Over 65 die in Cleveland explosion; 50-block area hit; loss S10 million
Many children are among victims
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Foreign policy speech tonight –
Roosevelt takes campaign to sidewalks of New York
Two million expected to see President as he braves drizzle in open car
New York (UP) –
President Roosevelt took his fourth-term reelection campaign to this vast damp city today in an open car, 50-mile motor tour despite wet weather and gray skies.
Bare-headed and without the cape which had sheltered him earlier, the President made the first major station of his citywide swing at Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ ballpark, where he called upon an estimated 16,000 persons to return Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) to the U.S. Senate.
He speaks tonight before the Foreign Policy Association.
KDKA and KQV will broadcast the speech at 9:30 p.m. EWT.
Bad weather, brushed over the metropolitan area by the diminishing force of a hurricane-at-sea, cut crowds and took some of the sparkle from the occasion. But the President made good on the promise that he would parade “rain or shine.” He did so at the head of a motorcade of about 50 cars which was destined to be on the streets for four hours or more. Near noon the schedule was lagging by half an hour.
Will tour five boroughs
From the Brooklyn depot, where he arrived just before 8:30 a.m., Mr. Roosevelt will move for four hours or more through all but one of the city’s five boroughs. He will see and be seen by more persons, than could be mustered in many a prairie state in a matter of days.
Military courtesies were not wholly observed at the beginning of the city-swing. There was no 21-gun salute at the Army depot and it was as Candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt and not as the Commander-in-Chief that the President came to town. The party left the Brooklyn depot at 10:02 a.m. for the first leg of the journey to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The next was Ebbets Field, home grounds of the Brooklyn Dodgers, where the rally for Senator Wagner attracted additional thousands because the President appeared.
Route well-guarded
Ten thousand policemen – vacations and other leave canceled in this war-time political emergency – were guarding the route. Rooftops were ordered cleared and the Secret Service, and probably the FBI, were on unostentatious duty. This is Mr. Roosevelt’s first wholly public appearance since Pearl Harbor.
He has travelled far and often since then but his plans have been unannounced and his route as much of a military secret as a war plan. This avowedly political public appearance was undertaken under pressure of the President’s campaign advisers who believe there are thousands of yotes to be gained by presenting the President in person to the curbside crowds.
Crowds gather early
And if his health is an issue in this campaign, it doubtless will be remarked by the electorate that the President was not fearful of spending hours in an open car on a day which promised at any moment to send even the ducks indoors.
Hatless at the start of his tour, the President arrived at the Navy Yard at 10:18 a.m. Mrs. Roosevelt awaited him there. Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and other municipal and party leaders were in the parade. Mr. La Guardia in the presidential car for the first leg of the ride.
Child greets Roosevelt
Four-year-old Carol Levine, a Brooklyn beauty, came up with the first placard of the thousands which are expected to greet the President today. It was homemade, mailed to a suck and read: “Long Live Roosevelt.”
The first Roosevelt speech of the day was at Ebbets Field where some 7,500 persons had gathered well in advance of the President’s arrival as Senator Wagner began his preliminary remarks. The President will speak later today at Hunter College, a WAVE installation, in the Bronx.
Tonight, he will make the third of his formal and avowed nationwide political broadcasts before a Waldorf-Astoria Hotel dinner of the Foreign Policy Association.
Police seem apprehensive
A raw drizzle in the Ebbets Field section of Brooklyn dampened the occasion and the stands blossomed umbrellas by the hundreds. The area of the Navy Yard was cleared of all spectators before the President’s appearance. Police and others responsible seemed apprehensive.
The President’s battered old campaign fedora, a veteran of 1932, came into view early as the procession got underway.
Municipal politicos alternated in the open car with Mr. Roosevelt. But he had one constant companion – Fala, the White House dog. There were two secret service men on each side of the car, assigned to the running boards for an anxious four-hour tour of duty. Military bands – one of them powered by WACs – sent the party away from the Army depot with a blare of sound.
Bad weather cuts crowds
Mr. Roosevelt was 23 minutes behind schedule when he reached Ebbets Field at 10:58 a.m. Bad weather had cut the crowds on the early laps. But there were cheers, banners and shouts from windows and from the curbs. The sidewalk crowds were in knots of 500 here and 1,000 there, concentrated largely where the President was expected to make brief stops.
It was a colorful procession. City and national flags and the President’s own standard flew from the handlebars of the 50-motorcycle escort. Each time the motorcade slowed a dozen Secret Service men loped up alongside the presidential car to screen its flanks.
Rain fell steadily as the procession rolled at 30 miles an hour into the downtown section of Brooklyn.
