‘Biggest black market’ –
$1 million profit charged
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Democrats gaining strength, poll shows
New York (UP) –
Fortune Magazine reported today that its latest presidential poll shows Democratic strength has gained in the last four weeks, with President Roosevelt favored by 52.5 percent of the votes against 43.9 percent for Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the GOP nominee.
The magazine said Mr. Roosevelt’s lead, now at 8.6 points, rose from 6.5 points in the period between July 8 and Aug. 5. In the July 8 Fortune sampling, Mr. Roosevelt’s vote was 49.2 percent compared with 42.7 percent for Mr. Dewey.
The latest poll also indicated, Fortune said, that 72.4 percent of the public believes Mr. Roosevelt will win, as against 66.4 percent in July.
On eve of peace talks –
Dewey attacks Big Four’s ‘power politics’ plans
Opposes domination by ‘coercion’
Washington (UP) –
Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s vigorous denunciation of “power politics” centered new attention on the coming world security conference today as the United States, Britain and Russia prepared for talks aimed at creation of a new league of nations, possibly before the end of the war.
With the start of the discussions only five days off, their worldwide importance was stressed by these developments:
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Mr. Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee, opposed any new plan that would subject the world to the “coercive power” of the United States, Russia, Britain and China, which will join the conference at a later stage. His statement was regarded as a challenge to proposals by President Roosevelt and Russia for a world organization where chief responsibility for keeping the peace would rest with four or five big powers.
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Chairman Tom Connally (D-TX) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, revealed that the “real conference at a higher level” would follow the coming security talks by two or three weeks. He predicted that a treaty shaping a world peace organization would be agreed on by fall.
Hull answers Dewey
Secretary of State Cordell hull today described as “utterly and completely unfounded” the fears expressed by Mr. Dewey about plans for an international security organization. He said there is no plan for a military alliance of the four major nations.
Mr. Hull said:
No arrangement such as described by him, which would involve a military alliance of the four major nations permanently to coerce the rest of the world, is contemplated or has ever been contemplated by this government, or, as far as we know, by any of the other governments.
Confirming Senator Connally’s statement, Mr. Hull said he hopes that the preliminary international security talks will be followed this fall by a full-dress United Nations conference to formulate a new world peace organization.
Mr. Connally, the administration’s foreign policy leader in the Senate, which must affirm any treaty for U.S. participation in a new world organization, said that “we aim to have a league of nations, or whatever you want to call it, that’s a growing concern before the end of the war.”
GOP to watch parley
Mr. Dewey’s statement, his first important utterance on foreign policy since his nomination as the GOP presidential candidate, indicated that the Republican Party would watch the coming talks closely and challenge any development which it felt contrary to world welfare. It also dimmed hopes of keeping foreign policy out of the current election campaign.
Declaring that it would be “immoral” to leave solution of international problems in the hands of a permanent alliance of the Big Four, Mr. Dewey said that some of the advance proposals showed a “cynical intention” of those nations to dominate the world through four and “individual agreements as to spheres of influence.”
Roosevelt offers plan
President Roosevelt has suggested an organization whose chief responsibility for preserving the peace would rest in a council made up of “the four major nations and a suitable number of other nations.” All nations, however, would be represented in an assembly in order to guarantee them the right to justice under international law.
This plan has the general endorsement of Great Britain and is believed similar to the official Russian plan.
The big powers are expected to oppose the principle of full equality and responsibility of all nations for keeping the peace and probably will maintain instead that all powers, great and small, are equal only in the right to justice. They are understood to feel that large and small nations must not have the same influence or same right to voice in determining international policy.
Russia urges treaties
In addition, the Russians advocate that the four powers – knitted more closely into a “union of great powers” by special individual treaties – must carry the responsibility for keeping peace and suppressing aggression.
Mr. Dewey’s stinging attack struck particularly at such talk of individual treaties among the Big Four.
He said:
The fact that we four have developed overwhelming power as against our enemies does not give us the right to organize the world so that we four always will be free to do what we please while the rest of the world is made subject to our coercion.
That would be the rankest form of imperialism. Such a proposal would be rejected by the American people.
WMC ‘thaws’ job freeze to allow shifts to PAC
Dies Committee to investigate why it allows own top-flight employees to move
By Daniel M. Kidney, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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Background of news –
Women in Congress
By Bertram Benedict
The Democratic nomination of Mrs. Chase Going Woodhouse, former Connecticut Secretary of State, for a seat on Congress, brings to three the number of Connecticut women contesting for places in the House of Representatives. The state has only five House seats.
