America at war! (1941–) – Part 4

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Roosevelt to barnstorm New York City

He’ll attend rally, tour the boroughs
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer

Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt and his advisers today planned an active campaign for him in the final fortnight before the presidential election, including a tour of New York City and an appearance at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field Saturday.

Democratic National Chairman Robert E. Hannegan announced in New York that although the President will show himself at the Dodgers’ ballpark. he probably will not make a speech, The occasion will be a rally for Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY), and Mr. Roosevelt, will content himself merely with greeting the Senator, Mr. Hannegan said.

The President will make a long tour of the city, however, and that night will address the Foreign Policy Association there.

Philadelphia speech scheduled

The only political speech thus far scheduled for the President in that time will be at Philadelphia. David L. Lawrence, Pennsylvania Democratic leader, has announced that Mr. Roosevelt will speak in Shibe Park there Oct. 27.

Mr. Roosevelt told his news conference yesterday there would be some speeches but he did not yet know when or where. Some smart money is down on Cleveland, Chicago or Buffalo. And it is noted that the Shibe Park engagement breaks a precedent which came with the war – the President will make a public appearance at a time previously announced before a catch-as-catch-can audience.

Heretofore his wartime public appearances have all been before restricted audiences. The bars also slipped a notch yesterday when he told news conference questioners he would go to New York by train.

Always kept plans secret

All such presidential plans heretofore have been kept secret for security reasons and he has repeatedly been away from here with the public – including practically everyone in Washington – ignorant of his movements.

Mr. Roosevelt told DNC Chairman Robert E. Hannegan a week before the party’s Chicago convention that he would accept renomination for a fourth term but would not “campaign in the usual sense.”

He has made only two avowedly campaign addresses since then, one to the AFL Teamsters Union banquet here last month and a broadcast this month from the White House. Now the almost inevitable has happened. The President’s advisers have insisted that he go to bat.

Pennsylvania a key state

The choice of Pennsylvania for one of the President’s major campaign efforts underwrites the judgment of political experts that the contest in close and that Pennsylvania – and probably New York – are the key states. If Mr. Dewey can carry those two, he probably is in. If he loses them, his address will continue to be Albany, New York, after Inauguration Day.

The populous Mideastern seaboard states are a battleground. Former New Jersey Governor Charles Edison, one-time Secretary of the Navy in the Roosevelt Cabinet and an early and staunch New Dealer, sounded a sour note on the White House steps yesterday. Emerging from Mr. Roosevelt’s office, he revealed to reporters he had told the President that “New Jersey would go for Mr. Dewey by a substantial majority.”

Mr. Edison said Mr. Dewey would carry New Jersey because of resentment against Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City, the state Democratic boss, who is in disagreement with Governor Edison.

In Jersey City, Mayor Hague said that Mr. Edison will have a “rude awakening as a political prophet” and that President Roosevelt will carry the state in November “by even a vastly increased majority over 1940.”

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Dewey to give foreign policy views tonight

Talk may expand League attitude

New York (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey speaks on foreign policy in relation to preventing another war tonight for the second time in his 1944 presidential campaign.

The speech, to be delivered before The New York Herald-Tribune Forum and broadcast over the Blue Network from 9:30 to 10:00 p.m. EWT is entitled “This Must Be the Last War.”

KQV will carry Governor Dewey’s address at 9:30 p.m. EWT.

The Governor arrived here from Albany shortly before 1:00 p.m. and was scheduled to spend the time before his scheduled speech conferring with Republican National Chairman Herbert Brownell Jr.

Roosevelt idea ‘good’

“I think it is a good thing for the President to come to see the people even though it is only once every four years,” the Governor said when asked for comment on President Roosevelt’s scheduled tour of New York City next Saturday.

Governor Dewey received reporters briefly after meeting with Mr. Theodore Roosevelt Jr., widow of Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt and chairman of a woman’s group backing his presidential candidacy.

Mr. Dewey said he was “delighted” with the active participation in the campaign by Mrs. Roosevelt and her associates and their efforts “to call to the attention of all women the issues of this campaign.”

Dewey said:

Never were the results of the campaign so vital to the women of the country. Employment and peace and opportunities for all the world in the years to come can only be assured by a fresh and competent administration of our government.

Much conjecture

Dewey aides declined to give any hint in advance of tonight’s speech on how he will elaborate his program favoring responsible participation by the United States in an international organization to prevent war. Recent events, however, offered several avenues of conjecture.

