America at war! (1941–) – Part 4

americavotes1944

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.

americavotes1944

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.

americavotes1944

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.

americavotes1944

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.

americavotes1944

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.”

americavotes1944

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.

Editorial: How not to treat a wounded soldier

Editorial: How’s that again?

americavotes1944

Editorial: Why not the green light?

americavotes1944

Edson: Labor migration will affect election result

By Peter Edson

Ferguson: Progress

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

Army depends on home front, Forum told

Eisenhower pledges to destroy enemy

Millett: Letter has everything women want to hear

Soldiers keep wives happy with praise and devotion
By Ruth Millett

Navy to keep its production sights raised

Few cutbacks in output expected

FHA official predicts home building boom

G.I. Bill, heavy savings to spur construction

‘Mr. Personality himself’ –
McKeever gets top rating as coach of week

By Joe James Custer, United Press staff writer

Army to discontinue transmitting requests


Plan holiday broadcasts for servicemen

Gala programs are prepared

War workers must walk –
ODT halts taxis; drivers blamed

americavotes1944

Address by New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey
October 18, 1944, 9:30 p.m. EWT

Delivered before New York Herald-Tribune Forum, New York City

dewey2

It is a great pleasure to participate in this annual exchange of opinion about urgent problems of our time. Certainly, the most urgent problem we face in the world is the prevention of future wars.

We are agreed on one thing: We must not have a third World War. That means we must prevent a future war before it happens.

If any doubts remained after Pearl Harbor, they have been ended by the last desperate act of the Nazis in launching Hitler’s blind weapon of revenge, the robot bomb. This is futile savagery. But it serves to warn us against the future.

Japanese planes launched from a few aircraft carriers on December 7, 1941, struck us a devastating blow at Pearl Harbor. If we fail to make secure the peace of the world, the next war will not begin by a surprise attack upon an outlying base. It will begin when robot bombs launched thousands of miles away suddenly rain death and destruction on our major cities.

Even before this war, the airplane had reduced the size of the earth. The robot bomb has made this world of ours still smaller. It has put us under the guns of any aggressor nation that may rise to power anywhere in the world.

If there should even be a third World War, America would be in the front lines in the very first hour. That is not an argument. It is a fact.

Every American must learn the inescapable conclusion. We must never forget it. We must never again run the risk of permitting war to break loose in the world. Together with all freedom-loving people, we have had a narrow escape. We dare not take another chance. This war must be the last war.

To this end, the United States must take the lead in establishing a world organization to prevent future wars. I am more than a little tired of the defeatist attitude which some people take toward our participation in world affairs. To hear them talk, you would think the United States had never shown any competence in foreign relations. At least, not until the last few years.

Actually, from the earliest days of our nation, when Benjamin Franklin induced the King of France to enter the Revolutionary War on our side. American history is packed with diplomatic triumphs and international achievements.

Time and again, even in the earliest days of our republic, the United States wielded a moral force far in excess of its military power. In more recent years, our history is studded with a series of brilliant measures taken by able American Secretaries of State, to broaden the basis of international collaboration.

On any roll call of these great American Secretaries of State, there would stand out the names of Blaine and Hay and Root, of Hughes, Kellogg and Stimson. Their names are linked to such achievements as the Good Neighbor policy, the Open Door for China, the Hague Peace Conference, the disarmament conference by which the Japanese Navy was limited to an inferior status, the Pact of Paris to outlaw war, the World Court, the Policy of Non-Recognition of the fruits of aggression, and many measures to broaden the basis of international cooperation.

All these were great achievements carried through by men who had the respect of their country and of other nations. And every one of these great Secretaries of State I have mentioned was a Republican.

These achievements and countless others were made under administrations where the President conducted foreign affairs through the Secretary of State and our regular foreign service. These Presidents did not presume to be both President and Secretary of State. They did not presume to substitute their own personal will for the informed judgment of the American people.

If we are to be successful in our future labors to bring about lasting peace, they cannot be the property of one party or one man. It must draw its strength from all our people, everywhere. Only a united America can exercise the influence on the world for which its strength and ideals have equipped it. Of that I am deeply convinced.

I am equally convinced that to the extent that we leave our international relations to the personal secret diplomacy of the President, our efforts to achieve a lasting peace will fail. In many directions today, our foreign policy gives cause for deep anxiety.