The President and his wife smiled and nodded to the crowds, Mr. Roosevelt giving from time to time with a two-hand, overhead gesture or with a wave of the old hat acknowledgement. Women observed that Mrs. Roosevelt wore a dark red, fur-collared coat and a felt hat. Crowds stood three-deep along downtown Brooklyn curbs.
There was a buzz of curbside comment as the President passed by. “He looks swell” was a frequent judgement, and there was comment that in the long procession of cars only one top was down – the President’s.
Rail union paid Flynn $25,000, Dewey claims
Fee is for pay boost Roosevelt granted
By Kermit McFarland
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican candidate for President, came to Pittsburgh last night to charge that Edward J. Flynn, friend of President Roosevelt and third-term Democratic National Chairman, received a $25,000 legal fee for representing the railroad brotherhoods when Mr. Roosevelt granted them a wage increase of eight cents an hour.
This was the most spectacular angle in a labor speech Mr. Dewey delivered at an audience estimated at 12,000 which jammed Hunt Armory, despite a downpour of rain, to hear the Republican candidate in a major bid for Pennsylvania’s 35 electoral votes.
‘What happened?’
Mr. Dewey, to the hilarious applause of his audience, went into meticulous detail in describing the manner in which the railroad wage, increase came about.
When the controversy began, he said, the mediation laws which apply to railroad unions were operating successfully.
“But what happened?” he asked.
He answered that by saving Economic Stabilization Director Fred M. Vinson “destroyed the effectiveness of the Railway Labor Act by setting aside the recommendation of the mediation board for an increase of eight cents an hour.”
‘Uncertainty and tension’
Then, he charged, after the railroad workers had threatened a strike, “the grasping hand of one-man rule reached in and set itself above the law.”
While uncertainty and tension increased, Mr. Roosevelt did nothing but wage a war of nerves against the railway workers. Finally, he decided the stage was set for making political capital… Finally, Mr. Roosevelt seized the railroads to forestall a national disaster which he himself had prepared. After he did that, he graciously gave the very wage increase to which the railway workers had been entitled for over a year.
Then he charged that the railroad unions “had to be represented by special legal counsel” and that Mr. Flynn was the attorney they “had” to hire.
“The price of his services to the railroad workers,” Mr. Dewey alleged, “was $25,000.”
Interruptions
“That sort of business,” he went on, “must come to an end in this country.”
Mr. Dewey, whose half-hour speech was interrupted 24 times by noisy applause, promised his listeners that if he is elected, he stands committed to a program “that will ensure to American labor the guarantee of free collective bargaining through the National Labor Relations Act, and with freedom from government dictation.”
The Republican candidate’s speech not only was a straight-out bid for the labor vote in this industrial area, but also an appeal to the “white collars.”
15 months delay
He cited the case of a white-collar worker whose employer proposed to give him a pay raise.
He said:
More than 15 months after the original request, the New Deal settled the case by the old kangaroo court method of splitting the difference.
He said the New Deal is a “bankrupt organization” and that Mr. Roosevelt “has not offered to the people of this country even the pretense of a program for the future.”
Mr. Dewey said Democrats “resent the kidnaping of their party by the Communists and the Political Action Committee” and that a change in the Washington government “will speed total victory and will also speed our work for a just and lasting peace.”
One-man rule
He charged the New Deal “distrusts the people” and claims the social gains of the 1930s “as its private property.”
He accused the Roosevelt administration of “playing with the rights of labor for political power and political cash” and charged that the President is attempting to establish “one-man rule” over working men and women.
Mr. Dewey said that “playing with the rights of labor for political power and political cash is bad enough,” but “there is something even more dangerous in what the New Deal is doing.”
He then quoted Robert J. Watt, an AFL official, as saying:
Even as we fight for the survival of basic freedoms, we find that the democratic process in many ways is being hog-tied and rendered subordinate to the dictum of a one-man boss…
His pledges
The candidate reiterated pledges to appoint a Secretary of Labor from “the ranks of labor,” to abolish agencies he said are “strangling collective bargaining,” to establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee on a permanent basis, to give the Labor Department greater authority, to do away with “special privilege" and to expand unemployment insurance to all groups, including 20 million he said now are denied old-age and survivors’ insurance.
Mr. Dewey had a responsive crowd for his speech, which was carefully staged.
The audience not only gave him a prolonged ovation on his initial appearance, but, besides the applause, frequently required him to pause by breaking out with boos for “my opponent” and for “Boss Flynn of the Bronx” and laughs and yells of encouragement.
Some partisan kept hollering, “You tell ‘em, Tom!”