There was a possibility that he might expand on his comment that the results of the recent Dumbarton Oaks Security Conference proposing a United Nations organization, was “a fine beginning” but leaves “much to be done.”

Another possibility was in the suggestion of two leading U.S. Senators in foreign affairs that any peace treaty involving participation in a world organization be subjected to a two-thirds vote in the Senate but that the duties, powers and limitations on the American delegate be handled by separate legislation requiring only a majority vote in Congress.

2944

160 mph hurricane roars toward Florida after ripping Havana

Major blow in U.S. expected tonight

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2945

I DARE SAY —
The ostracized

By Florence Fisher Parry

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2946

Roosevelt asks aid for war fund

Washington (UP) –
President Roosevelt last night called for greater-than-ever contributions to the national and community war fund campaigns “to show that there is no letdown in the spirit and unity of this country.”

He said in a broadcast that the voluntary nature of the community war fund campaign was demonstrative of “democracy at its best.”

He said this year “more than ever” the needs of both war fund drives were important not only because of their aid to needy people at home but to help the “long suffering peoples of the United Nations” and services helping American fighting men.

He said:

It is through this gift that we send a token of our personal friendship to the tragic victims of brute slavery and to those who have so long borne the burden of fighting this war.

2947

Gracie Allen Reporting

By Gracie Allen

Hollywood, California –
Now I read they’ve invented a big mechanical brain at Harvard University. It’s several times smarter than a human brain, and, if you ask me, I’m scared. Goodness, I didn’t say anything when the Harvard boys went around swallowing goldfish, but this time they’ve gone too far.

Ladies, imagine how our husbands will take advantage. They’ll get a mechanical brain to do their office work. This will give them the entire day to entertain their pretty secretaries.

If Harvard wanted to invent something, why couldn’t it have been a mechanical lap? Personally, I hope the mechanical brain gets a big headache.

2948

State claims ‘Old Testament’ pact slaying was deliberate

Prosecutor wants death penalty for man who admits he killed ‘unfaithful’ wife

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Move to avert strike pushed at Cleveland

City to take hand in power dispute

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2949

To plan, keep peace –
Roving court is envisioned by Allies

Highly mobile body now foreseen
By Hal O’Flaherty

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2950

Knight purchases Chicago paper

Veteran publisher buys Knox stock

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New clue probed in tub slaying

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2951

Military rule of Reich mapped

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2952

Cronkite: Only Nazi political collapse can end war by Christmas

Allied supply lines in west extended considerably; enemy bars use of key ports
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer

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Sedition trial passes six-month milestone

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2953

Yanks drive within eight miles of Bologna

British of 8th Army in Cesena outskirts
By Eleanor Packard, United Press staff writer

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2954

Wolfert: Allies lost big punch because far-stretched supply lines broke

Correspondent in Europe since D-Day reviews tactics which almost smashed Nazis
By Ira Wolfert

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1944 victory talk called delusion

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2955

Monahan: Annie a ‘good sport,’ hometowner writes

Corporal in CBI area describes Sheridan as a gritty trouper
By Kaspar Monahan

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2956

Poll: Campaign has little effect on labor vote

Sentiment about same as month ago
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion

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americavotes1944

Truman claims Dewey is guilty of ‘chicanery’

Charges distortion of committee reports

With Senator Truman en route to Portland, Oregon (UP) –
Senator Harry S. Truman, Democratic vice-presidential nominee, charging Governor Thomas E. Dewey with “political chicanery,” today predicted that the Roosevelt-Truman ticket would carry huis home state of Missouri by 100,000 to 150,000 votes.

Mr. Truman said Mr. Dewey had “chosen to take sentences from committee reports and had construed honest criticism of mistakes as a statement that the President was inefficiently conducting the war.” The Republicans failed to quote a section saying “the greatest job of the war had been done on the home front,” he told San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club yesterday.

Mr. Truman said:

This is the most efficiently conducted war in the history of the world as far as the United States is concerned.

Hits ‘chicanery’

He added:

It is not within the limits of ethics when political chicanery is practiced by a candidate for the highest office in the land.

Mr. Truman told reporters that on the basis of registration figures, the Democratic ticket would carry California by a majority in the neighborhood of 400,000. He said he would give a measure of credit to Albert K. Chow, head of the Chinese Six Companies, if his election prediction is correct.

