Editorial: Be a big shot (price $1000)
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Background of news –
When the electors bolted
By Bertram Benedict
A special session of the Mississippi Legislature is to be called, according to Governor Bailey, to amend the state’s election laws. This action will have been forced by three of the state’s nine presidential electors on the Democratic ticket. These three recently announced that they intended to vote for Senator Byrd (D-VA) for President instead of for President Roosevelt.
If any of the presidential electors elected Nov. 7 should vote on Dec. 18 for someone other than Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Dewey, they will be fulfilling the original intent of the Constitution. As every schoolboy knows, the framers of that document expected the electors to use their own judgment in electing the President and Vice President.
It was some time before the electoral system solidified into its present procedure. Some oddities in the procedure have been as follows:
1789: There were no votes from Rhode Island or North Carolina, because these states had not yet ratified the Constitution; or from New York, because the Legislature could not agree on the election procedure. Two electors chosen from Virginia and two from Maryland did not show up to vote. One of the two Marylanders was held up by ice in Chesapeake Bay, the other had the gout. Now most states provide that if any elector fails to vote, his vote shall be cast by his fellow-electors.
1800: The Federalists counted on the electors appointed by the South Carolina Legislature, but these voted for the Democratic-Republican candidate, Jefferson, and thereby elected him. But at the same time, they voted for a Federalist for Vice President. One elector picked in Pennsylvania to vote for Adams voted for Jefferson. Of the 15 electors from Pennsylvania, eight voted for Jefferson, seven for Adams. A majority of the states still had the electors picked by the legislature, instead of by popular vote. South Carolina did not end choice by the legislature until after the Civil War.
1808: Congress had passed a law requiring the states to pick electors within 34 days preceding the first Wednesday in December, but in New Jersey, they were picked 35 days before. If New Jersey’s vote had been challenged, it could have been ruled out.
1816: Maryland chose eight Democratic-Republican electors and three Federalist ones, but the three Federalists refused to vote.
1828: One elector chosen in Georgia on the ticket for Jackson favored John Quincy Adams, and resigned after being elected rather than vote for Jackson. The Legislature filled the vacancy with a Jackson man.
1836: In some states, the slate of electors opposed to Van Buren was not pledged to any candidate, but was labeled “Opposition.” The “Opposition” electors chosen, generally known as Whigs, split their votes among four different presidential candidates.
1860: With three tickets in the field opposing the Republican ticket, the opposition in some states presented fusion slates of electors. In New York, for instance, the anti-Lincoln slate was composed of 18 electors for Douglas, 10 for Bell, and 7 for Breckenridge.
1872: Greeley, the Democratic candidate for President, died after the election but before the Electoral College met; he had won 66 electoral votes. Three of the Greeley electors persisted in voting for him, but Congress would not accept votes for a dead man. The other Greeley electors gave complimentary votes to other Democrats.
1884: With the Greenbackers showing much strength, certain states had some Greenback and some Democratic electors on the same slate. In 1892 and 1896, certain states had joint slates of some Populist, some Democratic electors.
1912: In South Dakota, the electors for Theodore Roosevelt announced they would vote for Taft instead of Roosevelt if necessary to defeat Wilson. Sherman, the Republican nominee for Vice President, died before the Electoral College met; the Republican National Committee instructed the eight Republican electors to vote for Nicholas Murray Butler for Vice President.
Martin blasts Roosevelt on preparedness
Governor Edward Martin, charging that “there has been little common honesty in handling the federal payroll and in the administration of the Social Security Act,” maintains that President Roosevelt “failed to prepare the nation for war.”
“Warned as he was, it was the President’s great responsibility to lead this nation and make it ready to defend itself,” Mr. Martin said in a political speech at McKeesport last night. “That, on the record, he failed to do.
People not informed
Mr. Martin said:
Had we been prepared, or on the way to preparedness in 1939, we might have avoided war. At least our preparations would have been speeded up and this would have avoided many casualties and the expenditure of billions of dollars.
The conclusion cannot be escaped that the President did not take the people into his confidence; that he did not voice specific warnings until it was too late, and that he led the country to believe that neutrality would save us from war.
Referring to the federal payroll, Mr. Martin said, “It has been used to build up a solid phalanx of New Deal votes here in… every state in the Union.”
Mr. Martin asserted:
The Social Security Act as administered by the New Deal has been called the “Socia! Security swindle.” Its old-age benefits were to be paid out of funds from a tax on workers and a tax on payrolls. The money collected has simply gone into the general fund. It has been spent and all that is left of that trust fund is a bundle of IOUs.
