halted, were strewn with glass, brick, stone and cherished possessions.
The anti-climax to the celebration came between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. A rumor spread through the crowds that 117 German tanks were counterattacking the town.
Some tanks did get within shelling distance of the main British armored corridor and dropped a few rounds near a road north of here before they were eliminated.
As the rumors mounted, part of the troops were evacuated.
I was dining with Bill Downs of CBS at a hotel near the center of the city when I first noted panicky civilians outside running out and we started for headquarters.
Queen’s pictures hidden
From some of the windows the Dutch, fearful of German return, had removed flags and pictures of Queen Wilhelmina. Most of the American and British troops seemed to be gone. A few civilians stood wonderingly before houses.
Just before we reached headquarters, a lone German, twin-engined bomber swept over and dropped orange, yellow and green flares.
The town was without air-raid shelters so we sped toward the open country. We got only as far as the town park before the first bombers arrived.
Eindhoven pays fiddler
We lay on the ground while bombs ringed us and explosions within 100 feet showered us with twigs, branches and dirt. Shrapnel clipped through the leaves above. Ammunition exploded in deafening bursts.
Eindhoven was paying the fiddler.
Today cheerfulness was returning to the town. As the Allies pushed on toward the front, the inhabitants took time to look up from their rooms and shovels, smile and shout “hello.”
Editorial: Stalin electioneers for FDR
One of the current mysteries is how such busy men as Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin find time to mix in American politics for the reelection of President Roosevelt. Even harder to understand is how such intelligent men can fail to see that these efforts are self-defeating, that they boomerang in favor of Governor Dewey.
Nothing causes deeper resentment in Americans than attempts by foreign governments to influence elections here. That always has been so, and it is even truer today because of greater emotional tension.
Though Mr. Churchill had been warned by earlier hostile American reaction to such blunders by the British press and officials, he could not resist the temptation in his Québec statement last week to put in a few personal plugs for the fourth term candidate – without specifically mentioning the election.
Marshal Stalin is less subtle. He simply takes one of his Moscow party-line magazines, and a stooge writer, and cuts loose against Mr. Dewey and the Republicans. He has the GOP candidate and party smeared with all the lies and insults which pass for clever propaganda in a dictatorship, but which informed readers in a democracy find revolting.
According to War and the Working Class, the Republican Party “always has been a citadel of isolationism.” But the article slips in its list of alleged isolationists by including prominent Democrats and by admitting that Mr. Dewey “has attempted to shake off diehard isolationists like Hamilton Fish and… Gerald Smith.”
Extreme reactionaries, Fascist elements, and even Hitlerite agents are trying to use the Republican Party, it charges, which is supported by the National Association of Manufacturers, DuPont, Ford, General Motors. These firms are said to be trying to preserve their interests in Germany, Italy and Japan.
Of course, this poison pen stuff is not much different from that of Marshal Stalin’s Communist organization in this country, which is working so hard to reelect Mr. Roosevelt.
We do not suggest that Candidate Roosevelt approves of such blundering tactics by his Stalinite supporters in Russia and in this country. As a smart politician, he knows that the loving Red buss bestowed upon him is apt to be politically a kiss of death. And the Republicans know that many voters will judge Mr. Dewey by his enemies.
Editorial: Dewey and MacArthur
Candidate Dewey probably did no good either to himself or Gen. MacArthur by his remark at a press conference that Gen. MacArthur’s genius should get more recognition through appointment to a post of higher responsibility. Gen. MacArthur pleads his own cause more effectively by brilliant actions like the landing on Morotai Island, 300 miles from the Philippines.
Asked whether Gen. MacArthur should be given supreme command in the Pacific, Mr. Dewey retreated to the position that this should be decided by the chiefs of staff. This is in line with Mr. Dewey’s earlier declarations that he would let the generals and admirals run the war. But the question of higher responsibility for Gen. MacArthur, in general terms, might be reserved for the general staff quite as appropriately as the question of higher responsibility in the specific role as supreme commander in the Pacific.
