Stokes: The fight is on
By Thomas L. Stokes
With Dewey party –
This 1944 presidential campaign is apparently going to be the dirty affair that many people feared.
Who is to blame will be argued from now until Nov. 7 by the partisans of President Roosevelt and Governor Dewey. But, however that may he, it is obvious that the campaign is headed for the “you’re another” level.
This was made certain when the Republican candidate, nettled by President Roosevelt’s campaign address last Saturday night – which patently disturbed the Dewey high command – rolled up his sleeves, dug his pitchfork into the Roosevelt record, and made the dirt fly, with a blunt: “He asked for it. Here it is.”
Governor Dewey’s charge in his Oklahoma speech that the President’s “sad record of failing to prepare the defenses of this country for war has cost countless American lives” and “untold misery” inevitably will bring back, from the Democratic side, the record of Republicans in Congress – on an increase in the air force, on national defense measures generally. on extension of the draft which Republicans in the House fought so bitterly, on Lend-Lease.
Willkie warning recalled
This was the record of which Wendell Willkie reminded them almost daily this spring in his Wisconsin primary campaign. That is why Republicans dislike him so.
Governor Dewey undoubtedly will get read back to him also some of his own statements in his 1940 primary campaign, in Wisconsin and speeches of other Republican leaders.
This is only natural, since the Republican candidate has opened the subject and has quoted President Roosevelt, even though such quotations from either side may prove nothing conclusively. For the nation was going through a terrible ordeal of the spirit in those years, yearning for peace, not realizing the seriousness of the Nazi menace.
The debate undoubtedly will bring out many other things – Mr. Roosevelt’s “quarantine-the-aggressors” speech in 1937, for which he was so seriously criticized in some quarters, the charge against him of “warmonger” and the heavy onslaught from the other side urging that he take the country into war while its defenses still were unprepared, and so on.
Significant move
It was significant that Governor Dewey seized the occasion of President Roosevelt’s first campaign speech also to return again to the remark of Maj. Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, draft director, that “we can keep people in the Army about as cheaply as we could create an agency for them when they are out.” He also repeated his charge that the administration “is afraid to bring men home after victory.”
This tack is regarded by Republicans as a most persuasive argument with soldiers weary from the fighting and from their confinement in camps here at home, as well as with their parents and relatives. This line of political argument brought a stinging retort from the President.
It is no secret that the strategy of the Republican campaign was to draw out President Roosevelt, to put him on the defensive. Governor Dewey’s aides pointed out to reporters on the trip that Mr. Roosevelt had assumed a political role much earlier this year than four years ago, when he waited until mid-October.
But they did not expect him to come out fighting so vigorously.
The Roosevelt speech created a mild panic on the campaign train. As a result, the Oklahoma City speech was rewritten to meet the Roosevelt onslaught.
Henceforth it will be politics as usual.