The case of Poland is one example. Poland was the first nation to resist the oppression of Hitler. The restoration of free Poland is the outstanding symbol of what we are fighting for. Admittedly, Poland has differences with Russia that go deep in history and for which there is no simple solution. Yet Mr. Roosevelt undertook to handle this matter personally and secretly with Mr. Stalin. At their only meeting, neither our Secretary of State nor the Under Secretary was present, Instead, Mr. Roosevelt took along Harry Hopkins, who acquired his training in foreign affairs in running the WPA, But, because of the secret nature of the meeting, American public opinion has been silenced by the fear that some delicate negotiation might be embarrassed.

Mr. Roosevelt, nevertheless, has not yet even secured Russian recognition of those whom we consider to be the true government of Poland. Neither was it possible to save that immortal group of Polish patriots, led by Gen. Bor, who struck, as they believed, in coordination with Russia, only to be abandoned. After 63 days of gallant and unequal struggle, they were overwhelmed by the Nazis.

In all this, we Americans would have a clearer conscience if the voice of our people had not been stifled.

Now look to Italy. Some 15 months have passed since Italy’s surrender. We have sent over a batch of alphabetical agencies. They brought with them invasion currency bearing the legend “Freedom From Want. Freedom From Fear.” What a mockery that must seem to the Italian people.

Here is the comment of the vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, who has just returned from Italy. He reports “mass unemployment, hunger, despair, degradation, delinquency and painful disappointment” …because the Allies have not “helped the Italian people help themselves.” He quotes the solemn warning of the Pope as follows:

The great democracies must show greater interest and concern for Italy if she is not to plunge from one dictatorship into another.

The Italian people deserve something better than the improvised, inefficient administration which personal New Deal government is giving them.

Take now the case of Germany. Our experience in Italy should have brought about timely decisions on how to handle the invasion and occupation of Germany. As long ago as last January, Gen. Eisenhower told us we would have to deal with that problem this year. Yet, when the invasion of Germany began, there was still no official plan. Careful plans had, to be sure, been worked out by the two departments primarily qualified – the War and the State Departments. But that kind of planning goes for nothing when the President personally handles foreign policy.

There was a conference involving this very vital subject between the President and Mr. Churchill at Québec last month. Did Mr. Roosevelt take the Secretary of War or the Secretary of State to the conference? As usual, he took neither. Instead, he took with him the Secretary of the Treasury, whose qualifications as an expert on military and international affairs are still a closely-guarded military secret.

The result was a first-class cabinet crisis when it appeared that the work of the State Department and the War Department was to be scrapped in favor of a brand-new scheme produced by the Treasury. In the end, the Treasury plan was scrapped. A new plan was ordered, this time to be produced by Mr. Crowley, head of the Foreign Economy Administration. Today, just an hour ago, I was happy to learn that Allied headquarters had announced a military program for Germany.

Meanwhile, Germany’s Propaganda Minister Goebbels has seized upon the episode to terrify the Germans into fanatical resistance. On the basis of our Treasury Department’s ill-conceived proposals, the German people were told that a program of destruction was in store for them if they surrender. Almost overnight, the morale of the German people seemed changed. They are fighting with the frenzy of despair. We are paying in blood for our failure to have ready an intelligent program for dealing with invaded Germany.

Turn now to France. The unfortunate consequences of Mr. Roosevelt’s personal antipathy for Gen. de Gaulle are only too well known. We backed his antagonist, Darlan. When Darlan was assassinated, we backed Giraud. Now, with France free, Mr. Roosevelt is compelled to deal with Gen. de Gaulle, who is, in fact, heading the only existing French government. Mr. Roosevelt’s persistent refusal to grant recognition to the de Gaulle government of France is contributing to the increasing chaos behind our lines at a critical period of the war. France is Germany’s principal neighbor and knows most about German aggression. The glorious resistance the French people made during four tortured years entitles them to more generous treatment. We need France in our councils and we need her now.

One more illustration. Look at Romania. On September 12, 1944, an agreement was made restoring peaceful relations. This was no mere military armistice. That agreement fixed the future frontiers of Romania. It disposed of Bessarabia and Transylvania, two of the worst trouble spots of Europe. It dealt with economic matters.

Now, who negotiated and signed that agreement? It was signed “by the authority of the government of the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States by Melinosky.” That treaty was signed by a representative of Soviet Russia acting in behalf of the United States.

