Poll: Campaign has little effect on labor vote
Sentiment about same as month ago
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
…
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.
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.
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.
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.
GOP faction’s nipped by court
Atlanta, Georgia (UP) –
A black-and-tan Republican faction, backed by the national GOP but unrecognized in Georgia, lost another and possibly the final round yesterday in its battle for the right to represent the party on the Georgia ballot in November.
The State Supreme Court, without dissent, denied the faction’s plea for rehearing of a decision handed down last week which sustained Secretary of State John Wilson in his certification of a lily-white group of Republicans as the proper group to name GOP presidential electors.
Georgia’s ballots, listing electors of the faction, have long since been printed and thousands have been mailed to out-of-state servicemen. Election officials thus believed that any further attempts by the black-and-tans to force a change in the ballot would be impractical.
The decision climaxed an intraparty racial squabble that has split Georgia Republicans for years and which this year was taken to court at the instance of the national GOP, which at its Chicago convention seated the black-and-tans rather than the lily-whites.
Wallace calls GOP foe of agriculture
Mason City, Iowa (UP) –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace, son of a former Republican Secretary of Agriculture, continued a tour of the Midwest today after having declared that the Republican Party “down through the years has opposed equality for agriculture.”
Mr. Wallace said:
The Democratic Party has given agriculture what collective bargaining is to labor and corporations are to capital, and the Republicans want to take it away from you.
The ignorance of the Ohio Governor and the New York Governor concerning corn belt agriculture is colossal.
Battle of Statler inquiry studied
Washington (UP) –
The Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee was called into closed session today to decide if and when it will give a public airing to the celebrated “Battle of the Statler” between two Navy officers and members of the AFL Teamsters Union.
Chairman Theodore F. Green (D-RI), arranged the meeting to present evidence gathered by committee counsel Robert T. Murphy, but said he would make no personal recommendation one way or the other as to a formal inquiry.
The decision, he said, must be made by the committee, not the chairman, but “I hope they decide today.”
Senator Green refused prior to the meeting to answer any questions concerning the brawl that took place in the Statler Hotel here on Sept. 23 just after President Roosevelt had opened his political campaign with an address before the AFL union.
The officers involved, LtCdr. James Suddeth, 33, and Lt. Randolph Dickins, 23, contends it all started when members of the union collared them and demanded to know how they vote. They replied that it was strictly their business, whereupon fists began to fly.
Perkins: Labor eases demands for ruling on pay
Roosevelt unlikely to act before election
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
Washington (UP) –
Now that the presidential candidates have reached the stage of pulling “facts” on each other, the following facts are presented from the record with regard to whether President Roosevelt will feel it his duty to order an upward revision of wage standards before Election Day.
A week ago, the public members of the War Labor Board decided they would make no recommendation to the President on this dynamic question, but would merely present a factual report on the situation and let him make the decision. Whereupon the labor members of the Board roundly condemned the public members. Two CIO representatives announced a determination to get the question to the President by next Saturday – about two weeks before the election.
But yesterday the labor members, CIO as well as AFL, went along with the public WLB members in deciding that the latter should have until a week from today to submit to the full board their ideas on what should be contained in their report to the President. The labor members’ determination for a quick presidential decision has cooled off. Under the schedule to which they agreed there will be hardly any chance for a ruling by Mr. Roosevelt before the Nov. 7 balloting.
So, the union members and other wage-earners who have been looking for an early and final presidential decision on the case will have to wait until after Nov. 7.
Mr. Roosevelt will be spared the embarrassment of making a decision that (a) would alienate some of his labor support, or (b) risk upsetting the anti-inflationary applecart.
The truth about the Commies –
Communists backed Roosevelt after he freed Earl Browder
And then New Deal gave its blessing to Mrs. Browder’s residence in U.S.
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in a series of articles describing how American Communists, by utilizing their technique of infiltration, have burrowed into American unions, kidnapped the American Labor Party in New York, dominated the CIO Political Action Committee and made strong inroads into the New Deal administration.
Washington –
It was after the American Communists got orders to drop their sabotage of this country’s defense preparations and back his administration that President Roosevelt released their leader, Earl Browder, from Atlanta Prison.
And, with the Communists riding high on the fourth term bandwagon, a New Deal board recently legalized the residence here of his wife, Mrs. Raissa Browder, an important Communist in her own right. It acted despite adverse recommendations by the War and Navy Departments and the FBI.
The steps against the Browder couple – the passport fraud conviction and the deportation order – were taken while the Communists operated under different orders. Then, as their contribution to the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, the orders were to scuttle America’s defense plans.
Skilled in quick shifts
These shifts from anti- to pro-administration were nothing new to the Communists after 25 years of dancing to the tune of a foreign master.
Today, playing Pied Piper for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket, they are telling the American people how to vote. And they’re warning them, in Browder’s words, that a Roosevelt defeat and a Dewey victory will destroy world unity and plunge Europe “into the most devastating civil war.”
Four years ago, their headquarters, the Communist International in Moscow, put on another record.
