The Pittsburgh Press (November 3, 1944)
‘Dewey Smear’ charged by Ickes
New York (UP) –
Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes last night charged that Governor Thomas E. Dewey was waging a campaign which has been a “sly but deliberate effort” to capitalize on anti-labor and anti-Semitic sentiment in the United States.
Mr. Ickes asserted that the “Dewey Smear” was “in the Republican tradition” and was the method used to defeat the late Al Smith for President in 1928.
Secretary Ickes said:
Governor Smith happened to be a Catholic. It was in that same year and on that issue that I left the Republican Party never to return. A Protestant myself. I resented the injection into a political campaign of a religious issue.
Speaking at a Madison Square Garden rally sponsored by “Everybody for Roosevelt,” the secretary said Mr. Dewey and his followers have reiterated that CIO Political Action Committee Chairman Sidney Hillman was “Russian-born or Lithuanian-born” and have referred to his “rabbinical training.”