Millett: There are times when customer isn’t wrong
Sloppy service and discomfort don’t have to be accepted by anyone
By Ruth Millett
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From St. Louis –
Dewey to speak Monday night
Need for honesty will be subject
Albany, New York (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey will continue his direct attack on the Roosevelt administration in a nationwide broadcast from St. Louis Monday night, when he will discuss “the urgent need for honesty and competence in our national government.”
Paul E. Lockwood, the Governor’s secretary, said the speech would deal with a wide variety of activities by the present Democratic administration.
Governor Dewey’s speech will be broadcast over the Blue Network from 10:00 to 10:30 p.m. ET.
The Governor will remain in Albany today preparing for the Midwestern trip. He will leave by special train for St. Louis tomorrow afternoon and return to New York State immediately after the speech. He will address the
In addition to St. Louis, Governor Dewey’s present itinerary calls for appearances at Minneapolis, Chicago, Buffalo, New York City and Boston. There were reports that he will also speak in Connecticut, Delaware and Pennsylvania before Election Day.
Garner visits with Truman at Texas stop
En route to Los Angeles, California (UP) –
Senator Harry S. Truman was met at the Uvalde, Texas, railroad station last night by former Vice President John N. Garner, his one-time Congressional crony.
“Cactus Jack” Garner, red-faced and smoking a Mexican cigar, was wearing khaki work clothes.
Mr. Garner, chatting with the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, said he would be 76 next month and intended to live until he was 93. He explained his hands were badly strained from hulling pecans at his Uvalde ranch and added that he had been shucking corn all day.
He downed a shot of Bourbon whisky – “with branch water, none of that fizz stuff” – and reckoned he wouldn’t like to 93 “if I didn’t get that.”
Mr. Garner stayed aboard only a few minutes because the train had no scheduled stopover at Uvalde.
A reporter asked Mr. Garner if he intended to vote for Truman. “Now, boys, you know you shouldn’t ask me that,” Mr. Garner replied.
Joe Pew speaks –
‘Treachery’ laid to New Deal
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (UP) –
The New Deal administration was assailed here last night by Joseph N. Pew Jr. as “12 years of treachery, dishonor and deceit, which brought creeping paralysis over our people.”
Making what probably was his first political speech, the millionaire executive of the Sun Oil Company and financial backer of the Republican Party charged that President Roosevelt “is not complaining for himself, but for Senator Harry Truman [the vice-presidential nominee] whom he hopes to make the next President.”
Mr. Pew was a surprise speaker at a rally of the Republican State Committee here.
Illinois Governor Dwight H. Green, accusing the Roosevelt administration of 12 years of “bungling and stumbling,” told the group that it was the duty of the voters to save returning U.S. troops from the “catastrophe and confusion which threaten if the New Deal is entrusted with peace and reconversion.”
Governor Green said the President’s record was replete with vetoes of bills aimed to help war veterans, their widows and children. From 1933 to Nov. 1, 1943, he said, Mr. Roosevelt vetoes 18 bills, depriving veterans and their dependents of $450 million in benefits.
Rep. Luce: Roosevelt ‘lied’ nation into war
GOP Congresswoman charges that President lacked courage to ‘lead us into it’
Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce charged last night that President Roosevelt was “the only American President who ever lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it.”
The sharp-tongued Republican Congresswoman from Connecticut who is a candidate for reelection, said in a radio speech that the President’s failure in his greatest obligation to his countrymen, preserving the peace “he inherited when he was young and strong,” disqualified him from any part in the making of the new peace.
Mrs. Luce accused Mr. Roosevelt of withholding his knowledge of the gravity of world events because he wanted a third term and “because he did not have the courage to admit that his seven-year policy of isolation and appeasement was a failure.”
She said the record belled accusations that Republican obstructionism tied the President’s hands and termed such charges “extenuating circumstances often presented by New Dealers” for the President’s “failure to safeguard this nation against an attack on two fronts.”
Republican Senators and Presidents were accused of keeping the United States out of the League of Nations and thus preventing Mr. Roosevelt from working with other nations to prevent war, Mrs. Luce said, but, she added, Mr. Roosevelt did not seek greater collective security during his seven peacetime years.
“The very opposite is the case,” she added.
Mrs. Luce said arguments to prove that Americans were so isolationist that Mr. Roosevelt could do nothing were tantamount to accusing the people of being responsible for Pearl Harbor.
Nevertheless, she asserted, the President did not warn the people and all she could find in studying the record were “happy assurance” from the President that the nation was in no danger from foreign powers.
When Herbert Hoover was President, Mrs. Luce declared in answering criticism that Republican Presidents had permitted the decay of American military power, he “spent a larger percent of the total government expenditures on armaments during his four years than Mr. Roosevelt did during his first four years.”
