Stock market will be closed on Saturdays
Security exchanges to take holidays
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U.S. officials in conflict on size of merchant fleet
Dispute emphasized by plans for international parley on post-war shipping
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Roosevelt snaps answers at his news conference
Some reporters think President looks tired; smiles are infrequent
Washington (UP) –
Reporters who attended President Roosevelt’s first news conference since his return from the Pacific found him in a snappish mood today.
Mr. Roosevelt looked a little on the tired side to those who had not seen him since the last White House conference – the one of July 11 when he read his letter of advance acceptance of the fourth-term nomination and then roared with laughter as he watched the correspondents rushing for telephones.
Today he smiled rarely; he lacked as much of a deep tan as he usually acquired on sea voyages; he couldn’t be heard back of the first few rows and was interrupted with calls of “louder.”
Twenty-odd questions were fired at him. To many of them, the answer was, “No comment,” or “I don’t know.”
He took opportunity to criticize a question asked him on his train en route home – whether there was anything to reports that his trip had a political tone. Asked about this today, the President’s reply was substantially like this:
One of the press association reporters asked that question; he had to ask it because it was obviously planted. It was one of those questions that have to be asked in a campaign year. It was a fool question and the reporter knew it and asked it reluctantly.
To another question, he replied sharply that he was not in the White House to answer fool questions about everything that publishers put in print because if he did, he wouldn’t have time to be President.
Poll: Roosevelt has edge on Dewey in New England
But Maine, Vermont still back GOP
By George Gallup, Director, American Institute of Public Opinion
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Dewey adviser to meet Hull
Albany, New York (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey, Republican presidential nominee, named John Foster Dulles today to represent him at a conference with Secretary of State Cordell Hull on post-war international plans.
In a telegram to Mr. Hull, the Governor said he was “happy to extend my fullest cooperation to the end that the result should be wholly bipartisan and should have the united support of the American people.” Mr. Dulles is Mr. Dewey’s foreign policy adviser.
Mr. Dewey added:
Mr. Dulles, who is well known to you and to President Roosevelt, has given a lifetime to study and constructive action in the field of foreign affairs. I consider him one of the very ablest of American authorities on international relations. He is fully acquainted with my views and has my complete personal confidence which I am happy to say is shared by a number of members of the United States Senate of varying political views.
Editorial: Dewey’s foreign policy
Mr. Dewey on the eve of the three-power conference in Washington voices his fear of the trend toward international power politics. He states the issue of imperialist control versus the rights of small nations. As a presidential candidate, it is not only his privilege but his duty to speak out on this subject, which is so close to the hearts of most Americans.
But he would have been more effective, in our judgment, if he had given Secretary of State Hull full credit for leading the fight for a genuine international security organization.
It was Cordell Hull who wrote the rights of small nations into the Moscow Pact, a pledge for a democratic international organization later incorporated into the Connally Resolution by the Senate. American policy was reasserted in the Hull Easter declaration:
Nor do I suggest that any conclusions of these four nations can or should be without the participation of the other United Nations. A proposal is worse than useless if it is not acceptable to those who must share with us the responsibility of its execution.
Again, in his Pan-American Day address, the Secretary of State insisted that the big powers were pledged to these traditional American principles:
They were stated in the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations Declaration, and the declarations made at Moscow. Specifically, it was agreed at Moscow that membership in the world security organization must be on the basis of the sovereign equality of all nations, weak as well as strong, and the right of every nation to a government of its own choice.
But these British pledges and Hull statements did not prevent Prime Minister Churchill from reporting to Commons his proposal for “a world-controlling council… comprising the greatest states,” and “a world assembly whose relations to the world executive or controlling power for the purpose of peace I am in no position to define.” Mr. Churchill not only defends British imperialism but Russia’s ambitions in Eastern Europe.
Even more significant than words are acts. On the record up to now the small nations have been shut out of all major political conferences and decisions. On the record Russia is trying to control Eastern Europe as a sphere of influence, and Britain is trying to speak for Western Europe.
