The Pittsburgh Press (October 18, 1944)
Bricker calls New Deal’s spending ‘lavish, unwise’
GOP candidate says taxpayers face post-war debt of $300 billion
Long Beach, California (UP) –
Ohio Governor John W. Bricker today condemned the New Deal for spending the taxpayers’ money “lavishly and unwisely.”
The GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a speech prepared for delivery here, said:
New Deal waste has become so rampant that the nation is beginning to reel and stagger under the load of the national debt.
The estimated post-war “New Deal debt,” which will reach $300 billion, he said, is a burden which must be borne by “American taxpayers for many years to come.”
Not all war debt
He said:
Let us not forget that the war alone is not responsible for this burden.
Before the war, he added, the New Deal administration “nearly doubled the public debt over what it was in 1932.”
Mr. Bricker asserted that the “way out of this flood of spending” is the election of a Republican administration.
“A vote for Tom Dewey,” he said, “is the key to the solution of this problem.” The Republican Party, he recalled, has promised to “eliminate from the budget all wasteful and unnecessary expenditures and exercise the most rigid economy.”
Calls Democrats reactionary
Last night, Mr. Bricker said that the Democrats and not the Republicans were the reactionaries of the country.
He said:
The truth is that instead of advancing liberalism in America, it has set this nation on the road toward reaction. It has reached back for centuries and taken into its hands old-world devices subjecting people to governmental regimentation.
Mr. Bricker said that President Roosevelt, Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Rexford Guy Tugwell, Adolf Berle, Harry Hopkins and Attorney General Francis A. Biddle were the “arch reactionaries” of this century.
Hits Pearl Harbor secrecy
In an interview yesterday, Governor Bricker accused the administration of concealing the full “black story” of the Pearl Harbor disaster until after the November election.
I expect there will be a new Pearl Harbor story and that it will be black. But I doubt that we’ll hear anything more before Election Day.
When President Roosevelt took office in 1933, Mr. Bricker asserted, no peril faced the nation from outside. The candidate blamed lack of information on German and Japanese military preparations for American failure to act sooner.
He said:
We had diplomatic service around the world, but we were not advised of the rising threat. If the government knew about it, it didn’t tell Congress or the American people, and so nothing was done to halt the rising military power. And all the time we were furnishing Japan with the instruments of war.