America at war! (1941–) – Part 4

1830

americavotes1944

Wider job and age security promised U.S. by Dewey

GOP nominee also pledges medical assistance to needy, aid to returning servicemen

Los Angeles, California (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey ended the West Coast phase of his election drive today after an address last night before 90,000 persons, who packed the Los Angeles Coliseum to hear him attack the Roosevelt administration for not going far enough in providing social and economic security.

He surpassed proposals of preceding Republican presidential nominees in advocating a five-point program for expansion of unemployment and old-age pension coverage, medical aid for the needy, job placement, and aid for returning servicemen.

Declaring that his program should be started at once as an important step toward peacetime security, Governor Dewey proposed:

  • Extension of old-age insurance to include farm workers, domestics, employees of non-profit enterprises, government workers and the self-employed.

  • Extension of unemployment insurance also to those groups not now protected.

  • Return of government employment services to the states as soon as practicable.

  • Medical service for the needy, in cooperation with medical men.

  • Establishment of state and local veterans’ service agencies to guide returning soldiers to jobs and educational opportunities.

“Here is a program to pick up and carry forward an American system of social progress,” he said.

Governor Dewey rejected the thought that social progress is an invention of the present administration.

He argued:

It is nothing new for Americans to be concerned about social progress. Social progress in America did not begin in 1933. It began when the first settlers came to this country. It has been as insistent as the growth of our country. It is in our blood today.

Governor Dewey recognized problems in extending social security coverage and said it would be necessary to change the method of collecting social security taxes to avoid imposing a bookkeeping burden on small employees. But he promised such problems “can and will be solved.”

Physicians’ aid wooed

On the subject of medical service for the needy, he said the program should be worked out with the cooperation of medical men.

He said:

There can be no group better able to advise on medial care than the medical profession. Yet, unhappily, this is the very group which the New Deal has managed to alienate.

Heading eastward for one more major speech, at Oklahoma City next Monday, Governor Dewey said he had found in his trip across country unprecedented national unity. He said that uppermost in the minds of all is a determination to win a crushing victory over Germany and Japan. After that, he said, the people want a lasting peace and American participation in a permanent world organization for peace.

1831

americavotes1944

In Boston speech –
Bricker favors a World Court

Then force if needed, candidate proposes

Boston, Massachusetts (UP) –
The United States must be ready to unite with other nations to prevent by force the outbreaks of small wars which might lead to a third great World War should “persuasion or economic pressure” first fail, Ohio Governor John W. Bricker said today.

The Republican vice-presidential candidate, speaking before the Massachusetts State Republican Convention, charged that the New Deal administration’s international policies of “day-by-day expediency” had led the nation into the present war.

World Court favored

He proposed the establishment of a World Court to arbitrate and conciliate international disputes. Small wars, he said, lead to “worldwide conflagrations” and economic sanctions must be applied at incipient trouble points.

He said:

When this cannot be done, our country must be willing to join with others if necessary to prevent small wars from becoming big ones.

This country, he said, furnished material “and power with which to make war” to Japan while sending money to China. Hitler, he added, came to power when the New Deal did, but the government did “not make any effort to keep orderly peace in the world” and maintain national security.

‘Boondoggling’ assailed

“We squandered our substance in boondoggling and took no heed of gathering war clouds,” Governor Bricker said. He added that the United States could go far in eliminating the causes of war by giving “constant and unselfish attention to matters of discriminatory trade agreements, excessive tariffs, monopolies and cartels, exchange wars and other barriers to international trade and commerce.”

Governor Bricker will speak tonight at Norwalk, Connecticut, and return to Ohio tomorrow for a week’s rest before beginning a 9,000-mile Western tour.

Spending assailed

In a speech at Bangor, Maine, last night, Governor Bricker asserted that the Roosevelt administration had spent three times as much money as all the other Presidents combined, and promised that a Republican victory in November would “put an end to the orgy of spending.”

Governor Bricker said George Washington spent only $34 million; James Madison $176 million; James Polk $175 million; Abraham Lincoln $3,335,000,000; William McKinley $2 billion, and Woodrow Wilson $46 billion. The speaker emphasized that he was quoting figures on money spent by war Presidents.

“Franklin Roosevelt, during his 12 years,” Governor Bricker said, “has spent the astronomical sum of $360 billion.”

He asserted that at the end of 1944, the public debt will be $258 billion compared to $22.5 billion when Mr. Roosevelt took office, and with every person in America now obliged to pay an average of more than $100 a year in federal taxes.

