Roosevelt blisters GOP for ‘catastrophe which we inherited’
President, in opening talk, accuses Republicans of stealing New Deal thunder
By Merriman Smith, United Press staff writer
Dewey’s radio fails, he doesn’t hear speech
Aboard Dewey special campaign train (UP) – (Sept. 23)
Governor Thomas E. Dewey was unable to hear President Roosevelt open his campaign for a fourth term tonight when the radio in his special car failed.Paul E. Lockwood, the Governor’s secretary, said the radio failed shortly before the President began speaking.
Newspaper reporters listened to Mr. Roosevelt’s speech in the club car of the train which had a separate radio. The New York Governor did not enter the club car.
Washington –
President Franklin D. Roosevelt accused Republicans of claiming credit for New Deal reforms and charged Thomas E. Dewey and other GOP campaigners with lying in the Nazi pattern.
He declared that, after winning the war, his administration would lead the nation into history’s “greatest epoch of free achievement by free men.”
In this first avowedly political speech of his fourth-term campaign, the President fired a salvo against the party whose leaders, he said, produced the “catastrophe which we inherited.”
He was addressing 900 leaders of the AFL’s Teamsters Union – who shortly before had unanimously ratified their Executive Board’s endorsement of the Democratic ticket – but his blistering words were broadcast nationally by two major networks, CBS and NBC.
Mr. Roosevelt asserted confidently that the American people would win a “victory for democracy” in this war and “move forward with God’s help to the greatest epoch of free achievement by free men the world has ever known or imagined possible.”
Program laid down
His administration, he said, is now laying the groundwork for that epoch, and “the keynote of all that we propose to do in reconversion can be found in the one word: ‘jobs.’”
He laid down this program:
We shall lease or dispose of our government-owned plants and facilities and our surplus war property and land on the basis of how they can best be operated by private enterprise to give jobs to the greatest number.
We shall follow a wage policy which will sustain the purchasing power of labor – for that means more production and more jobs… this is not a time in which men can be forgotten as they were in the Republican catastrophe which we inherited.
No names mentioned
The President did not once mention any Republican by name, but he singled out statements by Mr. Dewey for special attention. Referring to the Republican candidate’s charge at Philadelphia that the administration planned to keep men in the Armed Forces until they found jobs, he said:
This callous and brazen falsehood about demobilization was an effort to stimulate fear among American mothers, wives and sweethearts.
‘Charge is fantastic’
Mr. Roosevelt said:
The very day that this fantastic charge was first made, a formal plan for the method of speedy discharge from the Army has already been announced by the War Department – a plan based upon the wishes of the soldiers themselves.
The President accused the Republicans of using “the propaganda technique invented by the dictators” according to which “you should never use a small falsehood; always a big one.”
Mr. Roosevelt said the Republicans were now supporting reforms which his administration introduced. In so doing, he revived the words “New Deal” which several months ago at a press conference he had sought to bury.
Accuses foes of fraud
He said:
The whole purpose of Republican oratory these days seems to be to switch labels. The object is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all social progress under the New Deal.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery – but I am afraid that in this case it is the most obvious common or garden variety of fraud…
Can the Old Guard pass itself off as the New Deal? I think not!
The President said that:
Perhaps the most ridiculous of these campaign falsifications is the one that this administration failed to prepare for the war.
GOP leaders assailed
Declaring that many Republican leaders, in and out of Congress, “tried to thwart and block nearly every attempt which this administration made to warn our people and to arm this nation,” he added:
Many of those very same leaders who fought every defense measure we proposed are still in control of the Republican Party, were in control of its national convention in Chicago, and would be in control of the machinery of the Congress and of the Republican Party in the event of a Republican victory this fall.
Declaring that neither labor nor the people as a whole would forget the record of past Republican administrations. Mr. Roosevelt denounced “labor baiters among the opposition who instead of calling attention to the achievements of labor in this war prefer to pick on the occasional strikes which have occurred.”
Hits PAC opponents
In an apparent reference to President John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, Mr. Roosevelt said wartime strikes had been condemned “by every responsible national labor leader… except one.”
“And that one labor leader, incidentally, is certainly not among my supporters,” he said.
The President appeared to be referring to Republican critics of the CIO Political Action Committee headed by Sidney Hillman, which was among the first group to endorse him for a fourth term, when he said:
They hate to see any working man or woman contribute a dollar bill to any wicked political party.
Of course, it is all right for large financiers and industrialists and monopolists to contribute tens of thousands of dollars…
Mr. Roosevelt accused Republicans of making it “pretty hard” for service personnel to vote in the forthcoming election and went on to urge every citizen “to use your sacred privilege of voting, no matter which candidate you expect to support.”
Mr. Roosevelt devoted a few words to apparent criticism of John Foster Dulles, Mr. Dewey’s chief adviser on foreign affairs. He spoke of “some politicians who kept their heads buried deep in the sand” and said that “‘only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplate war upon us.’” The “hysteria” quotation has been attributed to a Dulles statement before the war.
The President also took an indirect slap at former President Herbert Hoover in asserting that Americans would remember 1932 – the “closed banks and the breadlines,” the “foreclosures of homes and farms,” the bankruptcies and the “Hoovervilles.”
He replied to the “indispensable man” taunt of the Republicans. He said:
I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself – such as the old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable.
Mr. Roosevelt accused the Republican Party of talking “out of both sides” of its mouth at the same time and went on to say that the American people would not forget the accomplishments of his administration.
‘Won’t be deceived’
Mr. Roosevelt, in his first self-labeled political address, lashed out at the Republican position which has been outlined in a series of addresses by Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, the GOP candidate, saying that “the people of this country know the past too well to be deceived into forgetting.”
Mr. Roosevelt listed a number of tasks facing the country, among them:
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“There is the task of finishing victoriously this most terrible of all wars as speedily as possible and with the least cost of lives.”
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“And there is the task which we face here at home – the task of reconverting our economy from the purposes of war to the purposes of peace.”
Defends wartime economy
He told the Teamsters and a nationwide radio audience:
These peace-building tasks were faced once before, nearly a generation ago. They were botched by a Republican administration. This must not happen this time. We will not let it happen this time.
Mr. Roosevelt made a strong defense of his wartime economic policy, pointing particularly to the post-war situation in which, he said, “the keynote of all that we propose to do in reconversion can be found in the one word: ‘jobs.’”
Mr. Roosevelt assailed as “ridiculous… campaign falsifications” on the part of the Republicans a charge that “this administration failed to prepare for the war which was coming.”