She said:
In view of the world situation, the fact that Mr. Roosevelt’s only economy before 1939 was in armaments is astonishing.
‘Health whispers’ hit by Democrats
New York (UP) –
DNC Chairman Robert E. Hannegan charged today that the Republican Party was conducting a “whispering campaign” concerning President Roosevelt’s health.
Mr. Hannegan told newspapermen that “there is a whispering campaign being carried on by the opposition and it is being intensified.”
In Washington, the Presidential physician, RAdm. Ross T. McIntire, said yesterday that Mr. Roosevelt “is in good shape” and, “contrary to some reports, he does not even have a cold.”
Informed of Mr. Hannegan’s statement, RNC Chairman Herbert Brownell Jr. said the assertion was completely “unfounded.” He termed the Hannegan statement “some more of Hannegan’s shenanigans.”
Berle calls Dewey ‘dishonest’ for hurling Communist charge
White House also replies to 10 charges made by Republican candidate
Washington (UP) –
Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle Jr. today accused Governor Thomas E. Dewey of being “surprising dishonest” and simultaneously the White House made available a list of “facts” seeking to refute 10 specific charges made against the Roosevelt administration by the Republican presidential candidate.
Mr. Berle, in a letter to President Roosevelt, accused Mr. Dewey of attempting “to play fast and loose with the American public” in his recent charge at Charleston, West Virginia, that the administration wanted to establish a Communist system in this country.
The documented list of “facts” was obviously intended to refute charges made by Mr. Dewey in his Oklahoma City speech last month.
Both sides quoted
It consisted largely of Dewey quotations from speeches or remarks of administration leaders, including Mr. Roosevelt, followed by “facts” consisting of more complete texts of the same speeches or explanatory statements.
Issued without comment, it was apparently designed to show that Mr. Dewey’s 10 charges were based on brief excerpts from longer statements which in their full context did not bear out his accusations or implications.
Mr. Berle wrote the President to accuse Mr. Dewey of having “ripped a single sentence” from a 1939 memorandum by Mr. Berle to the Temporary National Economic Committee and using this “single sentence” in “a surprisingly dishonest effort to claim that your administration was secretly trying to set up a Communist system.”
Program outlined
Mr. Berle said Mr. Dewey quoted the sentence – “over a period of years the government will gradually come to own most of the productive plants of the United States” – as the “doctrine” advocated by the Roosevelt administration. Actually, Mr. Berle declared, “the entire memorandum showed the exact contrary.”
He said the memorandum included this “clearly-stated” program:
In a democratic organization of economy, the obvious end should be to permit and require private initiative to do as much of the work as it can, consistent with maintaining the national economy on a reasonably even flow, distributing the burdens and benefits meanwhile so that no class will be unduly favored, no class unduly burdened, and a maximum of opportunity be provided for everyone to use his abilities usefully with corresponding reward. It is the definite function of the financial system to make this possible at all times.
Mr. Berle said Mr. Dewey knew him “well” after he “asked and got my help in getting him the independent nomination which made possible his election as District Attorney in New York.”
Mr. Berle added:
He knows, as does everybody else, that, while I want a finance system that takes care of little people as well as big, I have never been a Communist.
The list of Dewey statements and “the facts: began with Mr. Dewey’s attribution to Gen. George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, the statement that:
In 1940, the year after the war began in Europe, the United States was in such a tragic condition that it couldn’t put into the field a mobile force of 75,000 men; the Aemy was only 25 percent ready.
Testimony cited
The document showed that Gen. Marshall testified on May 1, 1940, before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee:
We could put into the field at the present time, as a mobile force, about 75,000 men of tegular establishment… to be promptly reinforced by 25,000 men from the Enlisted Reserve.
It also quoted Gen. Marshall as testifying before the Truman Committee on April 22, 1941:
In February 1940, I talked in a meeting before a historical group I didn’t have any preparation; I just went into it and talked – one statement I made was that, compared to the Navy, which is 75 percent mobilized at all times, we at best were not over 25 percent prepared in the Army.
Well, that was just for the purpose of illustrating the difference of the national policy.
It was in no way a criticism. It was the national policy that the principal buildup would be behind the oceans and behind the Navy, that our great task was the development of a successful mobilization.
The document said Mr. Dewey quoted Gen. H. H. Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, as saying: “Dec. 7, 1941, found Army Air Forces equipped with plans, but not planes.”
