Editorial: How not to make peace
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Editorial: Forward – not back
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.
Background of news –
The transient vote
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.
Roosevelt busy writing speech
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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Heavy fighting rages on Peleliu
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.
My four years in Hitler’s gray Paree –
Nazis gleaned fortunes on black market
Written for the Pittsburgh Press
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Allen: It’s Dewey Day in Los Angeles – C. of C. or not
By Gracie Allen
Hollywood, California –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey arrived here in Los Angeles this morning from San Francisco, and today is officially “Dewey Day.” I never thought I’d live to see the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce admit they were having a “Dewey Day” …but I guess as long as they can show that it moved in from San Francisco it’s okay.
Being a newspaperwoman, I was invited to see Mr. Dewey and being a married woman, I immediately compared him to my husband. I always compared great men to George. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t what makes them seem so great.
But anyway, I’d say that George Burns and Governor Dewey have a surprising lot in common. Mr. Dewey is brilliant, famous, good-looking, well-built, young, and I understand he has a good singing voice. Well… George sings too.
Stokes: A new GOP
By Thomas L. Stokes
With Dewey party –
Those crusty antiquarians President Roosevelt once described as “the gentlemen who sit in their well-stocked clubs” must have had something akin to morning-after jitters when they opened their newspapers and read what the newest champion of the Republican Party is telling the folks.
Governor Dewey broke cleanly with old-fashioned Republicanism in his San Francisco speech. He frankly accepted basic New Deal doctrines that the national government must concern itself actively with the welfare of the people, ready to step in with help when the highly delicate economic mechanism of today gets out of gear.
Taking this stand, he proposed – as Wendell Willkie did in 1940 – to do it better, and with careful consideration to democratic principles.
He proposed to breathe new life into this basic philosophy by substituting a fresh, vigorous administration of public affairs for what he pictures as a confused and tired administration that is carelessly letting the nation slip into totalitarianism as it gets bogged down in the tangles of bureaucracy.
It was significant that it was in San Francisco, where 12 years ago Franklin D. Roosevelt first outlined the still-vague tenets of the New Deal in his Commonwealth Club speech, that Governor Dewey moved himself up to an almost parallel position. The test henceforth would seem to be one of performance in realizing common ideals.
Expanding economy
It was also in the Commonwealth Club speech here that President Roosevelt said that America’s industrial plant was finished, that the problem thereafter was one of distribution. Governor Dewey has recalled that statement frequently and taken issue with it.
Governor Dewey thinks he has much to offer here, promising an expanding, rather than a static economy.
His break with the past is graphically revealed by excerpts from his speech.
No man can be free when he stands in constant danger of hunger… certain government measures to influence broad economic conditions are both desirable and inevitable… if at any time there are no sufficient jobs in private employment to go around, then government can and must create additional job opportunities… the savage, old cutthroat adjustments are gone for good… the prices of major farm crops must be supported against the menace of disastrous collapse… in many directions the free market which old-time economists talked about is gone… the industrial worker, however capable and energetic he may be, cannot in modern society assure himself by his own unaided efforts con tenuity of employment… even the largest industrial corporation cannot maintain employment, if the country as a whole is undergoing depression.
‘Dog-eat-dog’ is gone
Repeatedly he said the old “dog-eat-dog” economy is gone forever.
The Republican candidate’s appeal represented a desperate effort to win California and the coast states away from President Roosevelt. The President was reported well ahead today in California.
Here is the state, so favored by nature, which was hit so hard in the last depression.
Its people flocked to President Roosevelt in 1932. Here the Okies streamed across the border from the dust bowl and the worn-out cotton lands. They created a new problem.
Here, since the war, they have come in new hordes to work in the war plants which have given California a new industrial empire, of which she is proud and jealous.
But Californians, old and new, who work in the fields and the factories, are still conscious of the past. They want no more depressions. They want no more Okie camps. Their hope is in the new war industries. They want to keep them, and keep people at work.
Southern California is the haven of old folks who came here to live on incomes from farms which they had left to their children in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska and Illinois, and who suddenly found the remittances stopped. They trooped in desperation to meetings where old Doc Townsend talked about old-age pensions. New evangels promised $30 every Thursday in the not-distant past.
Governor Dewey, conscious of this, speaks tonight in Los Angeles on social security. He is leaving nothing undone.
Guffey raps gold stand of Aldrich
Hits monetary plans ‘which cause wars’
Washington (UP) –
Senator Joseph Guffey (D-PA) today accused Winthrop Aldrich, New York banker who, he said, would be Secretary of the Treasury if Republicans win the Presidency, for advocating a return to the monetary conditions “which cause wars.”
Mr. Guffey told the Senate that Mr. Aldrich advocated “a return to the gold standard and Hoover economy.”
He also accused Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential nominee, of paying “lip service” to nonpolitical efforts for international peace “while his prospective Secretary of the Treasury demands that the international monetary relations be left in the same hands that brought the world into a tailspin.
Mr. Guffey said:
Last Friday in Chicago, Mr. Aldrich, a disinterested New York banker and a financial supporter and adviser of Governor Dewey, came out flatly against the international monetary proposals developed at Bretton Woods. He advocated a unilateral agreement with Great Britain and the United States which would exclude
This philosophy, advocated by the man who, it is reported, would become Secretary of the Treasury in the event Mr. Dewey were to become President, is simply a return to the conditions which cause wars.
Mr. Guffey added:
Thus, we have the paradox of Governor Dewey giving lip service to an international political organization which would seek to prevent wars while his principal financial adviser speaks out against the kind of economic measures which would remove the cause of war.