So long as this continues, Mr. Dewey and every American should be alarmed by the trend. The fact that Secretary Hull has fought so valiantly so long, and that he now hopes all the United Nations can be included in a later conference for international organization this fall, does not dispose of those fears.
President Roosevelt has never given the American public a full report on his understanding with Messrs. Churchill and Stalin at Tehran and since. Circumstantial stories have appeared indicating that the President gave his blessing, at least with the consent of silence, to the Churchill-Stalin sphere-of-influence deal. We cannot believe that the President would have been so foolish, but such widespread suspicions are the price he pays for his love of secret diplomacy.
We wish the President were as frank and vigorous in defense of American interests and policies as the Prime Minister is on behalf of Britain and as the Marshal is for Russia. Unquestionably Mr. Roosevelt in his own way is making the same fight as his colleague Cordell Hull, but he has less to show for it. His good intentions are not enough. In this field of post-war international relations, he has not proved himself – far from it!
Editorial: Freedom of reading
No reading necessarily influences the reader.
But all reading, to some degree, affects the general attitudes of the reader, although the effect may be infinitesimal.
And no reading affects all readers alike, or even any two of them precisely alike.
Which is by way of saying that there is no way of proving how any political biased or “interpretive” writing will affect any given number of readers.
If such persuasive writing were possible, somebody would write it and the election would be over.
Even the most biased or the most expressive political “masterpiece” will have a highly diversified effect on any group. It will please most those already sold on the same idea. It will aggravate those opposed to the idea. It may stimulate thought on the part of others, but it may also puzzle them or simply leave them cold.
All of which made the Taft law “censoring” books, movies, newspapers and periodicals for the Armed Forces a futile measure.
But it was also a ridiculous measure because it attempted to prohibit the adult men and women in the Armed Forces from reading material which is available to every schoolchild in America. It treated those entrusted with fighting the war as if they were too immature to be trusted with reading for themselves.
It was further ridiculous because the law itself was open to divergent interpretation.
The War Department, going to an extreme, ruled out standard works on the mere mention of political subjects. The Navy Department, on the other hand, pursued an unperturbed course by giving the men in the Navy the reading they seemed to want, regardless of content.
Congress has approved amendments to the Taft law so it no longer bars reading material available to the general public.
President Roosevelt cannot act too quickly in signing the Senate amendments to this unmoral and insulting law.
Freedom of reading is as basic as freedom of speech.
Monahan: Bette again plays a ‘deadly female’
Her latest victim is Claude Rains in Penn’s Skeffington
By Kaspar Monahan
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
On the Western Front, France – (by wireless)
Soldiers are made out of the strangest people.
I’ve recently made a new friend – just a plain old Hoosier – who is so quiet and humble you would hardly know he was around. Yet in our few weeks of invasion, he has killed four of the enemy, and he has learned war’s wise little ways of destroying life and preserving your own.
He hasn’t become the “killer” type that war makes of some soldiers; he has merely become adjusted to an obligatory new profession.
His name is George Thomas Clayton. Back home he is known as Tommy. In the Army he is sometimes called George, but usually just Clayton. He is from Evansville, where he lived with his sister. He is a frontline infantryman of rifle company in the 29th Division.
By the time this is printed he will be back in the lines. Right now he is out of combat for a brief rest. He spent a few days in an “Exhaustion Camp,” then was assigned briefly to the camp where I work from – a camp for correspondents. That’s how we got acquainted.
Clayton is a private first class. He operates a Browning automatic rifle. He has turned down two chances to become a buck sergeant and squad leader, simply because he would rather keep his powerful BAR than have stripes and less personal protection.
He landed in Normandy on D-Day, on the toughest of the beaches, and was in the line for 37 days without rest. He has had innumerable narrow escapes.
Twice, 88s hit within a couple of arms’ lengths of him. But both times the funnel of the concussion was away from him and he didn’t get a scratch though the explosions covered him and his rifle with dirt.
Then a third one hit about 10 feet away, and made him deaf in his right ear. He had always had trouble with that ear anyway – ear aches and things as a child. Even in the Army back in America he had to beg the doctors to waive the ear defect in order to come overseas. He is still a little hard of hearing in that ear from the shell burst, but it’s gradually coming back.