1832

Spellman celebrates mass in old German church

1,000 G.I.’s and natives hear archbishop thank doughboys for ‘job they are doing’
By Jack Frankish, United Press staff writer

…

1833

Japs booby-trap bodies of Marines

Attach grenades to Yanks on Peleliu
By Richard W. Johnston, United Press staff writer

…

1834

Bowles upset by OPA data on steel pay

Study of effect on prices secret

…

1835

americavotes1944

High production urged by Wallace

Program to avert unemployment asked

Troy, New York (UP) –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace asserted last night that wartime high production levels, more than 50 percent above those of 1940, must be retained after the war if 17 million unemployed is to be averted.

Mr. Wallace told a rally sponsored by the United Labor Committee for Roosevelt that a post-war national income level of $170 billion must be maintained to achieve satisfactory living standards.

He offered Russia’s employment standards as a yardstick.

Challenge hurled

He said:

When this war is over, we shall have one more chance to prove that our form of government is best.

Remember, after this war there will not be unemployment in Russia. We’ve got to do as well as they. We must do better or step back.

To ensure continued high production levels after the war, Mr. Wallace said:

It is enormously important that there be in power a truly liberal party based on the unity of labor and agriculture.

GOP policy hit

He charged the “high command of the Republican Party” with attempting to split labor and agriculture by playing on the farmer’s fear of labor and by encouraging the laborer in the belief he has nothing in common with the farmer.

Speaking at a luncheon of the National Citizens Political Action Committee in New York yesterday, Mr. Wallace said:

If liberalism goes under in Washington for so long as it did after the 1920 election, the situation of the world as a whole would be so dark there would be the gravest danger of necessity for more bloodshed.

Responsibility rests with the Democrats, he said, because “there is no danger that the Republican Party will become liberal.”

Dewey slashes back at Wallace

Los Angeles, California (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey slashed back yesterday at an inference by Vice President Henry A. Wallace that he would have to placate the isolationists to win the presidential election in November.

“It is too bad when people who know better don’t stick to the truth,” Governor Dewey told a press conference after a reporter had asked for comment on Mr. Wallace’s speech Thursday night in which the Vice President said isolationists would support the Republican ticket and that the GOP nominee would be forced to placate them “just as Harding placated the isolationists in 1921.”

1836

Businessmen barred from military zones

Headquarters replies to British charge

…

1837

Cowboy actor told to pay blonde’s hospital expenses

‘Testimony against girl involves too many men,’ judge sighs, delaying final ruling

…

1838

americavotes1944

PAC supports GOP in Vermont race

Boston, Massachusetts (UP) –
Spokesmen for the CIO Political Action Committee said today that their organization was actively supporting U.S. Senator George D. Aiken (R-VT) for reelection, but denied that another Republican senatorial candidate, Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall, was receiving similar support.

At Burlington, Andrew Jenkins, Vermont state chairman of the CIO-PAC, said his group was backing Senator Aiken “because he is a good man who has done more or less for labor.”

At Boston, a spokesman for Joseph Salerno, regional director of the CIO-PAC, said:

The report that we are supporting Governor Saltonstall is not true. We are violently opposed to his opponent [Democratic Mayor John H. Corcoran of Cambridge] but have not got actively behind the Governor because he has said that, the more he sees of Governor Dewey, the better he likes him.

Support of PAC rejected by union

New York (UP) –
A resolution calling for support of Sidney Hillman’s Political Action Committee was rejected by a three-to-one vote today by Local 39, International Union of Marine and Shipbuilders Workers of America (CIO), which has a membership of about 20,000 employees in the Todd Shipyards, Brooklyn.

The rejection came after the local voted to endorsed President Roosevelt for a fourth term, and after union president Ernest Rudloff warned that a refusal to support the PAC “would hurt labor throughout the country.”

The vote was taken after it was proposed, but not voted upon, to levy union members $1 each for support of PAC activities.

1839

americavotes1944

‘Unpreparedness’ laid to New Deal

Bridgeport, Connecticut (UP) –
Rep. Clare Boothe Luce (R-CT) charged last night that America’s war preparedness was hampered until Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, by influential New Dealers and present members of the CIO Political Action Committee “who burp noisily whenever Joseph Stalin gets indigestion.”

“That is one reason why we are taking such a long and bloody time to defeat Germany and Japan today,” she said.

