The Pittsburgh Press (September 9, 1944)
Editorial: Dewey gets started
Governor Dewey, opening his campaign in Philadelphia, said he wanted to make it clear that:
This is not merely a campaign against an individual or a political party. It is not merely a campaign to displace a tired, exhausted, quarreling and bickering administration with a fresh and vigorous administration. It is a campaign against an administration which was conceived in defeatism, which failed for eight straight years to restore our domestic economy, which has been the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent administration in the history of the nation, and, worst of all, one which has lost faith in itself and in the American people.
He pointed to the administrative chaos in Washington, the piling of agency on agency, the quarrels that no one in authority stops, the snarls that nobody untangles, the messes that are made of the people’s business at the people’s cost.
He cited the New Dealers’ fears for the future, their doleful prediction of difficulties and delays in reconversion and demobilization, their dismal preparations for another depression after the war – including Gen. Hershey’s shocking statement that after the war “we can keep people in the Army about as cheaply as we could create an agency for them when they are out.”
But, more than that, Mr. Dewey asserted his own firm faith that America can provide jobs and opportunities for all; that we have not even begun to build out industrial plant; that we have not exhausted our inventive genius or our capacity to produce more goods and an ever-higher living standard for our people; that we need not sacrifice freedom to achieve social security; that “we can achieve real social security only if we do keep our freedom.”
Of course, he said, we need regulation of the stock markets, bank-deposit insurance, price support for agriculture, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, relief whenever there are not enough jobs, protection of labor’s right to organize and bargain collectively.
But we must also have a government which believes in enterprise and government policies which encourage enterprise… We must see to it that the man who wants to produce more jobs is not throttled by the government, but knows that he has a government as eager for him to succeed as he is, himself… Our place in a peaceful world can and will be made secure. But nothing on earth will make us secure unless we are productive and unless we have faith in ourselves.
It remains for Governor Dewey to prove to the country that, as President, he would know how to act on the beliefs he proclaimed in Philadelphia. Such action, as he said, involves many things – tax policies, regulatory policies, labor policies, opportunities for small business, the encroachments of bureaucracy – subjects which he promised to discuss in detail in future speeches.
We think that his emphasis on jobs and opportunities, on production and prosperity, on the need for vigor and freshness in the government during coming year of peace, got his campaign off to a hopeful start.