War preparations opposed
Its American loudspeaker, the Communist Party’s 1940 national convention, resolved “to combat the imperialistic policies and acts of the President, the State Department and Congress to spread the war and involve the United States in it… oppose all war loans and credits… not a cent, not a gun, not a man for war preparations.”
“Betrayer of the worker,” and “Servant of Wall Street” were a few of the epithets the Communists threw at Sidney Hillman, now their current favorite and teammate in the CIO Political Action Committee.
Of the seven presidential campaigns since the Communists were first organized in America, this will be their first to support a major party candidate. The honor, of which President Roosevelt is the beneficiary, represents more than simple repayment for his goodwill gesture to the Browders.
Moscow’s policies followed
The Communists today, as always, accept as commands the necessities of Russia’s foreign policy. Stalin right now is anxious to make the Tehran agreements stick. So, Browder and the Communists, according to their official newspaper, The Daily Worker, “start from the premise that the accord reached at Tehran constitutes the greatest turning point in world history.”
In their eagerness to reelect the President, they’ve scrapped the class struggle temporarily, cloaked themselves in an ill-fitting garb of 100 percent Americanism and conveniently put among mothballs the revolutionary creed on which they were raised and nurtured. They don’t like to recall:
The statement of William Z. Foster, Browder’s predecessor, in 1930, that “you cannot cure unemployment except by the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a Soviet government in the United States…”
‘The enemy of religion’
The declaration at the same time by Robert Minor, who acted as a stand-in for Browder while the latter was in prison:
The Communist Party is the party of the working class, leading the workers in the class struggle and recognizing that all of history is made up of the struggle which has never been solved and never can be solved without violence.
And Mr. Browder’s own pontification, in 1935, that “the Communist Party is the enemy of religion” and the more the masses “participate in the revolution, the less likelihood is there of the church becoming an essential feature of the new social setup.”
During the many years they enthusiastically flaunted their revolutionary beliefs, the comrades made wholesale use of forged passports for their pilgrimages to the party mecca, Moscow. Two party officials served terms, including Charles Krumbein, now treasurer of the newly-named Communist Political Association.
Browder too confident
Browder, convinced he was protected by the statue of limitations, openly admitted he had traveled on other persons’ passports, altered to suit him.
Subsequently, he got four years for perjury. The party denounced the Roosevelt administration for “political persecution” and deified Browder as “the first victim of the second imperialist war." It demanded his release to “lead the fight for peace in America.”
France fell, the Battle of Britain reached its peak, and still Browder was a “martyr to the warmongers.”
Then the Nazis invaded Russia and the American Communists switched. Now they demanded that their imprisoned leader be freed “so that his great talents may be used to help organize the forces of the people in a mighty crusade to annihilate German Fascism.”
With Pearl Harbor, the cry became “all out for national unity.” Among the first out was Browder, his sentence reduced from four years to 14 months.
His release, declared President Roosevelt, would “have a tendency to promote national unity and alley any feeling which may exist in some minds that the unusually long sentence was by way of penalty imposed upon him because of his political views.”
Hannegan derides Dewey’s promises
New York (UP) –
Democratic National Chairman Robert E. Hannegan charged yesterday that Governor Thomas E. Dewey had refused to argue any of the real issues of the presidential campaign and said the GOP candidate “would promise anything if he thought it would get him votes.” Mr. Hannegan issued a formal statement in which he attacked Mr. Dewey’s Monday night speech at St. Louis and other addresses as holding the record “for cold insolence, unexampled effrontery and callous disregard of either truth or probability.”
He repeated the charge made in a recent White House analysis of Mr. Dewey’s speeches that the Republican nominee had distorted the truth by selecting separate sentences of paragraphs out of administration reports. Mr. Hannegan charged this technique had been employed in regard to recommendations concerning the demobilization of the Armed Forces.
The Democratic chairman predicted that Mr. Dewey would “make his supreme bid for the internationalist vote” in his address tomorrow night before the New York Herald-Tribune Forum, and called on him to answer four questions:
How will you get a peace plan approved by a Republican Foreign Relations Committee headed by Senator Hiram Johnson?
How will you obtain the necessary appropriations from a Senate Appropriations Committee headed by Senator Gerald Nye?
If you believe that executive agreements should be ratified by a simple majority of both houses, have you made a deal with Ham Fish who would be your chairman of the Rules Committee to get your legislative program through?
If you are in good faith about an effective world organization to preserve the peace, will you have the honesty to repudiate the Chicago Tribune and Gerald L. K. Smith?
Brownell: Democrats jittery
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (UP) –
Commenting on the announcement that President Roosevelt will speak in Philadelphia Oct. 27, Herbert Brownell Jr., Republican National Chairman, said yesterday that “the jitters in the Democratic high command seem to have reached to the White House.”
Mr. Brownell, who conferred with Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Republican leaders, told a press conference “we are going to roll up the largest Republican vote in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia since the New Deal came into power.”
Asked if he meant that the Republicans would carry these two cities, Mr. Brownell said he meant just what he said and would not elaborate. President Roosevelt carried both cities in 1936 and 1940.
Mr. Brownell praised the leadership of Governor Edward Martin and said Pennsylvania Republicans are concentrating on an old-fashioned Republican majority in the Keystone state in November.