11-point program
“The American program, as we Republicans see it,” was outlined by Mr. Martin in these 11 points:
- Use all our energy speedily to win the war.
- Work for permanent peace in collaboration with other nations.
- Preserve the sovereignty of the United States.
- Plan a program of veteran rehabilitation, reemployment and opportunity.
- Enforce economic government.
- Follow a system of free enterprise.
- Decentralize government.
- Return to the economy of plenty in this nation.
- Dispose of surplus war materials to private industry.
- Settle promptly all government contracts.
- Conserve natural resources for future generations.
Ickes: Dewey is foe of Negroes
Gains under New Deal cited in address
New York (UP) –
Vice President Henry A. Wallace and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes told a cheering crowd of more than 2,000 in New York’s Harlem District last night that President Roosevelt is the best friend the Negroes have ever had in high public office.
The two administration officials spoke at the Golden Gate Ballroom where Mr. Ickes, speaking over a nationwide radio network, charged that Governor Thomas E. Dewey had “walked down the aisle hand in hand with the most vindictive enemies of the Negroes.”
Vice President Wallace, urging the Negroes to vote early next Tuesday, said he believed “the American people know a champion when they see one,” and promised that Mr. Roosevelt would establish economic prosperity in the United States after the war.
Defends Hillman
Mr. Wallace said the New Deal had always worked for the underprivileged and assailed those who are attacking CIO Political Action Committee Chairman Sidney Hillman.
“Sidney Hillman has been kicked, around most unjustly,” Wallace said. “Folks ought to take their hats off to him.”
In his speech, Secretary Ickes cited the “advance of the Negroes under the present administration, but said Mr. Dewey’s performance as governor of New York toward the Negroes “has been little short of iniquitous.”
‘Progress’ cited
He said:
During the 1944 session of the New York State Legislature, which Governor Dewey controls, five fundamental bills were introduced designed to aid the Negroes and other minority groups by eliminating discrimination. All of these measures were killed by the Legislature, but any or all of them could have been passed with Governor Dewey’s support.
He called the roll of Negro “progress” under the New Deal – increased employment, better housing, partial elimination of discrimination in the armed services – and said that the most “substantial developments of all have occurred in the field of Negro education.”
Chant of voodoo priestess grips Americans; Jamaicans wild in native rites, doctor says
New Kensington physician in hidden group watching weird cult ceremonies
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booooooooooooooooooooooo! Get out of here!
Reading Eagle (November 2, 1944)
Pegler: Old hag
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
The party is beginning to get rough up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, where Clare Boothe Luce, a Republican, of course, and a warty, shapeless old hag with pool-table legs and a face that would clabber milk a mile away, is running for reelection to Congress. I toss in this little dash of descriptive matter about Mrs. Luce because her campaign manager says it is unfair to her to keep on writing how good-looking she is, as this tends to suggest that she is using sex appeal on the stags and might alienate the women’s vote. These dispatches aim to be fair.
The Communists of the Political Action Committee have ganged up on the frowsy old ostrich in greater force and vehemence than they have exerted against any other nominee in the country except Tom Dewey himself, and now it has been announced that Mr. Big, in person, will make a tailboard appearance and toss off a few remarks in his Groton-Harvard cockney dialect as he passes through Bridgeport Saturday on his way to Boston.
Henry Wallace, the Johnny Appleseed of the campaign, who has been thumbing his way around the East like a mildewed bum and making a speech wherever he finds as many as two prospects, or even one, gathered in a rapt and eager throng, is scheduled to speak in 11 towns.
This personal attention from the President and the forgotten man might be attributed to a spirit of personal revenge against the poor, unsightly wench because she sometimes gives an imitation of Eleanor Roosevelt telling a humorous and comical anecdote about the time Franklin said he would like to have his shoes soled and the second butler hocked them to the cash-clot man, thinking Franklin had meant that he wanted them sold.
Just to give you an idea of the ferocity of the Communist campaign, Clifton Fadiman, sometimes known as Killer Fadiman, the bull butterfly of the literary teas, made an oration the other night in which he dropped an ominous hint that if the Republicans should win the election, we would have a civil war. He did not say what part he would take in that civil war, but it appears that that is the one thing he has been saving for himself since the age of 32, when he was a savage, but vicarious anti-Fascist in the Spanish thing, and down to now in the present scuffle with Adolf Hitler, whom he fearlessly denounces, however.
The Killer also accused Mrs. Luce of bad manners and said “she is fresh from the foxholes of Park Avenue,” a remark which elicited from her the inquiry, “And where is your foxhole?” which was irrelevant, of course.
