The Pittsburgh Press (August 28, 1944)
Guffey for labor as full partner
Senator speaks at Bristol CIO rally
Bristol, Pennsylvania –
The Democratic Party must “take labor into partnership” throughout the county, U.S. Senator Joseph F. Guffey told a meeting of members of the CIO United Auto Workers here yesterday.
Mr. Guffey said:
I call for a full, fair and free partnership between all of labor, organized and unorganized, and the Democratic Party, a party which is nationwide and not the property of any section group.
That is what has begun to happen, even in the South where labor recently has won important elections and removed from the national scene certain elderly or loudmouthed politicians who curried favor with the Northern absentee owners of Southern wealth by labor-baiting and abusive investigations.
Absentees are mentioned
Mr. Guffey specifically mentioned Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, Congressman Joe Stearns of Alabama and Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, all Democrats, among those who “will no longer be with us in Washington.”
The renomination of Democratic Senators Lister Hill in Alabama and Claude Pepper in Florida in this year’s primaries Mr. Guffey interpreted as evidence that “floods of Republican money were unable to halt the march of labor and of liberalism in the new South.”
He said:
This is possible because labor is organizing politically and is taking the road of political action nationally. The fight will not be over quickly, nor will it be easy.
The Republican Party still contains plenty of men like Sewell Avery of Montgomery Ward who hate labor, and plenty of men like Joe Grundy, who wish to plunge us into high tariff bankruptcy. The party that stole the election of 1876 from Tilden, the party that counted out Bryan in the election of 1896, the party that gave us Harding and the Ohio gang in 1920 is still doing business at the same old stand and will stop at nothing to win the election.
Mr. Guffey said if the Republicans win “your hours of labor, your rates of pay, your very right to organize would go down like a house of cards before the avalanche of greed, or reaction and revenge.”