The day after it was signed, the Secretary of State of the United States declined to comment on the ground that the terms had not been received from Moscow in time to study.

These are just a few examples of what happens when a President insists upon handling foreign affairs on the basis of personal, secret diplomacy. The result is today that no one knows what our foreign policy is with respect to Poland, France, Germany, Romania and other countries of Europe, or for that matter, South America or China. We have no hint of what commitments may have been made, and American opinion is stifled and ineffective. Yet despite these obstacles, we are fighting our way to victory and we shall achieve American participation in a world organization to prevent future wars. We are going to succeed because in this matter we have followed the American way of doing things. The handling of this vital matter has been left to the State Department where it belongs.

Many times in the past, and six weeks ago, in detail, I have set forth the principles which should govern us in the great work ahead. There are two distinct tasks. One is the immediate problem of victory – the question of what shall be done with Germany and Japan when they have surrendered. The other is the long-term problem of world organization for peace.

The first task is primarily the responsibility of the victors. It will require continued close collaboration among the four great powers, the United States, Great Britain, Russia and China. France, too, must have a voice, as well as other countries whose territory has been conquered by the Nazis, but whose heroic people have shared in the winning of the victory.

Germany and Japan must not only be utterly defeated, but also completely disarmed. As I have already suggested, it may be necessary to forbid Germany any aviation industry of her own, and the entire Ruhr, which is the heart of Germany’s heavy industry, should be internationalized. Beyond that, the war criminals, both high and low, must be brought to justice. The people of Germany and Japan must be taught, once and for all, that war does not pay.

But I cannot repeat too emphatically that the second major task, the building of a world organization for peace, should not wait upon final victory. It should go forward as rapidly as possible, to immediate solution.

The main outlines of that organization have already become clear. It must include a general assembly comprising all the peace-loving nations of the world and a council small enough for almost continuous meeting and prompt action.

This world organization must be enabled, through the use of force where necessary, to prevent or repel military aggression. It must be supplemented by a world court to deal with international disputes.

These, in essence, were almost the recommendations since drawn up by the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks. At those conferences, we have made a good start. But this is only a beginning. Important matters remain to be worked out. It would be a profound tragedy if, after having reached a broad general area of agreement on the major principles, we should now fall to impatient quarreling over things still to be settled.

There are already those among us who want to attack the work that was done at Dumbarton Oaks because it did not go far enough. There are others, equally vehement, who are fearful that the plans go too far. Extremists on both sides have missed the point.

The important point is that a beginning has been made. Let us remember that achievement can only be reached through agreement – agreement between the Executive and Congress – agreement among our people – agreement not merely among the three most powerful nations, but among some 60 nations which must join in this endeavor for it to succeed. It is imperative that the small nations of the world be brought into full partnership in this work now and not later. World opinion in the final analysis is essential to continuing success, Force, without justice, can never preserve peace. The treatment of small nations is the test of the conscience of civilization. They should have a full share in these labors from the start.

There are two great disasters which could occur to us. The first would be if a few individual rulers should, in secret conferences, try to shape the future peace of the world. The second would be for any nation involved to break up into quarreling groups over individual proposals. We must make certain that cur participation in this world organization is not subjected to reservations that would nullify the power of that organization to maintain peace and to half future aggression. The surest way to invite disaster is to insist that everything must be perfect from the start. Human progress is not made in that way, and this is a profoundly human problem.

Whatever the difficulties, we must not be diverted from our goal by the irreconcilables of either camp. We have before us vividly the grim reminder of the robot bomb which shows no nation anywhere can be safe against aggression. No single nation can make itself impregnable to attack, We can no longer rely solely upon our own defenses, or upon our own love of peace. We can and we must have a world organization to prevent future wars.

We must have two unities on which to build. One is the unity of the United Nations. The other is unity of the American people.

We are working successfully now. With 130 million of our own people, to satisfy, and with almost 60 other nations to come to agreement – I am sure none of us will get exactly what he wants. Individuals must have convictions, but if any of us insists on exactly what he wants or nothing, we will get nothing, and that would be the greatest disaster the human race has ever suffered.

