Appeals Board acts despite objections of Army, Navy and FBI officials
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Washington (UP) –
Senator Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith (D-SC), vigorous critic of the administration who was defeated for renomination this summer, said today that President Roosevelt “can be beaten in November – he must be if America is to be redeemed.”
The 79-year-old Senator blasted at the New Deal as he prepared to preside over a meeting of anti-fourth-term Democrats and farm representatives which he called in an effort to rally the farm vote behind the Republican Dewey-Bricker ticket.
Mr. Smith sought to leave the impression with reporters that he was not bitter about his defeat for renomination to the chamber in which he had served for 36 years.
“They liberated me,” he said.
“From what?”
He replied:
From bonds which tied my hands in regard to the administration. Now, I am free to do what I think best to redeem my country from these bureaucrats.
Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania (UP) –
U.S. Senator James J. Davis, Republican candidate for reelection, said last night that a victory for President Roosevelt in November would give the United States a representative at the peace conference who would be committed to Communist and Socialist forces supporting his campaign.
Mr. Davis, on a speaking tour of the state, said that the “Sidney Hillman-Earl Browder influence has been manifested in every act of the fourth-term candidate.” Mr. Davis said these influences would be a factor at the peace table in the event Mr. Roosevelt were reelected.
Henry A. Wallace, in New York last night, warned the American people that if the Republicans win in November: “We may return to the normalcy of a Harding and a 10-year decay into the panic of a Hoover.”
But Governor Dewey’s speech in San Francisco was a convincing answer to Mr. Wallace’s dismal forecast of disaster through Republican victory.
The great question, we believe, is whether Franklin D. Roosevelt or Thomas E. Dewey better understands how this country can provide jobs for all. Because, without understanding, it is idle to expect accomplishment. And Mr. Dewey gave a convincing answer to that question when he said:
There can be jobs for all only if business, industry and agriculture are able to provide those jobs, there are no clever shortcuts to this goal. It cannot be achieved by some ingenious scheme concocted by a social dreamer in a government bureau. The New Deal pulled rabbits out of the hat for seven years and ended up with 10 million still unemployed. We will achieve our objective only if we create an economic climate in which industry, business and agriculture can grow and flourish.
Nor does Mr. Dewey’s understanding stop with that. It compasses the proper role of government as a servant rather than a master of the people. It takes in the fact that government measures to influence broad economic conditions are both desirable and inevitable, but that these measures need not, and must not, deprive the people of political freedom under the pretext of giving them economic security.
The freedom he would preserve is not freedom for farmers “to go broke when there are peacetime surpluses and the prices of crops, fall ruinously” or for labor “to walk the streets in bad years, looking for work at any price.” It is freedom for agriculture and labor and industry to go forward together, helped and not hindered by their government, united and not divided by their President, toward the true security of peace and sound prosperity.
That – not the normalcy of a Harding or the panic of a Hoover – is Mr. Dewey’s goal.
By Jay G. Hayden
San Francisco, California –
The biggest single question mark in this 1944 presidential contest is the roving industrial vote, and nowhere is this element of uncertainty more in evidence than in Oregon and Washington, which Governor Thomas E. Dewey has just visited.
Literally hundreds of thousands of new people have been drawn into the teeming war industries of these states. Henry Kaiser alone has approximately 90,000 employees in his three shipyards in the twin cities of Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington.
Mr. Kaiser has brought men from New York by scores of trainloads and the draft of workers from the Deep South has been even greater. Portland’s Negro population has jumped from 1890 to 30,000. That city’s overall increase is placed at 175,000 and Seattle’s even higher.
The political point is that President Roosevelt’s greatest strength always has been among the factory workers and, in consequence, the great influx of these into Oregon and Washington should make them a Democratic cinch.
Many transients not registered
The disturbed circumstance from the Democratic standpoint is that the increased population is not reflected in the registration figures.