When Tommy finally left the lines, he was pretty well done up and his sergeant wanted to send him to a hospital, but he begged not to go for fear he wouldn’t get back to his old company, so they let him go to a rest camp instead.
And now after a couple of weeks with us (provided the correspondents don’t drive him frantic), he will return to the lines with his old outfit.
Clayton has worked at all kings of things back in that other world of civilian life. He has been a farm hand, a cook and a bartender. Just before he joined the Army, he was a gauge-honer in the Chrysler Ordnance Plant at Evansville.
When the war is over, he wants to go into business for himself for the first time in his life. He’ll probably set up a small restaurant in Evansville. He said his brother-in-law would back him.
Tommy was shipped overseas after only two months in the Army, and now has been out of America for 18 months. He is medium-sized, dark-haired, has a little mustache and the funniest-looking head of hair you ever saw this side of Buffalo Bill’s show.
While his division was killing time in the first few days before leaving England, he and three others decided to have their hair cut Indian fashion. They had their heads clipped down to the skin all except a two-inch ridge starting at the forehead and running clear to the back of the neck. It makes them look more comical than ferocious as they had intended. Two of the four have been wounded and evacuated to England.
I chatted off and on with Clayton for several days before he told me how old he was. I was amazed; so much so that I asked several other people to guess at his age and they all guessed about the same as I did – about 26.
Actually, he is 37, and that’s pretty well along in years to be a frontline infantryman. It’s harder on a man at that age.
As Clayton himself says, “When you pass that 30 mark you begin to slow up a little.”
It’s harder for you to take the hard ground and the rain and the sleeplessness and the unending wracking of it all. Yet at 37, he elected to go back.
Pegler: Union ‘sanctions’
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
From San Francisco, word comes of a new wrinkle in government. RAdm. Harold G. Bowen has applied “sanctions” against several hundred union machinists who refused to do overtime work on important Navy jobs.
The “sanctions” were authorized by Fred M. Vinson, the Director of Economic Stabilization, and we learn that the men will be reported to their draft boards, to the War Manpower Commission and to their ration boards. Thus, the Navy, which under our way of government, is supposed to have no authority over civilians, moves to review the draft deferments of these men, to blackball them from all work and, moreover, to starve them by shutting off their food allowances. Why else would they be reported to their ration boards?
These “sanctions,” meaning punishments, are inflicted on men who are not charged with any violation of law, much less tried and convicted.
The Selective Service Law was intended to select men for the Army and Navy, not to coerce civilians by intimidation. Rationing was adopted to apportion the supply of food, heat and gasoline. The authority of the War Manpower Commission is vast and vague, but even here, the fact remains that an American is supposed to be entitled to a fair trial in a regular court on specific charges of violation of law.
If these men are suspected of any offense deserving punishment, they should be charged, arrested and tried; for certainly valuable rights are at stake here. One of them at least, the right to a fair, individual’s share of food and heat is not subject to revocation by any court, even during a condemned murderer’s stay in the death house.
Only a few days ago, in Philadelphia, four men suspected of organizing and leading the transportation strike were fired and certified to their draft boards. One is above the draft age and he not only loses his years of seniority with the company, certainly a valuable right, but is blackballed entirely from all work for the duration of the war.
It has been only a few years since the ideologists of the New Deal were arguing angrily that a worker had a property right in his job. It was compared to a franchise. Some of them said that if an employer fired a worker, he should be forced to pay him a certain cash sum in addition to his earned pay and dismissal pay, representing the value of a piece of property or a right, namely the job which he had lost. It was even argued that a man should have the right to sell his job to another and, then, in the zone of the ridiculous, a situation was conjured in which a syndicate of smart hustlers would buy up for cash several millions of individual jobs and lease them back to the workers.
These actions against men who seem to have been acting entirely within their ancient legal right, abruptly flout the concept of a job as personal property. Moreover, they violate rights which existed long before the adoption of those laws and regulations poetically known as “labor’s gains” won under the New Deal.