Opening her reelection campaign in industrialized Bridgeport, Connecticut headquarters of the PAC, Mrs. Luce asserted that Bridgeport PAC director Sam Gruber was one of 63 lawyers of the American Peace Mobilization who in 1940 sent telegrams to President Roosevelt and the House Military Affairs Committee calling for defeat of the Selective Service Bill.

Recalling that PAC chairman Sidney Hillman and even President Roosevelt had pledged complete liberation of Poland two years ago, she asked the reason for their “strange silence” about the restoration of a free Poland in the face of Russian opposition now.

Mrs. Luce described her Democratic opponent, Attorney Margaret Connors as a “New Deal rubber stamp” and offered her own record in Congress as evidence she was “neither reactionary nor isolationist.”

Anti-4th-termers to close session

Washington (UP) –
The newly-formed “National Agriculture Committee,” an anti-fourth-term organization headed by Senator Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith (D-SC), prepared to conclude a two-day meeting today and carry to the country its battle cry of “farmers for freedom.”

Senator Smith, defeated recently for renomination to the chamber in which he served 36 years, said the primary objective of the new group was to get out the farm vote for the Republican Dewey-Bricker ticket.

Ralph Moore, former official of the Texas Grange, was elected secretary of the new committee.

1840

Editorial: We must correct this

…

1841

Editorial: He prefers anonymity

…

1842

americavotes1944

Editorial: Worth repeating

President Roosevelt was once Governor of New York. During that period, he was confronted with a proposal for expansion of state powers at the expense of local control of local affairs. This is what he had to say about that proposition:

I cite this as an illustration of the present dangerous tendency to forget a fundamental of American democracy, which rests on the right of a locality to manage its own local affairs; the tendency to encourage concentration of power at the top of a governmental structure, alien to our system and more closely akin to a dictatorship or the central committee of a Communist regime. We have met difficulties before this, and have solved them in accordance with the basic theories of representative democracy. Let us not now pursue the easy road of centralization of authority, lest some day we discover too late that our liberties have disappeared.

Brother, you can say that again!

1843

Edson: Cotton Ed front for new ‘revolt’ among Democrats

By Peter Edson

…

1844

Ferguson: According to ability

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

…

1845

americavotes1944

Background of news –
The Secretary of Labor

By Bertram Benedict

President Roosevelt, in his speech to the Teamsters Union tonight, may have some comment on Governor Dewey’s promise, if elected President, to appoint a bona-fide trade unionist to the Secretary of Labor in his Cabinet.

The Department of Labor was set up in 1913, by an act dividing the Department of Commerce and Labor which had been established in 1903. When the 1913 act was passed, the Republicans were in control of the Senate, the Democrats of the House.

In 1913, the American Federation of Labor had a membership of less than two million, and even with the independent unions such as the railroad brotherhoods, most wage-earners were outside of the unions. It might have seemed unfitting to appoint as Secretary of Labor, to represent all workers, a union official; today, with the unions claiming a total membership of around 15 million, Governor Dewey’s proposal of a union leader as Secretary of Labor seems not unfitting.

For the first Secretary of Labor, President Wilson appointed William B. Wilson of Pennsylvania, born in Scotland. Mr. Wilson had been secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers, but had been elected to Congress in 1906, and at the time of his appointment was chairman of the House Labor Committee.

Davis second to hold job

President Harding appointed as the second Secretary of Labor James J. Davis, also from Pennsylvania and also foreign-born (in Wales). Mr. Davis had been an iron puddler for a time in Ellwood, Indiana (Wendell L. Willkie’s hometown), but since 1906 had been director general of the Loyal Order of Moose. So, like Mr. Wilson, he was a former union official who had later become distinguished in other fields.

It seems substantiated that after the 1924 election, President Coolidge offered the position to John L. Lewis, who, as an enrolled Republican, had worked valiantly for the Republican ticket. However, Mr. Coolidge – and President Hoover following him – reappointed Mr. Davis.

Mr. Davis retired in December 1930 after he had been elected Senator from Pennsylvania (his seat is being contested again this year). President Hoover then appointed an out-and-out union man, but one outside of the AFL – William N. Doak, legislative representative of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.

Miss Perkins, whom President Roosevelt appointed in 1933, was non-unionist, but her work as New York State Industrial Commissioner had received the approbation of the unions.

Secretaries of Commerce

As the Secretary of Labor is supposed to work for the interests of labor, and the Secretary of Agriculture for farmers’ interests, the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to work for the interests of business.

