Yanks pour through gap blasted in Siegfried Line
500-mile Allied front surges eastward from Holland to Switzerland
By Virgil Pinkley, United Press staff writer
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Siegfried forts captured almost without struggle
Defenses overrun in combined assault by infantrymen and dynamiting engineers
By Henry T. Gorrell, United Press staff writer
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Hurricane deaths reach 27; damage exceeds $40 million
Crops hit hardest but thousands of buildings are destroyed along coast
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Democrats told ‘we could lose’
Hannegan warns against complacency
Baltimore, Maryland (UP) –
Democratic National Chairman Robert E. Hannegan admitted last night that complacency on the part of party members might result in the defeat of President Roosevelt at the polls in November.
Mr. Hannegan told the Democratic Clubs of Maryland that “in spite of all the help our cause is getting from the public utterances” of the Republican candidates, “I am still ready to point out to you candidly that we could lose in November.”
Asserting that the name of President Roosevelt “already ranks with the names of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson.” Mr. Hannegan blasted Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey as the GOP’s “high man in the making of accusations that blow up in his face.”
A ‘natural’ procedure
Mr. Hannegan said:
In view of the Republican presidential candidate’s past training and experience, this is to be expected. It is quite natural that he should follow the principle: When in doubt, prosecute.
The Democratic chairman charged that the Republican platform was “a museum piece straight out of the collection of Herbert Hoover” and that Mr. Dewey’s plan for dealing with national problems, especially that of unemployment, was “the way of Herbert Hoover.”
Answer Dewey’s charge
Mr. Hannegan asserted that Mr. Dewey’s charge that the Roosevelt administration planned to hold men in the Army after the war to prevent another depression “could scarcely have been calculated to add to the morale of the men now in uniform and fighting their country’s battles.”
He said:
The purpose of that [the administration’s] plan is not only to get all the unneeded fighting men out of the Army at the earliest possible time, but to do something that Mr. Dewey may not have thought of – that is, to go about it in the fairest and most democratic way. To decide on the order of this mustering out, the Army consulted the men themselves.
Labor and industry muster forces for wage shutdown
Battle lines drawn on reconversion issue; WLB arranges hearings
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Background of news –
Labor in politics
By Bertram Benedict
Sidney Hillman and his CIO Political Action Committee, working ardently for the reelection of President Roosevelt, have become major issues in the 1944 election campaign.
On Wednesday, Senator Brewster (R-ME), mixing his metaphors a little, said:
Mr. Hillman is an albatross hung about the neck of the Democratic Party. He gave the Democratic Party in Maine the kiss of death.
At the annual convention of the United Mine Workers at Cincinnati on Tuesday, President John L. Lewis came out vehemently for the defeat of President Roosevelt. It remains to be seen whether the Democrats will be able to set off Mr. Lewis’ indirect support of Governor Dewey against Mr. Hillman’s support of President Roosevelt.
While Mr. Lewis was attacking Mr. Roosevelt at Cincinnati, the convention of the CIO United Auto Workers at Grand Rapids was evincing much enthusiasm for the President’s reelection.
All this contrasting pro-Dewey and pro-Roosevelt activity in the ranks of organized labor in the United States would seem strange in any industrial nation of Europe, for European labor normally tries to achieve its ends in the political field through a labor or socialist party of its own, instead of through a “capitalist” party.
The Workingmen’s Party
However, it was the United States which produced the earliest attempt at a labor party on something of a national scale. In 1828, the Workingmen’s Party was organized in most of the large Eastern cities. In some states, it formed political alliances with agrarian political groups. The new party won some minor political victories, but soon disintegrated.
After the Civil War came the National Labor Union, then the National Labor and Reform Party. These got tied up with the agitation for cheaper currency, and amalgamated with the Greenback Party. In 1878, Greenback-Labor parties polled about a million votes in the elections for Congress.
The 1880s were the powerful era of the Knights of Labor, which in the ‘90s was eclipsed by the newly-formed American Federation of Labor. The Knights in their period of decline had pinned their faith to political action, and that was incessantly pointed to by Samuel Gompers, presiding genius of the AFL, as one reason why the Knights were displaced by the AFL.
The Gompers policy
Mr. Gompers insisted that in the political field American labor should follow a policy of rewarding its friends and punishing its foes, instead of dissipating its strength by running candidates of its own.
In 1924, the AFL did join with the railroad brotherhoods, the Socialist Party, the Farmer-Labor Party, and certain agrarian and liberal groups to sponsor the presidential candidacy of the late Senator Robert M. La Follette. Although Mr. La Follette polled more than one-half as many votes as John W. Davis, the Democratic candidate, he carried only his own state, Wisconsin.
The La Follette defeat is always adduced by labor leaders who oppose a separate labor party with a separate labor ticket. They also adduce the failure of the Socialist Party to get anywhere in American politics. And, finally, they are adducing the growing political ineffectiveness of the British Labor Party, which today seems much weaker than when it took office (as the plurality, not a majority party) in 1924 and again in 1929.
Québec’s plan to speed war to be revealed
Roosevelt, Churchill to continue sessions
Québec, Canada (UP) –
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill today will reveal some of the decisions made in their momentous Second Quebec Conference on Pacific war plans and the Allied program for a Europe entirely freed of Nazi influences.
After announcing as much as military security and fluctuating international politics will permit, the President and the Prime Minister – according to hints by official spokesmen – will go to an undisclosed place to continue their discussions on a more intimate basis.
The new talks were certain to involve questions of a world peace organization, the future of Germany, and Anglo-American dealings with Russia.
In between military planning for the destruction of Japan, these other topics were touched upon during the week’s conference here.
Evidence of these political angles was found in the hasty trips here of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and his No. 1 assistant, Sit Alexander Cadogan, who has been heading the British delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks world security conference in Washington.
It seemed equally evident that Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill had not finished their business although the Québec phase of their conferences ended today.