Sixteen women have been nominated in 1944 primaries and conventions to date for seats in the House of Representatives of the next Congress. Two women lost races for nominations in this week’s primary in Wisconsin but the number of women candidates may be increased to 20 or more in the primaries remaining to be held. The only woman seeking a Senate seat in 1944 – Senator Hattie Caraway – was defeated in the Arkansas primary in July.
Of the seven women now serving in the House, all except one have been renominated; Miss Winifred Stanley (R-NY) was not a candidate in the Aug. 1 primary in her state.
Of the present women representatives, six are Republicans and one a Democrat. Of the women nominated or renominated in the primaries to date, seven are Republicans and nine are Democrats.
Chances believed good
Several of the Democrats are running in “sure” Republican districts and several of the Republicans in “sure” Democratic districts, but the chances of all present women members who have been renominated are considered good, for all of them have served one or more previous terms in the House.
Rep. Mary Norton (D-NJ) and Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers (R-MA) have been members since 1925.
Since women first voted in all states in 1920, there have been 18 Democratic and 11 Republican women members of Congress, of whom five have served in the Senate. One Republican and two Democratic women Senators served merely honorary terms and Mrs. Rose Long (D-LA) took an active part in Senate proceedings for only a few months under an appointment to fill the unexpired term of her husband.
Senator Caraway, first appointed in 1931 to serve out her husband’s term, was elected to succeed himself in 1932 and was reelected in 1938. Over half of the women members owed, or have been appointed when widowed, or have been chosen at special elections to replace their husbands. Over half of these were not candidates in the next general election.
Have special interests
The special interests of the more active women members of Congress have been:
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Labor problems, to which Mrs. Norton (now chairman of the House Committee on Labor) has devoted her chief attention;
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Legislation affecting veterans and members of the Armed Forces, with which Rep. Rogers had been chiefly concerned;
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Education and public health, which have received the principal attention of Rep. Frances Bolton (R-OH);
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Preservation of peace, which led Rep. Jeannette Rankin (the first woman member of Congress) to sacrifice her seat by voting against war in 1917 – and again in 1941.
Three women have served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee – Ruth Bryan Owen (D-FL), a former member, and Reps. Rogers and Bolton, who are present members of the committee. Rep. Clare Boothe Luce (R-CT) was refused a place on the Foreign Affairs Committee but was made a member of the House Military Affairs Committee.
Connecticut, with three women candidates, is certain to have at least one woman member in the House of the next Congress, for in the fourth district of that state, the contest is between Republican Rep. Luce and Democrat Miss Margaret Connors.
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
On the Western front, France – (by wireless)
The commander of the particular regiment of the 4th Infantry Division that we have been with is one of my favorites.
That’s partly because he flatters me by calling me “General,” partly because just looking at him makes me chuckle to myself, and partly because I think he’s a very fine soldier.
Security forbids my giving his name. He is a Regular Army colonel and he was overseas in the last war. His division commander says the only trouble with him is that he’s too bold, and if he isn’t careful, he’s liable to get clipped one of these days.
He is rather unusual looking. There is something almost Mongolian about his face. When cleaned up he could be a Cossack. When tired and dirty he could be a movie gangster. But either way, his eyes always twinkle.
He has a facility for direct thought that is unusual. He is impatient of thinking that gets off onto byways.
He has a little habit of good-naturedly reprimanding people by cocking his head over to one side, getting his face below yours and saying something sharp, and then looking up at you with a quizzical smirk like a laughing cat.
Jacket fits like a sack
The colonel goes constantly from one battalion to another during battle, from early light till darkness. He wears a new-type field jacket that fits him like a sack, and he carries a long stick that Teddy Roosevelt gave him. He keeps constantly prodding his commanders to push hard, not to let up, to keep driving and driving.
He is impatient with commanders who lose the main point of the war by getting involved in details the main point, of course, being to kill Germans. His philosophy of war is expressed in the simple formula of “shoot the sonsabitches.”
Once I was at a battalion command post when we got word that 60 Germans were coming down the road in a counterattack. Everybody got excited. They called the colonel on a field phone, gave him the details and asked him what to do. He had the solution in a nutshell.
He just said, “Shoot the sonsabitches,” and hung up.
Another of my favorites is a sergeant who runs the colonel’s regimental mess. He cooks some himself, but mostly he bosses the cooking.
His name is Charles J. Murphy and his home is at Trenton, New Jersey. Murph is redheaded, but has his head nearly shaved like practicably all the Western Front soldiers – officers as well as men. Murph is funny, but he seldom smiles.
When I asked him what he did in civilian life, he thought a moment and then said:
Well, I was a shyster. Guess you’d call me a kind of promoter. I always had the kind of job where you made $50 a week salary and $1,500 on the side.
