The Pittsburgh Press (September 19, 1944)
Dewey Short blasts ‘Commander-in-Chief,’ indispensable theme
‘How did country exist before Roosevelt?’ he asks in speech condemning New Dealers
By Kermit McFarland
Opening another drive to swing Pennsylvania from the Roosevelt column in the November election, the Republican State Committee here yesterday launched a campaign of unrestrained bitterness against the New Deal and all its cohorts.
Leading the attack in a keynote speech which heaped disparagement and belittlement upon the President was Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri, who styles himself a “hillbilly from the Ozarks.”
He ridiculed the “indispensable man” and “Commander-in-Chief” themes which some Democratic stump speakers have adopted calling it “tommyrot.”
“How in the world did this country ever exist before Roosevelt came into office?” he shouted in sarcasm while the assembled Republicans roared approval.
And he was Commander-in-Chief at Pearl Harbor, too. Don’t forget that! He must have known what was going on in Germany and Japan.
Mr. Short assailed the Roosevelt administration for the national debt, which he predicted would reach $300 billion at the end of the war.
Throws off coat
He said:
All the time Hitler was building up a war machine. Roosevelt was busy increasing out debt from 22 to 67 billion dollars at the time of Pearl Harbor. The debt was $203 billion as of last June 30 and it will be $300 billion by the end of the war.
Warming to his job, Mr. Short, midway in the speech, threw off his coat, unbuttoned his collar and loosened his tie.
This led him into a charge that the “Commander-in-Chief” title is “just a fraud.”
Generals winning war
He said:
This war is being won but it is being won by Marshall and King and MacArthur and Arnold and Spaatz, Stilwell and Chennault, not by any politicians in Washington.
He bitterly assailed the Four Freedoms declaration proclaimed by Mr. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill prior to U.S. entry into the war.
He shouted:
It must have taken an intellectual giant to go into confinement and give birth to that one. America always has had those freedoms. Even a man in jail enjoys the Four Freedoms. When was America ever without them?
Get in there and fight
Mr. Short warned the Republicans they must “take off your coat, roll up your sleeves and fight like hell between now and November” to offset the fourth-term campaign launched by Sidney Hillman and the CIO Political Action groups.
He said:
They say they have got $700,000 to spend, but I have it on good authority they have three million dollars. You’d better do something about it. These Communists would burn down the Capitol if they had their way.
In retort to a statement last week by Democratic State Chairman David L. Lawrence in which Mr. Short was accused of voting against “every national defense measure introduced in the House of Representatives to prepare us for war,” the Missouri Congressman said:
I have been further back under the barn looking for eggs than Dave Lawrence ever has been away from home – blast his dirty, stinking hide.
By this time, the “hillbilly from the Ozarks,” gulping glass after glass of water between denunciations of the New Deal, was getting worked up.
‘When we get into power’
He said:
I won’t say every New Dealer is a lunatic, but every lunatic I meet is a New Dealer…
It’s going to take all of our prison camps to hold those New Deals when we get into power – the dirty, contemptible crooks…
I don’t want to raise up a Hitler here to get rid of one abroad…
I want somebody in the White House who loves America as much as Winston Churchill loves the British Empire…
Cooperation? Collaboration? Yes, of course. When did America ever refuse? We’ve been more than kind and generous. But I’m not going to give this country away. We’re fighting with our allies, not for them.
Earlier he had quipped, to the vast relief of his listeners: “Washington is the only insane asylum on earth run by its own inmates.”
Truman gets it
He said:
Mr. Roosevelt promised in 1940 to keep us out of war. He kept us out of war, just as the Democrats did in 1916.
Mr. Short also unleashed a stormy attack on Senator Harry S. Truman, also of Missouri, the Democratic nominee for Vice President.
“Harry Truman is boss-picked, boss-reared and boss-controlled,” he alleged.
Far milder assaults
Mr. Short’s speech climaxed a day in which the State Committee heard similar, but far milder, assaults on the New Deal.
Senator James J. Davis, candidate for reelection, accused the administration of spreading a “false gospel of pessimism and defeat.”
He said:
We must have in this government men who have faith in America, in an economy of ever-increasing abundance.
Mrs. Edna R. Carroll, vice chairman of the State Committee, said “America is at the crossroads.”
To the left national socialism
She said:
To the left is the road to national socialism, with a million signposts pointing the way. And down that road the New Dealers travel with strange companions to the certain destruction of representative republican government.
The committee, in a series of resolutions (adopted in lieu of the customary state platform), condemned the Roosevelt administration for “blundering dissension, economic experimentation, confusion, conflicts and chaos” and for “one-man government.”