Plea for Davis
Mr. Dewey was introduced by Governor Edward Martin who also received a roaring ovation when he entered the hall on a carefully-timed arrival under the escort of a squad of State Police.
The Pennsylvania Governor, who made a special plea for U.S. Senator James J. Davis, his opponent for the gubernatorial nomination in 1942, said, “We want to bring our boys back to an America like they are fighting for.”
Crowd in tumult
Gauging his time by the hour Mr. Dewey was to start speaking over a radio network, the Governor completed his speech, paused briefly, looked a bit anxiously toward the entrance through which the presidential candidate was to enter, then said:
I want to give you that courageous young Governor of New York, the next President–
But the words were lost in the tumult which followed as the crowd, 9,500 of them seated but the others standing, rose with an outburst of applause, cowbells and other noisemakers to greet the smiling and dapper presidential nominee as he strode up a side aisle to the platform, accompanied by Mrs. Dewey and an escort of police.
Mr. Dewey’s speech was delayed at the start as the audience broke into a noisy chant, “We want Dewey, we want Dewey.”
Mr. Dewey began:
It is good to be in Pennsylvania and to hear from Governor Martin that your state is in the Republican column and for Senator Davis.
Other speeches
Before the presidential candidate’s appearance, the crowd heard speeches by Warren Atherton, former commander of the American Legion, Republican County Chairman James F. Malone, Supreme Court Justice Howard W. Hughes, and Superior Court Judge Arthur H. James.
Mr. Dewey, neatly dressed in a brown suit, smiled and waved to the crowd from both sides of the speaking stand both before and after his address.
Mrs. Dewey, wearing a simple black coat, decorated by an orchid, and a red-feathered turban, sat between Governor and Mrs. Martin smiling shyly while the candidate delivered nis address.
Mr. Dewey, after his arrival at noon yesterday, held several conferences, among them one with a delegation of United Mine Worker officials.
‘He is against us’
After the UMW meeting, John O’Leary, vice president, said “We’re against President Roosevelt because he is against us.”
The Republican candidate was escorted to the East Liberty armory by City and State Police. He was sirened back in ample time to catch his. special train, which returned to Albany the way it came, via Ashtabula, Ohio, Erie and Buffalo.
Members of the Pennsylvania Reserve Defense Corps (Home Guard) were on duty at the armory and the unit’s band provided the music.
The truth about the Commies –
Communists kidnapped American Labor Party with help of Hillman
Dubinsky and others resigned rather than follow Red direction of union political group
By Frederick Woltman, Scripps-Howard staff writer
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the fifth in a series of articles describing how American Communists, by utilizing their technique of infiltration, haver 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 –
Sidney Hillman, generalissimo of the CIO’s political action venture on behalf of a fourth term, handed the Communists their greatest political weapon in 25 years of unproductive left-wing conniving.
He gave them, lock stock and barrel, a major political party, New York’s American Labor Party, which has been able to swing a balance of power in the state representing the largest bloc of electoral votes in the country.
In kidnapping the American Labor Party in New York State, Mr. Hillman and the Communists learned a lesson and secured a pattern which was easily expanded into a national program by the CIO Political Action Committee.
This Hillman maneuver represented the Political Action Committee’s introduction into power politics. To the Communists, already delighted with the opportunity to hide behind false fronts, it furnished a readymade political machine without the handicap of the Communist label.
Took over party
To Mr. Hillman, it supplied a valuable rehearsal for his current nationwide campaign to reelect President Roosevelt.
“Clear everything with Sidney” was an injunction which paid big dividends to the Communists last March.
Here was a party organized in 1936 by the Empire State’s leading trade unionists and capable of mustering nearly half a million votes. The Communists for years had been trying to capture the American Labor Party. Communist headquarters, unable to rally enough votes to keep the party emblem on the ballot, directed its members to register in the American Labor Party.
Then Mr. Hillman, in his first move as commander-in-chief of the Political Action Committee, made a deal with the Communist clique of the Labor Party. In the March 1944 party primary, the Communists took over the basic units and state committee of the party, allowing Mr. Hillman to accept the state chairmanship.
**Daily Worker’s instructions
Today Browder’s newly-named Communist Political Association works Officially with and through the American Labor Party. Indeed, The Daily Worker, official Communist organ edited by Browder, issues such instructions to the Communist stalwarts as follows:
What You Can Do to Help Reelect President Roosevelt:
Report to your nearest American Labor Party or Communist Political Association headquarters and volunteer your services as a registration candidate.
Mr. Hillman dismisses as “a red herring” any imputation of Communist influence in the Political Action Committee. But he did not come through the American Labor Party scrap untainted. On the contrary, some of the Political Action Committee’s own leaders as well as other trade unionists pinned the Red banner right on him.