How’s that for an honest man?
Murph and I got to talking about newspapermen one day. Murph said his grandfather was a newspaper man. He retired in old age and lived in Murph’s house.
‘Went nuts reading newspapers’
Murph said:
My grandfather went nuts reading newspapers. It was a phobia with him. Every day he’d buy $1.50 worth of 3-cent newspapers and then read them all night.
He wouldn’t read the ads. He would just read the stories, looking for something to criticize. He’d get fuming mad.
Lots of times when I was a kid, he’d get me out of bed at 2 or 3 in the morning and point to some story in the paper and rave about reporters who didn’t have sense enough to put a period at the end of a sentence.
Murph and I agreed that it was fortunate his grandfather passed on before he got reading my stuff, or he would doubtless have run amuck.
Murph never smoked cigarettes until he landed in France on D-Day, but now he smokes one after another. He is about the tenth soldier who has told me that same thing. A guy in war has to have some outlet for his nerves, and I guess smoking is as good as anything.
All kinds of incongruous things happen during a battle. For instance, during one lull I got my portrait painted in watercolor. The artist sat cross legged on the grass and it took about an hour.
The painter was Pfc. Leon Wall, from Wyoming, Pennsylvania. He went to the National Academy of Design in New York for six years, did research for the Metropolitan Museum and lectured on art at the New York World’s Fair.
Artist Wall is now, of all things, a cook and KP in an infantry regiment mess. He hasn’t done any war paintings at all since the invasion. I asked him why not. He said: “Well, at first I was too scared, and since then I’ve been too busy.”
Pegler: On Wilson
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
A visit to the screen show President Wilson allays any thought that this might be politically unhygienic entertainment for the American fighting people, even though it is a propaganda picture, heroizing a man who had at least a fair share of faults and arguing that the resistance of the historic little group of willful men in the Senate was, in the end, responsible for the present World War.
Without the benefit of counterpropaganda or argument, the young men and women of the American forces in this war might be persuaded that Mr. Wilson was a god and that none of the fault was his. However, the whole thing is very provocative so I think the result will be a reopening of the debate among those who see it.
And there are, fortunately, still many Americans around, even in the fighting services, who remember that Mr. Wilson, himself, was no less willful than Henry Cabot Lodge and that, the conduct of the whole American people after 1920, showed that they were fed up on Europe and didn’t want to commit themselves to intervention in Europe’s interminable wars, as the phrase went in those days.
Wilson bossy and patronizing
For the benefit of those who came into this world too late for personal observation of the issues and personalities, it will be recalled that Mr. Wilson was a very bossy and patronizing President, wherein he seems to have served as a model for the next man elected on the same ticket.
He had a way of low-rating Congress and going over their heads to appeal to the people who then turned him down on two important occasions. His conduct in Europe revealed an appetite for personal honors and homage which, likewise, is reflected in Mr. R., and each had a mysterious personal stool pigeon whose unaccountable importance created ill-feeling and some distrust.
The tendency of this film is to suggest that Mr. Roosevelt is the heir to Mr. Wilson’s wisdom and his woes and that, therefore, the troops ought to vote for him and a league of some kind to enforce peace.
It may be questionable pool to issue a propaganda film on this theme during the current campaign and it should be noted again, for future reference, that in going in for propaganda, the moving picture industry so far has conspicuously refrained from presenting any work dealing forcefully with any of the notorious evils of the New Deal. Under a Republican administration, it might be moved to pay some attention to such phases of our recent history, including the elevation to the Supreme Court of two men who have flagrantly condoned violent insurrection.
Film provokes own reputation
The trouble with this kind of film is that it provokes its own refutation. You present Wilson as he is shown here and you instantly arouse reminiscences showing that he was so self-willed and mulish, in fact so selfish, that he estranged himself from almost all his friends and even treated the faithful Joe Tumulty so badly that public sympathy went out to Joe.
You insinuate that money-hungry men tried to drive him into the war prematurely and you draw attention to the presence in his cabinet of old William Jennings Bryan who was always running off from the State Department to pick up $500 or $1,000 for a lecture and who, in the end, became so greedy that, in the Florida boom, he actually exploited the people’s trust in him to rally suckers for a real estate promotion by preaching religion to them and then leading them out to the scene of the development.
The man who paid him his hire in those days revealed later that Bryan always demanded his money before he would go on with his act and, toward the end, when the company seemed shaky, demanded it in currency.
There have been parallels of this exploitation of high office and public faith in the present government which will be brought to mind instinctively as the film unreels.