America at war! (1941–) – Part 4

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Landon: Roosevelt retreating to isolationism

Sabetha, Kansas (UP) –
Alf M. Landon last night accused President Roosevelt of “retreating to isolationism,” and said it would be impossible for Governor Thomas E. Dewey to do worse in the field of foreign affairs than the President.

The 1936 Republican presidential nominee charged that the American people had been deluded regarding accomplishments of the Moscow and Tehran conferences, which he described as a “bitter disappointment.”

“Instead of a hard-boiled hoss trader,” he said, “Roosevelt is like the sap who is always grabbing for the check.”

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Gracie Allen Reporting

By Gracie Allen

Hollywood, California –
Well, officially, Halloween is supposed to be next Tuesday, but if you ask me, it’s been here too long already. The Democrats have been trying to frighten the Republicans, the Republicans have been trying to frighten the Democrats, and the voters’ polls have been frightening both of them.

And another nice little Halloween touch is furnished by the politicians who run around putting soft-soap on people’s windows so they can’t see what’s really going on.

Of course, the most frightening thing is the booing at the newsreels these days. I wish they’d stop that. George and I were sitting in a theater the other night when the audiences started booing. Poor George – he jumped up and started into his old vaudeville act.

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Eastman: Communists playing party politics now in hope of revolt later

10,000 conspirators against U.S. government digging in now for future crisis
By Max Eastman, written for the Scripps-Howard newspapers

EDITOR’S NOTE: Max Eastman, at present roving editor of Reader’s Digest, is perhaps best known as translator of Leon Trotsky’s mammoth History of the Russian Revolution and author of a study of humor, Enjoyment of Laughter. He taught philosophy at Columbia University before leaving to edit The Masses and later The Liberator. Well known as a poet and philosopher, Mr. Eastman, after spending several years in the Soviet Union, published the first accounts of the internal fight within the Russian Communist Party which ultimately led to the famous Moscow trials and purges.

Cambridge, Massachusetts –
It sounds like horse sense to say: “What do 100,000 Communists amount to in a country of 140 million? As long as they are working for the things we want, why not use them?

People who talk this way think they are hardheaded. They think they are realists. They think they have had too much experience to get excited over a bogey.

The fact is they are provincial. They lack the experience which would enable them to form an intelligent judgment about this subject.

The Communist movement is not a propaganda league, an electoral party, an effort of persuasion, a campaign to win 140 million people to Communism.

The Communist movement is a conspiracy to seize power.

Care only for power

Its purpose is to destroy by force, and with a bloody purge, the democratic form of government and the system of free enterprise on which it rests. The Communists have only an incidental interest in propaganda or persuasion. They don’t care whether the American people are won to Communism or not. They are opposing Communism themselves now because they find this the easiest way to get their members, accomplices and dupes into key positions. They care only about power. They are a mafia, not a political party – least of all an “educational association.”

The thing should be stated this way: 100,000 American citizens have been organized into a compact, disciplined, fanatical league to destroy the American Republic by any means, moral or immoral, that may come to hand. If a person had a hard knowledge of that fact, he would not be so glib about “using” these conspirators where they can be helpful.

John Wilkes Booth was a brilliant actor, but you wouldn’t have advocated using him in Ford’s Theater, if you had known his underlying purpose. There’s as little reason why any man loyal to the American Republic should employ a Communist, or an accomplice of Communists (a fellow traveler) in any governmental position, or any position of power or influence anywhere in the land.

Planning for crisis

Another thing our soft, ignorant and provincial “realists” don’t understand: Communists are not conspiring to seize power now. They know as well as you do the juvenile folly of that. They are planning to seize power in a nationwide crisis.

Everybody knows that crises will come. There are enough unsolved problems – economic, social, racial – even if the Communists were not busily stirring them up. The world is in a turbulent condition, and the United States is not immune to turbulence, Some of us forget this, but the Communists never forget it. They inherited from Karl Marx a long-range view of history. And, according to that view, trouble is about all there is to history. Periods of tranquility are illusions – at best they are transitions from one violent crisis of social struggle to another.