Mr. Chow told Mr. Truman that 80 percent of 2,000 Chinese-American votes cast in San Francisco would be for the Democratic ticket.

Promises aid to China

The vice-presidential nominee last night said he regretted that the United States had been unable to supply more munitions to the Chinese because of the demands in other theaters. Speaking on the Chinese Hour broadcast by a San Francisco radio station, he said the time is now here to furnish the Chinese theater with equipment because we have the Japanese on the run today as never before.

After addressing the Commonwealth Club and conferring with Democratic leaders in San Francisco, Mr. Truman was Mr. Chow’s guest at a Chinese dinner. The Democratic candidate was scheduled to arrive in Portland tonight when he will speak extemporaneously at a banquet in the Masonic Hall. With Senator M. C. Wallgren (D-WA), he will drive to Olympia and Tacoma, Washington, tomorrow. He will give two radio talks in Seattle tomorrow night.

Bricker calls New Deal’s spending ‘lavish, unwise’

GOP candidate says taxpayers face post-war debt of $300 billion

Long Beach, California (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker today condemned the New Deal for spending the taxpayers’ money “lavishly and unwisely.”

The GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a speech prepared for delivery here, said:

New Deal waste has become so rampant that the nation is beginning to reel and stagger under the load of the national debt.

The estimated post-war “New Deal debt,” which will reach $300 billion, he said, is a burden which must be borne by “American taxpayers for many years to come.”

Not all war debt

He said:

Let us not forget that the war alone is not responsible for this burden.

Before the war, he added, the New Deal administration “nearly doubled the public debt over what it was in 1932.”

Mr. Bricker asserted that the “way out of this flood of spending” is the election of a Republican administration.

“A vote for Tom Dewey,” he said, “is the key to the solution of this problem.” The Republican Party, he recalled, has promised to “eliminate from the budget all wasteful and unnecessary expenditures and exercise the most rigid economy.”

Calls Democrats reactionary

Last night, Mr. Bricker said that the Democrats and not the Republicans were the reactionaries of the country.

He said:

The truth is that instead of advancing liberalism in America, it has set this nation on the road toward reaction. It has reached back for centuries and taken into its hands old-world devices subjecting people to governmental regimentation.

Mr. Bricker said that President Roosevelt, Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Rexford Guy Tugwell, Adolf Berle, Harry Hopkins and Attorney General Francis A. Biddle were the “arch reactionaries” of this century.

Hits Pearl Harbor secrecy

In an interview yesterday, Governor Bricker accused the administration of concealing the full “black story” of the Pearl Harbor disaster until after the November election.

I expect there will be a new Pearl Harbor story and that it will be black. But I doubt that we’ll hear anything more before Election Day.

When President Roosevelt took office in 1933, Mr. Bricker asserted, no peril faced the nation from outside. The candidate blamed lack of information on German and Japanese military preparations for American failure to act sooner.

He said:

We had diplomatic service around the world, but we were not advised of the rising threat. If the government knew about it, it didn’t tell Congress or the American people, and so nothing was done to halt the rising military power. And all the time we were furnishing Japan with the instruments of war.

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americavotes1944

Stokes: Cross currents

By Thomas L. Stokes

New Haven, Connecticut –
Connecticut poses a complicated problem in the presidential campaign this year, with confusing cross currents that battle and worry both Republican and Democratic campaign managers.

They are similar to those found elsewhere in the East, but seem accentuated here in a more compact area. Republicans are concerned about some hitherto staunch party adherents – older people and parents – who appear inclined this year to desert to President Roosevelt because of the war. Democrats are disturbed over a disaffection in foreign national groups – Italians and Poles chiefly – and the slowly developing hostility to New Dealism among the native population with individualistic impulses.

When it is all analyzed and sifted down, best judgment is that President Roosevelt has a slight edge as of today over Governor Dewey to capture the state’s eight electoral votes, which become important this year because of the indicated close fight. Mr. Roosevelt carried Connecticut by 56,000 in 1940, in a total vote close to 800,000. It is expected to be slimmer this year if he makes it. Republicans claim Governor Dewey will break the Roosevelt clinch.

Rural areas solidly GOP

Democratic strength is concentrated in the industrial towns and cities. Small town and rural Connecticut is almost solidly Republican, with the old Yankee stock still a predominant influence.