Secretary Hull is working steadily with a bipartisan committee of the United States Senate in the best American fashion. I have been happy to join with Secretary Hull in non-partisan work between both parties on the drafts which have recently been completed at Dumbarton Oaks. In the end, I am convinced that we can meet all of these problems if we will use patience, wisdom and the full force of our people’s determination.

We have made a great beginning. We must hasten our labors to a successful conclusion. Our objectives and our methods must be known to our people and approved by them, so that they will be willing to support them and to sacrifice for them in all the years to come. Ten million Americans are making sacrifices today beyond any our nation has seen before. Some will come home permanently scarred. Some will never return. These tragedies must not visit us again. Our dead must not have died in vain.

We must keep our unity at home bright and fresh for the great tasks ahead. With that unity, we can give leadership in bringing lasting peace to a stricken world.

americavotes1944

Address by Rep. Clare Boothe Luce (R-CT)
October 18, 1944

Delivered before New York Herald-Tribune Forum, New York City

Friendship and faith bring us all to this platform: Personal friendship for a great woman, Mrs. Ogden Reid; political faith in the proposition that during the next few years all political things will be ordered better if the candidate of our choice becomes the President of our nation. But not one of us, in this Forum, can prove that faith, for no man can prove or disprove what the future will bring.

The past is the only witness we can call into a Forum to testify for the future. Those who refuse to remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Let us remember so much as we can, in the twelve minutes allotted, about peace plans and peace leaders.

In time ago out of mind the Prophet Isaiah said: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” For thousands of years, mankind, tortured by war, has cried aloud in anguish for a leader to publish a plan that would bring the world a just and happy and lasting peace. Yet, we know that such a plan has long been published. None has ever been more widely published, or more widely approved. And by a strange coincidence, it takes exactly twelve minutes to read it: Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Unhappily, mankind has never fully accepted that Leadership, or ever put that plan for a just and lasting peace into effect, despite the fact that all other leaders and all other plans, deemed more politically practical in their day, have proven ineffectual.

Still, as Sir Thomas More said: “All things cannot be well unless all men are good, which I think will not be these many years.” That was four centuries ago. Sir Thomas is still waiting. Meanwhile our generation can take comfort and counsel of history.

The League of Nations was not, as some people suppose, the first comprehensive political plan for world peace that ever failed. For centuries men have made blueprints to prevent war. All the devices we propose or debate today have been proposed and debated and sometimes tried by other generations: peace by disarmament, peace by arbitration, peace by an international police force. Serious proposals for world disarmament began in China as early as 546 BC. Later the idea took such deep root in the heart of the Chinese people that they have been known, even down to our time, as the most pacifistic people on earth. We must note that disarmament, as a plan to prevent war, began to fail the Chinese people most pitifully when the 19th-century white imperialists, and today’s yellow imperialists, showed no similar enthusiasm for it.

Ancient Greece had a scheme of collective security: a federation that was a near approach to the League of Nations. The Greeks even had a name for it: “The Greek Amphictyony.”

Then there were the long Pax Romana and the long Pope’s Peace of the Middle Ages. We may note, in passing, that these great periods of peace were not planned in any blueprint sense. The secret of these peaces was law – the interpretation and growth of law, divine and human.

But as they lasted longer than any other peaces since, perhaps it is the beginning of wisdom today, in speaking of peace, US speak first of “peace with justice.”

After independent or “sovereign” nations developed again in western Europe in the sixteenth century political machines to keep the peace were invented by the score, and failed by the score.

Among them were the plans of Emeric Cruse in 1623, Hugo Grotius in 1625, William Penn in 1694, Abbot St. Pierre in 1731, Jeremy Bentham in 1786 and Immanuel Kant’s untried “Perpetual Peace” plan in 1795. Government by law, not by men, was Kant’s keystone for a peaceful modern world structure. A great contrast to Kant’s plan was the personal plan of Czar Alexander the First in 1804.

This became the basis of the Holy Alliance of 1815, finally pressed upon Europe with the full weight of the Czar’s prestige as the absolute ruler of Europe’s most powerful nation. His plan was a curiously Russian blend of shrewdness and mysticism, generosity and ambition which perhaps did not die with him. In the Czar’s secret instructions to his ministers in England, which he wrote in his own hand, we find these phrases… “never beginning a war until all the resources which the mediators of a third party could offer have been exhausted… and give birth to a league… a new code of the law of nations… those who should try to infringe it would risk bringing upon themselves the forces of this new union.”