In Philadelphia, there is a question whether the four men had violated the Smith-Connally Act. Aside from the fact that some unions openly repudiated this law as unconstitutional and advised their members to ignore it when it was passed over President Roosevelt’s veto, a more immediate and more important fact cries out.
If they are charged with violation of this act, they should be tried under it and punished accordingly. Instead, they have been punished summarily and there seems to be no court to which they can appeal because no court imposed the sentences.
The blacklist long ago was condemned by all liberals and by the unions as a vicious weapon. It makes it impossible for a man to get a job and, in the old days, men adopted false names and moved to other regions to start over. But today if a man takes an alias, he may invite punishment for making false statements under oath to any of the numerous government boards with which citizens must do business. And anyway, he probably couldn’t get away with it, even temporarily, because to get a job he must present a “referral.” So, in the case of at least one of the Philadelphia men, the punishment is an economic death sentence without trial and without even the allegation of an offense against any law.
A little research in the early history of the Nazi regime in Germany will show who was the original author of these innovations in the regulation of the life and work of the American civilian by the national government. His name is Adolf Hitler.
Background of news –
House reorganization
By Bertram Benedict
Rep. Rowe, freshman Congressman from Ohio, is withholding his resolution for a Republican reorganization of the House because Minority Leader Martin considers it “inappropriate at this time.” If a poll of Republican members shows that a majority of them wish to proceed. Mr. Rowe says he will demand a party caucus on his project to have the Republicans take over.
Reorganization of the House of Representatives by the Republicans would involve (1) the unseating of Speaker Rayburn and the probable election of Republican Leader Martin as his successor; (2) dismissal of the present Democratic chairmen of all House committees and award of their places to Republicans; (3) transfer of majority control in all committees from Democrats to Republicans.
The Republicans hope to accomplish all this, and much more, in January 1945, for there is a firm belief among them that the voters will give them control of the House in the November election. The Republican leadership has good reason to doubt, however, that such a reorganization can be carried out at any time in the immediate future.
Democratic bolts doubted
It is true, as Mr. Rowe points out, that the Democrats no longer have a majority in the House; also that legislative action at the 1944 session has been dominated by the Republican membership, aided by anti-New Deal Democrats from the south. What is open to grave doubt is whether any member elected as a Democrat would vote with the opposition party to give it control of the lower branch of Congress.
The present party alignment in the House is 216 Democrats, 212 Republicans, two Progressives, one Farmer Laborite, one American Laborite (three of the 435 seats are vacant).
Farmer Laborite Rep. Hagen can probably be counted as a Republican, for he has been nominated as a Republican in this year’s primary in Minnesota, but American Laborite Rep. Marcantonio can certainly be counted with the Democrats.
The two Progressives from Wisconsin have Republican backgrounds, but during the present Congress they have voted about as often with the Democrats as with their closer political kin.
Assuming that a Republican resolution for reorganization of the House would command the support of three of the members of minor parties – but no member of the Democratic Party – the Republicans would fall three votes short of mustering an absolute majority for its adoption.
Close division in 1917
The present division of party strength in the House is the closest since the 65th Congress met in special session in April 1917 to declare war on Germany. As a result of the November 1916 election, 216 Republicans, 210 Democrats, and 9 members of minor parties held seats in the House. The Republicans had a plurality, but fell two short of a majority. The candidates for Speaker were Rep. Mann of Illinois, the Republican leader, and Champ Clark of Missouri, who had held the office since 1911.
On the opening day of the session, Mr. Clark’s name was placed in nomination by a Republican – Rep. Schall, the blind Congressman from Minnesota. The members of the minor parties voted with the Democrats and Mr. Clark was chosen Speaker with a total of 217 votes to 205 for Mr. Mann. Two Republicans voted “present,” others did not answer roll, and four scattered their votes.
President Wilson delivered his war message at 8:30 o’clock that evening and on the following day, the Democratic committee slates were ratified by the House, thus insuring legislative cooperation with the Executive for the duration of the war, notwithstanding the lack of a Democratic majority.