Truman raps GOP promises at rally here
Candidate headlines ‘variety’ program
By Kermit McFarland
Headlining a “variety” program offered by the Democrats as the closing rally of the election campaign, U.S. Senator Harry S. Truman, Democratic candidate for Vice President, last night in Syria Mosque charged that the best Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican candidate for President, had to offer is “promises that the Republicans will not destroy what they never would have created.”
Senator Truman asked:
Even if you could rely on the campaign promises of the Republican candidate, why should you? The best that he offers you is a belated acceptance of the great liberal program which we Democrats already had forced through.
Mr. Truman, making his last campaign speech before he goes home to Independence, Missouri, to vote, headed a speaking schedule which included such diverse personalities as the movie notable Orson Welles, former Republican Governor of Pennsylvania Gifford Pinchot, Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt (widow of the son of Teddy Roosevelt) and representatives of the CIO and the AFL.
Draws bobbysoxers
This was the third Syria Mosque rally of the campaign and the Democrats, in point of size, turned out the best audience (After all, they do control the City and County payrolls, and Orson Welles drew a humorous contingent of bobby-sox girls and checker-jacketed lads who stormed the platform for autographs when he finished speaking).
Mr. Truman dug up the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations again, claiming all had “failed to carry out the campaign promises made to obtain their election.”
Phony prosperity
He alleged:
The attention of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover was lavished upon the bankers and Wall Street speculators. A phony prosperity was created for them at the expense of the working man and the farmer. Andrew Mellon and his favored friends made millions.
Senator Truman said the voters Tuesday must determine whether they want “the President and the Democratic administration which carried out those [liberal] reforms over the opposition of the Republicans in Congress to continue them or whether you want to elect the candidate of the Republican Party which so recently became converted to those reforms.”
He charged the Republican “reactionaries” don’t like “some of the things Mr. Dewey is saying,” but “they do not believe he means what he says.”
Charges ‘straddling’
“They have heard him talk out of both sides Of his mouth on foreign policy,” the vice-presidential candidate said, “and they know that he is an expert on straddling.”
To provide jobs after the war, Mr. Truman said:
We must see to it that all the great planta and facilities that were built to win the war are put to work producing peacetime goods to establish a better life for all of us.
Senator Truman inserted in his speech a special reference to U.S. Senator Joseph F. Guffey, who sat on the platform. He said Pennsylvania is “very ably represented” by the Senator from Pittsburgh, by whom he said he has sat in the Senate for nine years and nine months.
Pinchot speaks
Mr. Pinchot, twice governor of the state, charged that if Mr. Dewey’s “friends” had had their way, “America would have been helpless when Germany and Japan did attack us.”
And that is not the worst of it. The President’s opponent not only has the support of the isolationists, but he himself, according to the papers, has actually been backing some of the worst of them and urging their reelection to Congress.
Strange contradiction
Mr. Pinchot said there was a “strange contradiction” between Mr. Dewey’s promises and “some of the men who are trying to get him elected.”
He said:
Dewey promises everything the farmer wants. Yet the men who grow fat off the farmer are in is camp.
He promises everything labor wants. Yet the chief labor baiters of the nation are for him.
He promises to do away with monopolies. Yet the great monopolists are backing him up.
He says he is for little business. But the big business leaders are carrying his banner.
He tells us, although in very limited and guarded words, that he is for cooperation among the nations. Yet the leaders of isolation, and the isolation newspapers, are his supporters and have been from the beginning.
Defends Hillman
Mr. Pinchot belittled the Communist issue raised by the Republicans against Sidney Hillman, chairman of the CIO Political Action Committee.
He said:
In the first place, nobody runs Roosevelt. He paddles his own canoe. And in the second place, Hillman is not now and never was a Communist. Hillman is an old friend of mine and I know he’s not a Communist.