When she isn’t prowling around the streets, scaring babies and bulldogs with that mug of hers, Mrs. Luce takes trips to the war, in person, and she has invited the Killer to come on up some time and swap reminiscences about foxholes under battle conditions. She was in Belgium and France during the blitz and made two trips to the Orient, where she scared several Japanese divisions to death by pushing her face up out of the trenches.
Another of the commandoes selected for this shock operation by the Communist-New Deal PAC axis is old Dorothy Thompson, who has been fading away as a pundit ever since 1940, when she thought it would be a good idea not to bother to hold a presidential election. Mrs. T. had lived a long term in Germany and now you find her mostly in the papers which endorse Roosevelt’s own Hitlerian innovations,
She and the hag used to pull hair and kick and scream in a refined way a few years back, but Luce finally brushed her off, probably figuring that she was just wasting her time, and Thompson is now in there again trying to renew it, which might help the syndicate sales, although hardly much.
Well, this will give you an idea of the importance of this particular congressional district to the New Deal and their Communists. The thing is personal with the Roosevelts and deadly with the Communists because the dame insists that we ought to deal with Stalin as equals and establish a peace of free, independent European nations, not satellites of Moscow. On labor and war measures her record is just about perfect even from their own standpoint, but for these two reasons they are out to mow her down.
Address by President Roosevelt
November 2, 1944, 9:00 p.m. EWT
Broadcast from the White House, Washington, DC
Broadcast audio:
Ladies and gentlemen:
I had hoped that during the early part of this week I could have gone in person to some of the nearer Midwestern cities, such as Cleveland and Detroit, and I had hoped that I could visit some of my old friends in Upstate New York.
However, on my return to Washington from Chicago, I find that I am not free to spare the time right now. Therefore, I am speaking to you from the White House.
I am disappointed about this – but, as I told the American people a long time ago, I follow the principle of first things first; and this war comes first. That is why I have to be right here in Washington.
We have all been overjoyed by the news from the far Pacific, 8,000 miles away. Never before in all of history has it been possible successfully to conduct such massive operations with such long lines of supply and communications.
In the Pacific Theater, even while we are fighting a major war in Europe, our advance towards Japan is many months ahead of our own optimistic schedule.
But we must remember that any military operation conducted at such a distance is a hazardous undertaking. In any long advance, progress may be interrupted by checks or setbacks. However, ultimately our advance will stop only in Tokyo itself.
Our success has been the result of planning and organization and building; it has been the result of the hardest work and the hardest fighting of which our people are capable.
On the other side of the world, in Europe, the Allied forces under Gen. Eisenhower are pounding the Germans with relentless force.
We do not expect to have a winter lull in Europe. We expect to keep striking, to keep the enemy on the move, to hit him again and again, to give him no rest, and to drive through to the final objective – Berlin itself.
In Italy, against the handicap of rugged mountain obstacles, and against bitter German resistance, the Allied armies are steadily moving forward, wearing down the German fighting strength in a slow, hard slugging match.
In winning this war, there is just one sure way to guarantee the minimum of casualties – by seeing to it that, in every action, we have overwhelming material superiority.
We have already sent to Europe, just one of our many fronts, a force greater than the entire American Expeditionary Force of 1918. American troops are now fighting along a battle line of three hundred miles in northern France and Germany, and about a hundred miles long in Italy.
Within ten weeks after the first landings in France last June, the Allies had landed on the Normandy beaches nearly two million men, more than two million tons of supplies, and nearly half a million vehicles.
Think of all that vast mass of material for one operation think of the war factories and the ships and the planes, the railroads and labor required to produce and deliver the right supplies to the right place at the right time.
Then think of the tasks that lie ahead of us – all the long, tough miles to Berlin – all the major landings yet to be made in the Pacific – and you will have a conception of the magnitude of the job that remains to be done. It is still a job requiring the all-out production efforts of all of our people back here at home.
Delays in the performance of our job at home mean prolonging the war. They will mean an increase in the total price we must pay in the lives of our men.
All of our able commanders in the field know this. And so do our soldiers and sailors. And we at home must remember it and never forget it.
All Americans at home are concerned in this – the fulfillment of an obligation to our fighting men.
And the women of America are also most profoundly concerned.
Today, women are playing a far more direct, more personal part in the war than ever before.
First, and I think rightly first, are those women in uniform who have gone into the WAACs and the WAVES, the Marines and the Coast Guard, the nursing services of the Army and Navy, the Red Cross – serving in all kinds of places, in and out of the United States – all of them performing functions which definitely relieve men for combat work.
Then there are the millions of women who have gone into war industries. They are greatly responsible for the fact that the munitions and supplies to our men at the front have gone through to them on time.