Communism is a conspiracy to seize power when we are in trouble.

Confront that fact, and you will no longer be casual about “using the Communists” where they can be used. We have passed through crises and we can pass through others with our free institutions intact, if their personnel is loyal.

Enemies of democracy

But if those institutions are rotten-spotted with people who have crawled in there with the express purpose of helping them to crumble when a crisis comes, then we will not survive. That is the hard fact. That is realism. That is horse sense.

Another way of saying it is this: You can’t back democracy and Communism. If you are loyal to one, you spurn the other. Every trained Communist has in mind the day of armed war against democracy. Every believer in democracy, if he has political intelligence, takes an attitude of militant resistance to Communism.

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Affidavit declares –
Consul had orders to pass Mrs. Browder

High-ups told him he must grant visa
By Ned Brooks, Scripps-Howard staff writer

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Bricker: Business must be freed of shackles

Fort Worth, Texas (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker, charging the New Deal with dilatory tactics that delayed the war effort, today said if the government handled post-war production as it did war production American business would be “harnessed and hitched” with Sidney Hillman and Earl Browder giving orders.

Denying that industry had to be “thrown” into war “by the scruff of the neck” as Vice President Henry A. Wallace said in a recent Cleveland speech, Mr. Bricker charged that industry could not get on with the rearmament program until the “restraining hands of the Palace Guard” were lifted and expert industrialists took over.

Up to Dewey

The GOP vice presidential nominee, in his first Texas speech prepared for delivery here before departing for Dallas said Governor Thomas E. Dewey was the man “to cast off the harness of paternalistic control” and give business “the green light” to produce and make jobs.

Mr. Bricker said:

If the government steps into the post-war production as it did into war production, Mr. [presidential adviser Harry] Hopkins and Mr. [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Morgenthau will be playing with the destiny of American labor and industrial management to tunes called by Sidney Hillman and Earl Browder. These gentlemen know exactly what they want. They want American business harnessed and hitched.

Answers Wallace

Attacking Mr. Wallace’s Cleveland speech in which the Vice President said, “You had to take industry by the scruff of the neck and throw it into the war,” Mr. Bricker retorted:

Henry Wallace ought to know better than that. The New Deal took industry by the scruff of the neck all right as early as 1932 but the New Deal didn’t throw industry into the war. American industry got into production just as soon as the administration took its hands off the scruff of its neck.

He added:

And what a job of production industry performed when the restraining hand of the Palace Guard let go and when the expert industrialists took over.

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Truman attacks Dewey as evasive

Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
Senator Harry S. Truman, Democratic nominee for the Vice Presidency, said today that Governor Thomas E. Dewey was “hiding under the bed” in ignoring Mr. Truman’s challenge that he repudiate eight Republican Senators seeking reelection this year.

When he learned that Mr. Dewey had declined to comment on his demand, Mr. Truman issued a statement which said:

Just as I feared, Mr. Dewey has neither the courage nor the honesty to tell the American people what he intends to do about these eight Republican isolationists whose public utterances and voting records brand them as isolationists and untrustworthy on foreign affairs. Mr. Dewey is hiding under the bed, afraid to answer that question.

The statement said Mr. Dewey had resorted to “subterfuge” in getting telegrams from five Republican Senators and reading only one – from Senator Wallace H. White Jr. of Maine – in his address last night.

“Mr. Dewey did not read the telegrams from Senator [Robert A.] Taft, Republican isolationist from Ohio,” Mr. Truman said.

When I reach Akron, I am going to tell the people of Ohio about Senator Taft’s voting record on foreign affairs. It was a mighty bad one.

The other seven isolationists seeking reelection on the Republican ticket either were not asked or did not send even a meaningless telegram to Mr. Dewey. Why not? On Wednesday Mr. Dewey will follow me to Wisconsin, the home of Alexander Wiley, one of those seven, Let us ask Mr. Dewey whether he is for the reelection of Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin.

Mr. Truman said Mr. Wiley had voted against the Selective Service Act and its extension, the Lend-Lease Bill, defense appropriations, acquisition of merchant vessels, the arming of merchant vessels, and authorizing the requisitioning of plants and equipment for defense.