Mr. Dewey wishes to make it appear that if elected President he will not, in the constitutional role of Commander-in-Chief, seek to supersede the judgment of our real military chiefs. He does not strengthen that position by intimating that he would supersede their judgment in one particular only – namely, the promotion of Gen. MacArthur to higher authority.
It does a general no good to become the subject of political controversy. Leonard Wood, a Republican, and a candidate after World War I for the presidential nomination, undoubtedly suffered from political discrimination during World War I, when he was not permitted to go overseas.
Yet the close connections between him and Theodore Roosevelt, his known political ambitions and the ambitions his friends cherished for him, undoubtedly contributed to this result. The more the Republicans complained about the injustice done to Gen. Wood, the more difficult it became for the administration to use him in a place worthy of his talents.
President Roosevelt spoke in affectionate terms at Seattle of “my old friend, Gen. Douglas MacArthur,” but the eagerness of some of MacArthur’s other old friends to make a presidential candidate of him and the publication of his private letter attacking the administration, have tended to make a military problem child out of the general. Now Mr. Dewey, in the midst of his campaign, drags Gen. MacArthur deeper into politics and makes the problem more difficult.
Background of news –
Midwest conservatism
By Bertram Benedict
Governor Dewey in the Far West is admittedly fighting an uphill battle.
In 1940, Colorado was the only one of the 11 Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states to vote for Wendell Willkie. Arizona, Nevada and Utah each gave 60 percent or more of their vote to President Roosevelt, Montana 59 percent, Washington 58 percent, California and New Mexico 57 percent, Idaho and Oregon 54 percent, Wyoming 53 percent.
On the other hand, political observers agree that the Midwest west of the Mississippi seems safely in the bag for the 1944 Republican presidential nominee, with the exception of Missouri, usually classified as a border state. In 1940, Mr. Willkie carried the states in this area except Minnesota. Mr. Willkie got 57 percent of the vote in Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota, 55 percent in North Dakota, 52 percent in Iowa.
La Follette strength in this section
This reaction of the Midwest west of the Mississippi against the so-called “liberalism” of the New Deal is in sharp contrast with what used to be the comparative radicalism of that section. There the elder La Follette, branded as a radical in the East, ran well in his third-party campaign in 1924. Minnesota and North Dakota gave him almost as many votes as they gave Calvin Coolidge. South Dakota gave him almost three times as many votes as to John W. Davis, the Democratic nominee. Iowa and Kansas gave Mr. La Follette almost twice the vote for Mr. Davis and Nebraska almost the vote it gave Mr. Davis.
And this period of Bob La Follette in the western part of the Midwest was achieved although he was the candidate of organized labor, sponsored by the AFL, the railroad brotherhoods and the Socialist Party. Today this section seems particularly resentful at trade unions and at the concessions given them under the New Deal.
In 1916, Woodrow Wilson was considered the “liberal” candidate, Charles Evans Hughes the conservative. Justice Hughes carried only four states west of the Mississippi (Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, South Dakota). Mr. Wilson was popular among the unions and had put through the Adamson eight-hour law at the behest of the railroad brotherhoods (also, Mr. Wilson’s supporters were stressing the “He Kept Us Out of War” issue, and the Midwest was strongly anti-war).
Insurgent revolt began there
Theodore Roosevelt, branded as a Socialist in some of the more conservative quarters of the East, was especially popular in the western part of the Midwest. In 1912, Minnesota and South Dakota gave him their electoral votes when he ran on a third-party ticket and a reform platform. And Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota gave him more votes than they gave William Howard Taft, the Republican nominee. From this section came many of the insurgent Republicans who had led the revolt against the conservative Taft administration.
In 1896, William Jennings Bryan, running for the Democrats on a Free Silver program and endorsed by the Populists, carried Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota. In that section of the country, the Populists and Greenbackers had won in the preceding years many victories in Congressional, state and local elections.
Evidently the farmers of the western Midwest were liberally or radically inclined when in trouble on mortgage indebtedness, inclined to go conservative when they did not feel overburdened with indebtedness. If Mr. Roosevelt carries most of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states in November, it will seem that the earlier liberalism or radicalism of the Midwest has moved farther West.