And, finally, the women who uncomplainingly have done the job of keeping the homes going – the homes with service flags in the windows – service flags with blue stars or gold stars.
And we do not forget those women who have volunteered with the men in the difficult and important work of the ration boards all over the nation – doing the job of apportioning the necessities of life equitably among their neighbors, rich and poor.
Everyone who has made a sacrifice in this war – and that includes pretty close to 135 million Americans – is determined that this must not happen again, that the disastrous mistakes of the past shall not be repeated, that this nation shall be committed to playing a leading part in a world organization which shall be strong and effective and enduring.
We have been told during this political campaign that unless the American people elect the Republican presidential choice, the Congress will not cooperate in the peace. That is a threat to build a party spite-fence between us and the peace.
I do not know who empowers these men to speak for the Congress in uttering such a threat.
Certainly, the United States Senate and the House of Representatives showed no reluctance to agree with the foreign policy of this administration when, almost unanimously last year, they passed the Connally and Fulbright Resolutions which pledged this nation to cooperate in a world organization for peace.
These are high and serious matters to those who know how greatly our victory in this war and our ability to establish a lasting peace depend on maintaining unshaken that understanding which must be the core of the success of the United Nations.
It is heartening for me to have known and to have talked with the statesmen not of the big nations only, but the statesmen of the smaller nations – men like Beneš of Czechoslovakia, Mikołajczyk of Poland, Nygaardsvold of Norway – and leaders of democratic thought from Yugoslavia and Greece and Denmark and Belgium and The Netherlands – and, of course, the great leaders of our neighbor countries in this hemisphere.
I have spent many fruitful hours talking with men from the more remote nations – such as Turkey, Persia, Arabia, Palestine, Abyssinia, Liberia, Siam, and others – for all of them are part and parcel of the great family of nations. It is only through an understanding acquired by years of consultation, that one can get a viewpoint of their problems and their innate yearnings for freedom.
And all of them have this in common – that they yearn for peace and stability, and they look to the United States of America with hope and with faith.
The world is rising from the agony of the past. The world is turning with hope to the future. It would be a sorry and a cynical thing to betray this hope for the sake of mere political advantage, and a tragic thing to shatter it because of the failure of vision.
There have been some other aspects of this campaign which have been distasteful to all of us.
This campaign has been marred by even more than the usual crop of whisperings and rumorings. Some of these get into print, in certain types of newspapers; others are traded about, secretly, in one black market after another. I do not propose to answer in kind.
The voting record proves that the American people pay little attention to whispering campaigns. They have paid little attention to all the malignant rumors of enemy origin that have flooded this country before and during this war – and I am sure that they will treat the present whispering with the same contempt.
As we approach Election Day, more wicked charges may be made – and probably will – with the hope that someone or somebody will gain momentary advantage.
Hysterical, last-minute accusations or sensational revelations, are trumped up in an attempt to panic the people on Election Day.
But the American people are not panicked easily. Pearl Harbor proved that.
This election will not be decided on a basis of malignant murmurings, or shouts. It will be settled on the basis of the record.
We all know the record of our military achievements in this war.
And we all know the record of the tremendous production achievements of our American farmers, our American businessmen, and our American labor.
And we all know the record of our teamwork with our allies. Immediately after Pearl Harbor we formed with the other United Nations the greatest military coalition in all of world history. And we have gone steadily on from that to establish the basis for a strong and durable organization for world peace.
The America which built the greatest war machine in all history, and which kept it supplied, is an America which can look to the future with confidence and faith.
I propose the continuance of the teamwork that we have demonstrated in this war.
By carrying out the plans we have made, we can avoid a post-war depression – we can provide employment for our veterans and our war workers – we can achieve an orderly reconversion.
Above all, we can avoid another false boom like that which burst in 1929, and a dismal collapse like that of 1930 to 1933.
With continuance of our teamwork, I look forward, under the leadership of this government, to an era of expansion and production and employment – to new industries, to increased security.
I look forward to millions of new homes, fit for decent living; to new, low-priced automobiles; new highways; new airplanes and airports; to television; and other miraculous new inventions and discoveries, made during this war, which will be adapted to the peacetime uses of a peace-loving people.
The record that we have established in this war is one of which every American has a right to be proud – today and for all time.
We do not want the later record to say that the great job was done in vain.
We do not want our boys to come back to an America which is headed for another war in another generation.
Our post-war job will be to work, to build – for a better America than we have ever known.
If, in the next few years, we can start that job right, then you and I can know that we have kept faith with our boys – we have helped them to win a total victory.