Dubinsky accuses Hillman
Said David Dubinsky, founder of the labor party and its principal backer until the Hillman-Communist victory:
I regard the former American Labor Party as a Communist Labor party, and am therefore withdrawing… Mr. Hillman can act as a front for the Communists; I never did and never will…
Himself a supporter of President Roosevelt, Mr. Dubinsky, president of the AFL International Ladies Garment Workers Union, has since taken the non-Communist leadership out of the American Labor Party and organized a Liberal Party. While now working for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket, the new party refuses to co-operate or associate with Mr. Hillman.
A high CIO official, Samuel Wolchok, president of the United Retail and Wholesale Employees and a member of the CIO executive board, scathingly attacked Mr. Hillman’s alliance with the Communists. He declared:
While in sympathy with the CIO Political Action Committee on a nationwide basis, I am unalterably opposed to Mr. Hillman’s use of its machinery to foist a new form or organization on the New York American Labor Party which, far from uniting its membership, will inevitably lead to its utter disruption.
Thirty others revolt
Thirty more CIO officials and Political Action Committee backers revolted against Mr. Hillman and called in vain for him “to abandon the campaign he is waging for the election of Communist candidates” to American Labor Party office. They added that “joining hands with the Communists” is “not only wrong in principle but dangerous politically.”
One CIO official, Sam Baron, manager of the CIO Textile Workers’ New York office, resigned his union position, charging that Mr. Hillman had set up “a political dictatorship” in the textile union “in his desire to attain national political leadership.”
Mr. Hillman, he charged, had “compelled” every textile official to back up the Hillman-Communist coalition although “not one… had any sympathy for it.”
Mr. Baron added:
Any attempt to compel individuals to follow the dictates of a political boss, even though he comes from the ranks of labor, is fraught with danger. Political freedom is one of our most precious possessions. It antedates Mr. Hillman…
Mr. Hillman weathered this opposition. The Communists acquired a new party for themselves in New York State. And both, now, have turned to the greener fields of national politics.
Perkins: Rail union papers follows Dewey tack on pay issue
Weekly organ Labor headlines ‘White House Held Responsible for Adverse Decision’
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
Washington –
By coincidence, Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s slam-bang labor speech in Pittsburgh last night, with much of it directed toward railway workers, is followed today by some uncomplimentary remarks about the Roosevelt Administration in Labor, weekly organ of 15 railroad labor organizations.
The article is headlined.
- “Labor Disappointed Over Failure To Change ‘Little Steel’ Formula”
- “White House Held Responsible for Adverse Decision”
- “‘FD’ Had Given Union Chiefs Definite Impression That He Favored Change”
- “Workers Lose Billions”
- “Talk About Action ‘After the Election’ Branded ‘Just s Goldbrick’ by Meany” (George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the AFL)
The spectacular charge by Governor Dewey that “Bronx Boss” Ed Flynn was employed as counsel by some of the railway brotherhoods in last winter’s railway wage row was not news to railway labor leaders here, although the size of the fee alleged by the Republican candidate ($25,000) was not generally known. Mr. Flynn appeared in preliminary proceedings in Chicago, but was not publicly in the picture when the controversy shifted to Washington.
Whitney hired Flynn
Railway labor executives said Mr. Flynn was employed on the initiative of A. F. Whitney of Cleveland, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen and an outspoken Roosevelt supporter.
Recounting the history of the War Labor Board’s decision to make only a fact-finding report with no recommendations to the White House on a change in the national wage policy, the Labor article stated: “In labor circles, the general impression is that the action was in line with instructions from the White House.”
Election cited as factor
Recounting that labor leaders had an early impression that President Roosevelt favored a relaxation of wage control; that CIO President Philip Murray, after a White House conference, predicted an early change; but that “foes of labor,” identified as the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “laid down a barrage against relaxation of the wage shackles,” the paper said:
Evidently, the Chief Executive, nearing an election, felt he could not face such an attack, even though the interests behind it were those which always opposed the major features of the “New Deal” program.
Thereafter, a change in front occurred. The White House and “FD’s” lieutenants started throwing cold water on the idea of modifying wage controls – at least until after the election.
Meany calls it ‘goldbrick’
Mr. Meany was quoted as saying:
A promise to lift wage controls after “V-E [Victory in Europe] Day” is just a goldbrick so far as the workers are concerned. It won’t mean anything to them.
Mr. Meany based his statement on the premise that with V-E Day:
War contracts will be canceled right and left. Layoffs of millions of workers will start. Other millions will be reduced to shorter working hours. One would have to be gullible, indeed, to believe that employers at such a time will raise wages, even if the administration says they should. In fact, that’s when they will try to cut wages.