After making this statement in a report to the Secretary of War on Jan. 4, 1944, Gen. Arnold, according to the document, went on to say that:
When the Japanese struck, our combat aircraft strength was little better than a corporal’s guard of some 3,000 planes; of these, only 1,157 were actually suited to combat service…
‘Growing every hour’
Gen. Arnold said, too, that on Dec. 7, 1941:
We may not have had a powerful air force, but we knew that soon would have one. We had the plans and our organization was growing every hour. We knew that we had done everything in our power, everything permitted by us as a peace-loving nation to prepare to defend that nation against cruel and cunning foes.
It also quoted Gen. Arnold as having said:
The resourcefulness and energy of our people would have been of little avail against our enemies if the Army Air Forces had not begun preparations for war long before Pearl Harbor. By Dec. 7, 1941, we were in low gear and were shifting into second.
That we were rapidly building up our strength at that time has been erased from the minds of many people by succeeding events.
Didn’t start from scratch
But due in large part to the initiative of our Commander-in-Chief, we did not start this war from scratch.
The document said Mr. Dewey quoted Senator Harry S. Truman as saying on the floor of the Senate Aug. 14, 1941, that the responsibility for “the shocking state of our defense program” could be laid to the White House.
The “facts” said the discussion followed a Truman speech “chiefly” about “camp construction and raw materials” and that Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-MI) asked Mr. Truman “where the final authority rests in respect to priorities and curtailments?” Mr. Truman said the committee was trying to find out.
White House blamed
Mr. Vandenberg then said: “In other words, the Senator [Truman] is now saying that the chief bottleneck which the defense program confronts is the lack of adequate organization and coordination in the administration of defense?” Mr. Truman agreed and Mr. Vandenberg asked, “who is responsible for that situation?”
“There is only one place where the responsibility can be put,” Mr. Truman said according to the Congressional Record as quoted by the document.
“Where is that – the White House?” Mr. Vandenberg asked.
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Truman replied.
Courage questioned
Mr. Dewey was next listed as having quoted from a Truman magazine article published in November 1942 concerning the “lack of courageous, unified leadership and centralized direction at the top.”
The document pointed out other portions of the article at length, including a passage:
Chaotic conditions in war production are by no means a thing for which the administration or the men in charge are alone to blame. Leadership implies “followship.” And up to now we, who have been free in finding fault, have shown ourselves poor followers. If we wish to correct the situation, the power lies with us.
Mr. Dewey also used this Truman quotation: “After Pearl Harbor, we found ourselves woefully unprepared for war.”
Rubber question stressed
The document offered additional quotations from a Truman report to the Senate, saying that “the Senator was talking only about disputes between agencies with particular reference to rubber.”
Mr. Dewey also used a line from the fourth term nominating speech made by Senator Alben W. Barkley (D-KY), who was quoted as saying, “When the treachery of Pearl Harbor came, we were not ready.”
The document says Mr. Barkley in the same speech praised Mr. Roosevelt as “the man who saw and warned the people against approaching danger.”
The document then went into four statements by Mr. Roosevelt and used by the Republican candidate. One was a line taken by Mr. Dewey from a message to Congress by the President in 1935:
There is no ground for apprehension that our relations with any nation will be otherwise than peaceful.
Another quotation given
In the same annual state of the nation message, the President said, according to the document:
I cannot with candor tell you that general international relationships outside the borders of the United States are improved.
Mr. Dewey quoted part of a 1937 speech by the President in which Mr. Roosevelt said:
How happy we are that the circumstances of the moment permit us to put our money into bridges and boulevards… rather than into huge standing armies and vast implements of war.
‘Must make will prevail’
The document pointed out that in this “quarantine-the-aggressors” speech, Mr. Roosevelt followed that sentence in this manner:
I am compelled and you are compelled, nevertheless, to look ahead. The peace, the freedom and the security of 90 percent of the population of the world is being jeopardized by the remaining 10 percent who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law.
Surely the 90 percent who want to live in peace under law and in accordance with moral standards that have received almost universal acceptance throughout the centuries, can and must find some way to make their will prevail…
Mr. Roosevelt’s May 14, 1940, press conference statements about a two-ocean Navy were the basis of this Dewey statement:
It was in January 1940 that I publicly called for a two-ocean Navy for the defense of America. It was that statement of mine which Mr. Roosevelt called, and I quote his words: “Just plain dumb. Then as now we got ridicule instead of action.”
50,000 planes asked
The document offers a partial transcript of this press conference in which the President called a two-ocean Navy “an entirely outmoded conception of naval defense.”
It added a footnote saying that the conference dealt largely with Mr. Roosevelt’s message to Congress asking for 50,000 planes a year and an Army-Navy appropriation of $896 million, “but Dewey said nothing about the message.”
‘Soothes the people’
The concluding phrase of the document deals with Mr. Dewey’s statement:
When Hitler’s armies were at the gates of Paris, Mr. Roosevelt once again soothed the American people with the jolly comment: “There is no need for the country to be ‘discomboomerated.’”
