The Pittsburgh Press (November 1, 1940)
Campaign Summary —
CANDIDATES TRAIN GUNS ON MIDDLE EAST
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Roosevelt Returns to New York; Willkie Campaigns in Jersey
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To Lyle C. Wilson, United Press Staff Writer
New York, Nov. 1 –
President Roosevelt and Wendell L. Willkie are fighting with every political weapon available for the decisive middle eastern states, the presidential battleground.
Mr. Roosevelt returns to New York City tonight to make another bid for New York State’s 17 electoral votes in the great urban area where he must pile up a whopping Election Day lead if he is to get them. He will speak in Brooklyn.
WCAE and KQV will broadcast Mr. Roosevelt’s address 9 o’clock tonight.
Mr. Willkie continues his campaign in New Jersey after a (…) invasion of Pennsylvania and Delaware.
The Red network of the NBC will broadcast Mr. Willkie’s address at 8:30 tonight.
Three States Hold Key
If either candidate can line up; New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the other one probably will lose. New York is a Willkie must if he is to win.
This election will be close, today’s polls report. Close in New York, close in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois.
Willkie Gains
The margin of electoral vote victory probably lies among those states but the no-quarter contest extends far beyond to Massachusetts, where Mr. Roosevelt suddenly decided to deliver a major address this week, and to the Upper Mississippi Valley states, where ardent campaigners are carrying the gospel for both sides.
Mr. Roosevelt had a tremendous lead and Mr. Willkie reduced it but by much or little is a question the voters themselves will determine. There has not been another contest like this since 1916 and for spectacular political turbulence 1940 probably will be all-American for some time to come.
“True it is,” wrote Charles Dudley Warner, “that politics makes strange bedfellows” – and it is considerably truer today than when he wrote it before the turn of the century.
Party lines and personal political ties are broken and tangled. In this campaign a former Democrat is the Republican candidate in opposition to a Democrat whose vice presidential running mate is a former Republican.
Herbert C. Hoover and Alfred E. Smith, who fought the presidential battle of 1928, are on the same side now, speaking for Mr. Willkie, while Henry L. Stimson, who was Mr. Hoover’s Secretary of State, is Mr. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War.
Brain Trust Scattered
And the brain trust is scattered and divided with Raymond Moley and General Hugh Johnson notable among New Deal advises in Mr. Roosevelt’s first term, warning against a third.
And in the election stretch, President John L. Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organization bolted the New Deal which he helped make secure four years ago.
Urban street corners are blaring with speakers and loudspeakers for and against, and the plain ordinary voter is the man-of-the-year this week and next – through Tuesday.
Close as the popular vote promise to be, there still is the possibility of a big electoral vote margin, especially if Mr. Roosevelt is the winner.
Far West Eyed
He goes into the contest with the votes of the so-called Solid South and there is no evidence of general weakening of his position among the border states despite poll indications of a soft spot in Missouri. Democrats also claim that mountain states – where silver is a prime commodity – and the Far West are leaning satisfactorily to the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket.
The Republican drive on the Pacific Coast depends on the personal pull of Senator Charles L. McNary, vice presidential candidate, in Oregon, and of Senator Hiram W. Johnson, Progressive Republican, in California.
Both sides are reaching for the “bloc” votes, the Negroes and those citizens of German, Italian and Jewish blood.
War Threat Stressed
Republicans warn directly or indirectly that Mr. Roosevelt’s re-election would move the nation toward war, and the Democratic response is that Mr. Willkie might be an appeaser or that he is playing politics with a war scare.
Henry A. Wallace, Democratic vice presidential candidate, told a Madison Square Garden audience in New York last night that there were “Nazi propaganda and Nazi pressure” for Mr. Willkie’s election.
In Camden, N.J., Mr. Willkie said Mr. Roosevelt’s government would make “our Constitution a scrap of paper,” and he and other Republican campaigners hit again and again at the possibility of a dictatorial government.
Roosevelt Uses ‘My’
“It used to be ‘my friends’,” said Mr. Willkie, referring to a reference by the President to Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador to Great Britain.
Now it is “my ambassador.” Pretty soon it will be “my generals.” Then it will be “my people.”
In New York, papers are making much of an altercation in which Presidential Secretary Stephen T. Early sought to get through a police line to Mr. Roosevelt’s special train Monday night. A Negro policeman reported himself kicked or “kneed” and the incident had become a political issue.
Mr. Roosevelt goes west to Cleveland tomorrow night to make a final bid for Ohio and the Lake States, where there are reports of substantial Republican gains. Mr. Willkie will be speaking here in Madison Square Garden in another bid for New York.
‘Hysteria’ Charged
At Lincoln, Neb., last night, Mr. Hoover said the New Deal’s foreign policy was one of “hysteria” that might get the country into war.
Alf M. Landon, Republican presidential nominee in 1936, said at Sioux City, Iowa, that:
If we yield on election day to the third term menace, the bells throughout the country should toll, for a people have lost their liberties, of their own free choice.
Alfred E. Smith, Democratic presidential nominee in 1928, said at Boston that in three campaign speeches, President Roosevelt has “simply appealed to class hatred” and has “made no answer” to charges of New Deal failures.
LaGuardia Raps Willkie
At St. Louis, Mayor F. H. LaGuardia of New York said that Mr. Willkie’s advisers were “somewhat stunned at the reckless and unpatriotic statements their candidate is making” – a reference to Mr. Willkie’s statement in Baltimore that the country could expect war by next April if Mr. Roosevelt is re-elected.
General Johnson, speaking at New York, said Mr. Roosevelt’s policy was one of “hypocrisy and deceit,” and that Joseph P. Kennedy, ambassador to Great Britain, was a “war monger.”
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt said at Grafton, W. Va., that Mr. Roosevelt and “those around him” have “made commitments to foreign nations which we, the American people, know nothing of.”