Another peace plan, and perhaps the most elaborate and important of all, was the “Great Design” of Henry the Fourth in 1584. Very recently this name has been used by President Roosevelt, the fourth-term candidate, to describe his own plans for a lasting world peace.

The great design of Henry the Fourth provided for a confederation of states, each contributing specified quotas of foot soldiers, guns and ships to a common military peace force, this force was to act under the direction of a senate, or sort of supreme security council, representing fifteen participating states of Henry the Fourth’s day. The senate, sitting in perpetual session, had the power to create appropriate subcommittees, or an assembly. The plan was never put into effect, probably because France’s rival powers worried less Henry the Fourth, a wily diplomat and a strong leader of a strong nation, might use its “police force” to achieve the domination of Europe. Nevertheless, the “great design” became the master pattern for many other peace machines. The latest edition of the “great design,” which we all must hope is the best one, has just been published under the name of “The United Nations” by the conferees of Dumbarton Oaks – published, but not complete in detail, so not yet accepted by any of the Allied governments.

Here the past offers its testimony to the future for whatever it is worth to those who can interpret it correctly. The main incompletion of detail in “The United Nations” great design for world organization is the very detail that prevented Henry the Fourth’s original from being tried out at all. This is the detail concerning the ultimate control by the senate – or security council – of the international police force to be put at the disposition of the organization. For in Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s and Stalin’s day, as in Henry the Fourth’s, the international police force is plainly recognized as the “teeth” in the plan; and in our times, as 360 years ago, the great unanswered question about those teeth is, “Who puts the bite on whom?”

Several days ago, Under Secretary of State Stettinius called upon the American public to ponder that question, in order to hasten the realization of a truly effective world organization. No doubt in great public debate in this free democracy we will find a fair and a workable answer where the men of Henry the Fourth’s time failed. But it must be an answer that will be accepted, not only by Soviet Russia and Great Britain and China, but acceptable to all the little participating nations of Europe and Asia.

But why did the peace plans that were tried out in the past fall? The answer is relatively simple: they failed because they were technical machinery – blueprints – and nothing more. Then what more than good technical machinery is needed? Winston Churchill gave part of the answer in a telegram he recently sent a great League of Nations statesman, Viscount Cecil of Chetwood, on the occasion of Cecil’s eightieth birthday. Churchill wired: “The war could easily have been prevented, if the League of Nations had used courage, and had there been loyalty to associated nations.”

History has justified Mr. Churchill’s verdict. The League’s machinery never received the full and constant support of the great powers pledged to it.

All the past gives witness to this great lesson for the future: A machinery for peace will be no better than the willingness of governments and peoples to support it with continuing courage, and use it with constant vision.

On November 11, 1918, a great wartime President, Woodrow Wilson, hastily penciled a message to the American people. It began: “The Armistice was signed this morning. Everything for which America fought has been accomplished.”

Twenty-four years of League of Nations history have made a mockery of that thrilling message. For not only did Asiatic and European governments fail to use the League machinery with courage and vision but the world’s greatest power refused to use it at all. In 1920, the American people, through their Senate, formally rejected the League. Afterwards three Republican Presidents made no effort to enter it. Then in 1933 came a Democratic President – Franklin Roosevelt. Because of the waxing power of Hitler and Japan, the need for collective security from then on became ever greater. But in his seven years in office before the war broke, in Europe, our President again and again renounced the League. The lack of courage and vision deplored by Churchill in Europe’s statesmen was also lacking in America’s.

Plato said: “No one can be a true statesman… who has not room for courage in peace as in war.”

Lacking true statesmen with the courage to wage peace, the Allies are now waging war.

Let us hope that when our second V-Day comes, our President, whoever he is, will not assure us that a peace plan alone will guarantee that Utopia lies just around the corner. Let us hope that our President will have the valiance of spirit even in the jubilant hour of victory to tell us that tears and sweat and sacrifice still lie ahead in the waging of a just and durable peace; and that not only he, but his many successors must wage it.

Governor Dewey has clearly grasped this courageous concept of waging peace. I believe that he will wage it unremittingly.

In our national unity lies our real strength to wage peace. We the People must be one in spirit with our President.

We pray that our armies will soon be victorious everywhere, so that we and our President may embark on that endless adventure of peacemaking.