Democrats find encouragement in the large number of new voters in the cities, indicating a record turnout on Election Day, despite the absence of many in the service. “Making” of voters, as they call it in local idiom, is now going on. The state has permanent registration, with only newcomers required to register.

The CIO’s Political Action Committee is doing a good job in registration and it has stirred Republicans to intense activity. The CIO is given credit by old-line Democratic leaders, some of whom are not New Dealish personally.

These leaders explain that local labor leaders seem to realize that they are “on the spot” to deliver this year, having talked a good election in times past. They’ve got to prove their worth to the rank and file, as well as to regular party leaders with whom they are seeking to affiliate themselves in the organization.

Offsetting this labor advantage, which counts in the cities, there is the handicap to the Democrats m defections among Italians and Poles, a sizeable voting population.

Resentments invoked

Both sides are busy working these foreign nationals, among whom there are resentments of various sorts, involving United States and Allied policy toward their homelands.

Among the Italians too, particularly the older ones, there is reported a peculiar resentment, economic in derivation, because the Army has taken the young men in the family who are supposed traditionally to contribute to the support of the old folks. Some of these young men were doing very nicely in war plants before they were called to the Army. There is among Italians here, too, a residue of Fascist sympathy with the Mussolini regime in Italy.

Democrats are worried about the Italian and the Polish vote but try to discount its effect. They claim they will Go as well among the Italians as in 1940, when President Roosevelt carried the state despite his “stab-in-the-back” speech, which was then fresh in the minds of Italian voters. Democrats count on many younger Italians to vote Democratic.

A sampling indicates there are some Republicans of old Yankee stork who plan to vote for President Roosevelt for the first time this year, because of the war. But how substantial this may be is just as much of a question as how deep will be defections among Italians and Poles from the Democratic ticket.

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Maj. Williams: The racing place

By Maj. Al Williams

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Ball’s vote hangs on foreign policy

Washington (UP) –
Senator Joseph H. Ball (R-MN), who is “on the fence” politically until the presidential candidates elaborate their foreign policy pledges, expects to announce next week which candidate he will support.

By that time, he said in an interview, he will have heard Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s speech on foreign policy before the New York Herald-Tribune Forum and President Roosevelt’s talk Saturday in New York before the Foreign Policy Association.

On these speeches will depend not only his decision, he said, but that of thousands of independent voters.

“That man, Ball,” as some of his colleagues are calling him, believes the paramount issue of the campaign is a decisive, forward-looking foreign policy. He said that the whole purpose of withholding his support of either candidate is to obtain commitments that failed to appear in either the Connally peace resolution or the Democratic and Republican planks on foreign policy.

“There is too much the idea that the world security organization is an accepted thing and that there is no controversy, when there is controversy,” he said. He added that he called for presidential as well as Congressional candidates to state their position “clearly and honestly” so the people will know how to vote on Nov. 7.

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Retractions demanded –
‘Listener’ asks FCC curb on GOP radio speakers

Milwaukee, Wisconsin –
Attorney William B. Rubin, Wisconsin delegate to the Democratic National Convention which renominated President Roosevelt last summer, appealed to the Federal Communications Commission today for a curb on alleged “defamatory and untrue” Republican broadcasts.

He named as defendants in a notarized complaint which he said he had mailed to the commission in Washington, CBS, MBS, NBC and the Blue Network. Copies of the complaint were filed upon an outlet of each of the networks here and in Chicago. These included MTMJ, LEMP, WISN and WGN.

Complains as listener

Mr. Rubin said that he based his complaint on being “one of numerous citizens who uses the radio for the purpose of listening to and informing himself on political matters to enable him to properly vote on issues, and for candidates for office” in the Nov. 7 presidential election.

The complainant charged that between Oct. 1 and 16, the networks and other affiliated radio stations permitted the Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominees, Thomas E. Dewey and John W. Bricker, and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce (R-CT) to broadcast statements which “unjustly, unproperly and defamatorily” placed upon the President the responsibility for the present war.

Retractions asked

The commission was asked to demand that Mr. Dewey, Mr. Bricker and Mrs. Luce make corrections and retractions immediately over each of the radio channels which broadcast their charges. Mr. Rubin also petitioned the commission to require such candidates hereafter to file copies of their manuscripts 48 hours before they are broadcast with radio examiners who are empowered “to have all false and defamatory matters deflected therefrom.”

The complainant said he would be ready to file objections against renewal of broadcasting licenses of the offending radio stations if they failed to comply with the requirement.