The Pittsburgh Press (October 10, 1944)
Davis scores New Dealers’ war claims
Senator belittles defense efforts
Erie, Pennsylvania (UP) –
President Roosevelt and those backing his fourth-term campaign are trying to convey the “utterly false impressions” that winning of the war and the peace following it “have been and are the sole concern of the New Dealers,” U.S. Senator James J. Davis charged last night.
Mr. Davis, Republican nominee for reelection, said in a campaign address that the Democratic claim that the Roosevelt administration built up the nation’s defenses before Pearl Harbor was false and that their contention that they alone favor international cooperation to preserve the peace of the world is “just as preposterous.”
Cites King’s report
While Adolf Hitler was rearming, absorbing Austria and Czechoslovakia and invading Poland in the 1933-39 period, Mr. Davis said, “this administration added only 110,000 men to the Armed Forces of this nation.” He cited an official report of Adm. Ernest J. King as showing that during 1933-38, “not one single warship was added to the U.S. Navy.”
Mr. Davis said an official report of Gen. George C. Marshall showed that:
We had on hand in 1940 only 461 anti-aircraft guns, 186 infantry mortars, 142 tanks and 38,000 Garand rifles.
These conditions existed, Mr. Davis said, despite the fact that “in every year from 1935 through 1940, the Congress appropriated more money for defense than the administration asked for - $208 million more.”
Favored cooperation
Countering the second claim he attributed to Mr. Roosevelt’s supporters, Mr. Davis, who served three terms as U.S. Secretary of Labor, said:
I have served in the cabinets of three Republican Presidents, and all of them favored international cooperation. Not only did they favor it; they promoted it. Under their administrations the Nine-Power Pact, the inter-American conferences and numerous other international organizations and agreements were formulated and what is more those agreements were honored throughout those Republican administrations.
Mr. Davis said that during Mr. Roosevelt’s first two terms the League of Nations fell apart and “the New Dealers permitted every international agreement to which this nation was a party to die completely.”
The Senator told his audience:
I say to you that the New Dealers are no more fit to create and keep world peace today than they were fit to preserve peace from 1933 to 1939. As they proceeded with indifference and secrecy before the war, so too are they proceeding with indifference and secrecy at the present time – indifference toward the rights of small nations and secrecy toward their own people.