When Woodrow Wilson appointed William B. Wilson as Secretary of Labor in 1913, he appointed another member of Congress, William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce. Mr. Redfield was a New York iron manufacturer. But as Commissioner of Public Works in Brooklyn, he had had spats with public utility corporations and moreover had agitated for a lower tariff, so that some conservative business interests considered him not quite “kosher.” He was succeeded in 1919 by Missouri Rep. J. W. Alexander, a lawyer.

Herbert Hoover, long identified with mining activities abroad, served as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. He appointed in 1929 Robert P. Lamont, a Chicago manufacturer, succeeded in 1932 by Roy D. Chapin, a Detroit auto man.

President Roosevelt’s first Secretary of Commerce was Daniel C. Roper, a lawyer who had been Internal Revenue Commissioner under Mr. Wilson. His successor in 1939, Harry L. Hopkins, was also no businessman. The present Secretary of Commerce, Jesse H. Jones, is an outstanding banker.

1846

Poll: People think war will end in three months

Optimism spurts throughout U.S.
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion

…

1847

Brundige: Arsenic, Old Lace delirious farce

Grand plays nephew of lethal ‘Old Dears’ in Stanley film
By Lenore Brundige

…

1848

Millett: Men live their own lives but ‘women are meddlers’

Concentration on own affairs seems to be feminine problem
By Ruth Millett

…

1849

americavotes1944

Stokes: Dewey in filmland

By Thomas L. Stokes

Los Angeles, California –
Here is the City of Miracles. Here is the City of the Angels – the lost angels with broken wings and tarnished souls who used to flash across the sky like a flaming bird of paradise, trailing expensive perfume.

Here is the city where the girl who once stood behind the 10-cent store counter, the girl who handed out the hash in Pete’s restaurant, soars to fame and glory, learns how to speak English with a sultry British accent, how to throw a mink coat nonchalantly across her shoulders, how to order about a butler and a covey of maids and a whole battalion of publicity men – all of whom, behind her back, snarl: “That lousy–!”

This is the city of hard-faced women, beautifully dressed, tough of heart. This is the city of slick men on the make. This is the city that lives for a gag and celebrates a new publicity coup as no civilization ever celebrated a major poet.

WPA remembered

This is the city that is up today, was down yesterday. and is afraid it may go broke tomorrow.

This is the city where only yesterday – less than 10 years ago, there were 10,000 women on WPA sewing projects, and as many men on garden projects. They were men and women with soft hands, for they had worked in nicely paneled offices where promoters were promoting. The depression put a sudden stop to all that. One-third of the city’s population was on relief. Yet, out at Santa Anita then, somebody was betting $65,000 a race.

And there was misery among the old folks. Their investments no longer paid dividends, the remittances from the children to whom they left their farms back in the Midwest stopped, for the sons and daughters were caught, too. in the national disaster. Hopefully the old folks marched into old Doc Townsend’s sideshow, for the promise of $200 every month. They got the Townsend habit then. On the California ballot for a referendum vote in the coming election is a proposal for $60 for every person 60 and over – 60 at 60.

All of this, and it is somehow sad to contemplate, is perhaps America – America in miniature.

It all seemed a bit too much for Governor Thomas E. Dewey, though there’s a touch of Hollywood in him.

Dewey ‘the actor’

No suave actor who walks on the stage in one of those dinner-dress English drawing-room comedies ever looked more the part than did he when he strolled down the aisle of a hotel conference room for his daily press conference. He seemed to catch the spirit.

“What is this – Hollywood?” he asked.

Just then, there was a stir at the back, and down the aisle, in a wheelchair, they pushed Lionel Barrymore through the crowd to talk to the candidate. Mr. Barrymore being head of the Hollywood-for-Dewey Committee. That took more time, more picture-taking.

At last, the session could begin. There was a raw edge in the Governor’s voice, when he said: “Have we sobered down to the proportions of a press conference?”

At one time, a Canadian newspaperman jumped up with a question, explaining that he happened to be in town and wanted to take this opportunity to meet the Governor.

“Is there anybody here from China?” the Governor retorted.

And at night, the Republican candidate went out to that monster Coliseum. Ginger Rogers introduced Governor Warren of California, who introduced Governor Dewey.

The Governor rose to the occasion.

He came out for an expansion of the social security program that nearly matches that of the New Deal and also appropriated some features of the CIO program, critical as some other Republicans are being just now about the CIO.

Old Doc Townsend must look to his laurels.