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New gains in Italy –
Yanks capture Mt. Grande near Bologna

Key to Po Valley may fall soon

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U.S. bombers blast Hamm, Hamburg area

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Six million Yanks now overseas

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MacArthur bestows his praise –
Valiant fight of patriots hailed as ‘key’ to liberty

U.S. commander tells how for two years arms and supplies were smuggled in
By the United Press

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U.S., Russia split on terms for Hungary

Americans consider reparations too high

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Japan to permit relief for Yanks

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Toast of Nazis’ nude orgies now reposes in Dutch jail

Woman’s blond curls are still in place as she awaits possible traitor’s death
By Edward V. Roberts, United Press staff writer

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B-29s again raid Jap homeland

Foe’s ‘Pittsburgh’ pounded heavily

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Funeral fails to reunite Bennetts

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Editorial: Dewey reads the record

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Editorial: Jobs for tomorrow

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Ferguson: The USA

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

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Background of news –
The border states

By Bertram Benedict

A prediction constantly heard as the 1944 campaign approaches its peak of intensity is that the candidate who carries the “border states” will win the Presidency.

This much is true: In every presidential election during the 20th century, the winning candidate has carried at least half of the “border states.” As a group these are heterogeneous politically, and seldom line up as a unit in a presidential election.

Today, the border states are usually considered to be these seven, reading from east to west – Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma (admitted to the Union in 1907). Together, they account for 67 of the 531 votes in the Electoral College.

Geographically, there is little reason for grouping these states together. West Virginia and Missouri extend north beyond the latitude of the Mason-Dixon Line, while Tennessee and Oklahoma are much farther south than is non-border Virginia.

Term applied before Civil War

These states do have a common feature in that the proportion of Negroes in their populations is smaller than in the South as a whole (from 6 to 8 percent in West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma; from 13 to 18 percent in Delaware, Maryland, Tennessee).

In the era preceding the Civil War, and during the Civil War, the term “border states” was applied to the tier of five slave states bordering on the free states: Delaware, Maryland, Virginia (the western part adjoining Pennsylvania and Ohio was detached during the war and became West Virginia), Kentucky, and Missouri.

All of these except Delaware sent a considerable number of soldiers to the Confederacy. Virginia seceded. The secessionist factions in Missouri and Kentucky set up separate state governments which were admitted to the Confederacy. Union troops helped to keep Maryland from seceding, while Delaware retained the institution of slavery until the 13th Amendment was adopted and voted against ratifying the amendment.

None of the border states was among the two carried by Alf M. Landon in 1936 or the 10 carried by Wendell Willkie in 1940.

Results since 1900

In the presidential elections since the turn of the century, border states have differed from the rest of the country as follows:

1900: Republican victory by a substantial margin, but Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri went Democratic.

1904 and 1908: Republican landslides, but Kentucky, Maryland and Tennessee went Democratic.

1912: With the third-party candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt splitting the Republican vote, it was a Democratic landslide. All the border states went Democratic, but only Kentucky and Tennessee by majorities instead of pluralities.

1916: Democratic victory by a narrow margin, but Delaware and West Virginia went Republican.

1920: Republican landslide, but Kentucky went Democratic.

1924: Republican landslide, but Oklahoma and Tennessee went Democratic.

1928: Republican landslide, and none of the border states was among the eight states carried by Alfred E. Smith.

1932: Democratic landslide, but Delaware was one of the six states for Herbert Hoover.

Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri have Republican Governors; Delaware and Oklahoma, each a Republican Senator. The GOP has most of Missouri House seats.

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Millett: Nurse training is urged

One year course is proposed
By Ruth Millett

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De Gaulle asks U.S. to free French gold

Belgium holds strings on big hoard
By Hal O’Flaherty

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Russia plans to buy steel mill in U.S.

Seeks data, bids for complete plant

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Poll: Third party vote to total less than 1%

Norman Thomas chief candidate
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion

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Stokes: Praise for PAC

By Thomas L. Stokes

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