Mr. Meany is an AFL member of the War Labor Board and voted against the majority, made up of public and management members, who favored no recommendation, but only a presentation of facts and statistics, to the President. CIO members belligerently threatened to place the issue on the President’s desk without regard to the Board’s procedure, but have cooled off in this determination – reportedly because they were informed such action would work against the reelection chances of the candidate they are supporting.
Steele: Philippines drive elates Chinese
Asiatics now believe help is near
By A. T. Steele
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U.S. raid on Rangoon reported by Japs
By the United Press
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Is Washington safe for women? People wonder after three murders
Girl workers warned never to walk alone
By Martha Strayer, special to the Pittsburgh Press
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Poll: Young voters still favor Roosevelt
Those of 50 or over support Dewey
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Bricker blasts ‘indispensability’
Failures paved way for war, he charges
Provo, Utah (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker today labeled President Roosevelt’s “vaunted indispensability” for foreign affairs a “myth” and blamed him for failure of the 1933 World Economic Conference which, he said, paved the way for the present war.
In a speech prepared for delivery here, the Republican vice-presidential nominee asserted the New Deal did not want next month’s election decided solely on domestic issues, because it feared “an overwhelming defeat.” Instead, he said, the Democrats want the campaign based on foreign issues because they think they can win on them.
Governor Bricker said:
The New Dealers believed they have been able to keep the people in the dark on foreign affairs so that their high-sounding phrases and noble platitudes will sound persuasive. …The New Deal candidate’s vaunted indispensability for foreign affairs is pure myth.
Governor Bricker said the “tragic story” of the London conference “proves” the myth. American delegates, he said, lacked purpose and direction, were split by dissension, and when they finally seemed on the verge of a minor agreement, “Mr. Roosevelt sent a blighting message to the conference blasting all hopes.”
Governor Bricker said:
That closed the door on international conferences until war broke out. Germany was given a free rein to go ahead.
Can’t trust Dewey, Truman charges
Butte, Montana (UP) –
Senator Harry S. Truman said last night that Governor Thomas E. Dewey had to be “smoked out” on foreign affairs and that a “man who has to be smoked out isn’t to be trusted.”
Addressing a Democratic rally here, Senator Truman departed from his prepared text to say:
Mr. Dewey has been a long time finding where he stands on world affairs. We finally smoked him out. A man who has to be smoked out isn’t to be trusted.
In other departures from his prepared speech, Senator Truman urged unity among groups primarily interested in reclamation, flood control and power development in the Missouri Valley to promote the development of all three, and he spoke out for the first time on his campaign tour against sectional discriminations in freight rates.
He pledged the administration would extend rural electrification after the war if it is kept in office Nov. 7.
Wallace warns Midwest farmers
Omaha, Nebraska (UP) –
A Republican victory in the November election would lead to the “same abyss of crumbling farm prices” that occurred during the farm board days of the Hoover administration, Vice President Henry A. Wallace declared here last night.
Mr. Wallace said:
The Republicans want to do the farm board all over again. The Republican high command wants to destroy the AAA and the ever-normal granary. It advocates crop loans and support prices without the ever-normal granary.
He cited the Congressional records of party support of farm legislation under the New Deal and then asked who the farmers’ friends were.
He asked:
Will it be the Governor of Ohio and the Governor of New York, or will it be Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman?
As cries of “yes, yes” rolled, from the audience, he asked for the election of Democratic Congressmen – “tools for Roosevelt to work with.”
Ferguson: New privilege
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
Next February, French women will vote for the first time. The news is one indication that the democratic spirit spreads.
I once heard Eve Curie say that French women did not need the ballot. Without it, they still exercised a great influence over men’s political thought and activities. She believed in the old “power-behind-the-throne idea.”
Since she said that, France has been overrun and ruled for four years by enemy tyrants. It would be absurd to say that lack of feminine voting rights ad anything to do with that tragedy. But it would not be absurd to ponder how much French women have done for their unhappy land during its days of misery and defeat.
Without their help, the Maquis might have been crushed; and since the Maquis gave such great assistance to the liberating armies this summer, women deserve a share in their glory.
Probably France would not have been spared her humiliation, if her women had had the franchise after 1914. Since we are usually as stupid as men, there can be no positive statements about that. Women must also have failed to see the dangers of disunity when factions were tearing France apart and softening it up for conquest.
Nevertheless, in the future, France like other nations will have many women who do not possess a man to influence. These women as well as others bear the anguish of war, and the deprivations of economic disaster. Men of justice and goodwill no longer can withhold from them the right to a share in political authority.