This, according to the document, occurred during a May 1940 news conference when the President, discussing the public response to the need for preparedness, said he thought the people understood “the seriousness of the situation,” but that at the same time he wanted them to realize that “we are not going to discombobulate or upset, any more than we have to, a great many of the normal processes of life.”
Poll: Solid South still for Roosevelt
Only Oklahoma and Kentucky are close
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Col. ‘Bill’ Hayward dies in New York
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Dancer put in 1-A
New York –
Gene Kelly, dancer and Hollywood actor, has been given a Selective Service classification of 1-A and will be inducted in about a month, Waldemar Grassi, chairman of Kelly’s local New York Draft Board, disclosed today.
Bricker calls OPA ‘inept, confused’
Denounces ‘politics’ in rationing
Sacramento, California (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker declared today that the Office of Price Administration was inept, confused and devoid of planning and was being operated for political advantage.
Opening his California campaign, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, in a speech prepared for delivery here, blamed OPA for “keeping the people in the dark” on the entire rationing program. However, he admitted that rationing itself was necessary to combat wartime shortages.
But he asserted that handling of rationing by the OPA had been incompetent in eight ways:
- Planning was obviously poor.
- OPA had no understanding of the “psychology of rationing,” actually encouraging hoarding.
- Irregular rationing periods created confusion.
- Rationing was not coordinated with pricing.
- OPA had not always know how many rationing coupons it had issued.
- Responsibility was divided.
- Unnecessarily complex systems and forms were adopted.
- Black markets flourished and the pleasure driving ban was bungled.
Hits ‘political implications’
Asserting that the Republican Party believes in the principle of wartime rationing as an “instrument of war,” Mr. Bricker said:
The party does object to ineptness, the confusion, the lack of elementary planning and vision with which the New Dealers have administered the program… it particularly condemns the political implications of rationing.
Mr. Bricker illustrated the “political implications” remark by citing the recent order of OPA making “farm machinery ration-free” the very day after an OPA official dismissed as “astonishing” rumors of the removal. He said “we cannot know what the policy should be” because while OPA has the facts it insists upon “keeping the people in the dark.”
Influenced by election
He said:
But this we can be sure of the new policy undoubtedly was facilitated by the fact that Election Day is approaching.
Mr. Bricker makes his first major California speech tonight in San Francisco, which will be broadcast over MBS beginning at 8:30 p.m. PWT (5:30 p.m. EWT).
Mr. Bricker came to California after a tour of Oregon as the Republican Party’s assigned collector of its 25 electoral votes. Governor Thomas E. Dewey made only two speeches in the state, and party generals handed Mr. Bricker the job of winning over the voters for the entire ticket.
Wallace attacks Dewey as puppet
Calls him ‘front’ man for reactionaries
Cleveland, Ohio (UP) –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace last night attacked Governor Thomas E. Dewey as a “front” man who “cannot go back” on reactionary Republicans “as Hitler handled Theissen.”
“They pay the piper – they call the tune,” Mr. Wallace declared.
That is why, he said:
“The young man on the flying trapeze” spends part of his time talking like a liberal, part of the time like an old-fashioned reactionary and part of the time pretending that he really believes Roosevelt is a Communist.
The young, but vague Republican governor may be expected any night now to describe Governor Bricker as a New Deal Democrat.
Puts GOP in two classes
Speaking at a rally here, the Vice President divided Republicans into two classes, local Republicans, “usually fine people,” and national Republicans, “the Pews and Grundys of Pennsylvania, the Gannetts and Ham Fishes of New York, the Hearst-Patterson-McCormick newspapers axis, the Tafts, Gridlers and Hannas of Ohio.”
He said:
National Republicans are like the famous bird which always flew backward and thus could see where it had been, but never had any idea where it was going.
Their election would mean a soft war, a soft peace and a reactionary post-war period.
‘Fear a full vote’
Mr. Wallace charged:
The reactionary national Republicans fear a full vote. They have placed one obstacle after another in the way of the voter this year, and “outstanding leaders in this effort are the governors of Ohio and New York” whose “secretaries of states have lent themselves to efforts to restrict voting.”
He said:
The national Republicans voted against Selective Service, against an adequate Army Air Force, against Lend-Lease, against the arming of merchant ships, against repealing the arms embargo.
If the Republican candidate were a true liberal, he would tell the American people that it was the Republicans in Congress who are blocking adequate emergency unemployment compensation during the transition from war to peace.
Völkischer Beobachter (October 15, 1944)
Reichsmarschall Göring vor Rüstungsarbeitern –
Es wird ihnen nicht gelingen
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