Multnomah County, containing Portland, has a trailer registration booth that travels from factory to factory to enable the workers to register. There, as in all other war production centers, Sidney Hillman’s CIO Political Action Committee is putting on a vigorous campaign to induce labor union members to qualify for voting. But registration figures for Multnomah County, released on Tuesday, disclosed no appreciable increase over either 1940 or 1942.
This year’s total is 180,962. On the same date in 1940, the total was 180,833 and in 1942, 177,903.
In Washington, the registration in 1940 was about 990,000. It fell to 700,000 in 1942 and now has climbed back to only 890,000, still 100,000 less than when Mr. Roosevelt was elected for his third term.
The facts seem to be that at least half of the imported workers are unable to qualify because of an insufficient period of residence or other cause, and many even of those entitled to vote are disinclined to do so.
At the Kaiser plants presently the net decline in employment is 2,500 a month and the turnover – that is, the number moving out and in – is much greater. Whether they are coming or going, the nomads are unlikely to be able to vote.
Poll tax feared
The most astonishing circumstance, reported in both Portland and Seattle, is that a lot of war workers refuse to register. Some of the boys from down South, both white and Negro, believe that voting will make them liable to a poll tax and no amount of explaining that these western states have not now, and never have had, such a tax, seems able to disabuse them of this notion.
Principally on the basis of the scant registration of war workers, Republicans question the reliability of the Gallup Poll, which shows Mr. Roosevelt leading by a ratio of 55 to 45 in Washington and California and 51 to 49 in Oregon. The assumption of those who disbelieve this finding is that those polled include city workers, in proportion to their total, rather than the number of them who are registered.
It is pointed out that almost all elections, since 1940, have shown a marked decline in votes cast and that, generally, the smaller the vote the greater the Republican trend.
Wherefore the Dewey backers are hoping that enough workers will stay away from the polls for one reason or another to turn these Pacific Coast states to their man on Nov. 7.
Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt told his news conference today he was busy preparing his first “political” speech in the current campaign to be delivered tomorrow night at a dinner given here by the AFL Teamsters’ Union, but he was reluctant to answer political questions by correspondents.
The speech will be broadcast by KDKA and WJAS at 9:30 p.m. ET tomorrow.
A reporter asked for comment on a statement by Governor Thomas E. Dewey that “your administration is saturated with the defeatist theory that America has passed its prime.”
The President shook his head, saying that he would not comment.
In response to another question, Mr. Roosevelt said he had no present plans for speeches beyond the one he has scheduled for Oct. 5 when he will talk to Democratic Party workers over the country by radio.
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Hull hopeful of satisfactory truce
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Marines mop up Japs on coral ridges
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii –
U.S. Marines fought bloody hand-to-hand battles in mopping-up operations against stubborn Japs entrenched in the rough coral ridges on the west coast of Peleliu in the Palau Islands, 560 miles east of the Philippines, Adm. Chester W. Nimitz announced today.
At the same time, Gen. Douglas MacArthur announced that bombers and fighters of his Far Eastern Air Force carried out new attacks on the bases south of the Philippines, particularly concentrating on Celebes, 200 miles below Mindanao.
Remaining enemy defenses on Peleliu were described in front dispatches as the toughest since Tarawa, with the Japs fighting from pillboxes lodged in the coral ridges. But the Marines made several small gains northward yesterday along the western ridge and captured six more trench mortars and 31 machine guns. Ten additional aircraft were found destroyed on Peleliu Airfield, raising the total to 127.
A communiqué revised the count of enemy dead in the Palau campaign, reporting that 6,792 Japs had been killed on Peleliu and 850 on Angaur.
In the Southwest Pacific, more than 190 Liberators, Mitchells and Lightnings hammered Jap airdromes on the northeastern coast of Celebes with 155 tons of bombs Tuesday, while carrier aircraft again hit Halmahera, just south of American-occupied Morotai.
In the 17th raid in 18 days on Celebes, U.S. bombers and fighters, ground installations, destroyed or damaged three small vessels and two barges, and shot down a reconnaissance plane.