Pegler: More on Dewey’s record
By Westbrook Pegler
New York –
Some of Tom Dewey’s friends and neighbors are beginning to mutter he owes it to them to say now, somehow, that he will accept the nomination so they will have something to offer the Republicans around the country in competition with Mr. Willkie.
I agree that this bashfulness can be overdone and has just about served its purpose, but I take it for granted that Dewey will not only accept, but put up a fight for the nomination because to his kind of Republican, Willkie is just an imitation Roosevelt and his policies a plagiarized New Deal.
It has got to be Dewey or Willkie for no other Republican running against Mr. Roosevelt would be worth the investment in train fares, wire tolls and printing. Moreover, Dewey is so sore at Willkie for cutting him down in 1940 that you may be sure he would be very happy to accept if only to square matters.
Of course, he should be grateful because Mr. Roosevelt was a bull for strength that year and would have knocked the brash young man right through the skylight, but politicians are peculiar and he thought he had a good chance and was cut off by an interloper.
Willkie evasive on labor
But if Mr. Dewey is being coy, I submit that Brother Willkie is also simpering on an important issue while tearing around to meetings and pelting himself with compliments at close range.
How stands Brother Willkie on labor? That is one of the greatest domestic issues and grows graver day by day. It is not a mere matter of wartime strikes which may abate under the pressure of public opinion communicated to Congress and the bosses of the big organizations, and, in some cases have undoubtedly been provoked by dumb and stiff-necked or incompetent industrial management.
It involved fundamentals, the right of the citizen to join a private lodge, his right not to pay an income tax to a political organization as Sidney Hillman has had the effrontery to propose that he should, his right to bargain through the agent of his own choice as proposed in the Wagner Act and not through an agent thrust upon him by either his employer or the government.
These rights have been flouted in the most cynical way for several years and will wither away if they are not reestablished soon. Another four years of Mr. Roosevelt’s policy would cancel them entirely and if we can assume his administration would continue its creeping encroachments on the freedom and dignity of the individual, we can also foresee a convincing imitation in the country of the labor controls which Mussolini founded in Italy and Hitler adopted in the land of the chosen, but faceless people of the master race.
Dewey fair to labor
I will concede that Mr. Dewey has not declared himself strongly. But, for one thing, not being a candidate thus far, he hasn’t had to and, for another, he did prove as prosecutor in New York that he is at least opposed to criminality in union leadership and that he has a wide knowledge of those union practices which are not criminal but are antisocial.
And notwithstanding his prosecution of crooks in union office, the intelligent labor men have been glad to admit that he was fair and not in any sense the enemy either of unions or labor. In politics he has had the support of many such men.
Willkie’s thoughts on taxes and the American standard of living which he would debase, though reluctantly, in the interests of war efforts, and his foreign policy have been very bold and interesting. He will be accused of a number of sinful ideas against that which we call the American way, but it will have to be allowed that he has not trimmed on those politically dangerous issues.
Therefore, it is hard to understand why he ignores the whole great problem of labor and unionism as though it didn’t exist. It is there all right as prominent as something extremely dead and I can assure him on the basis of, I should say, at least 100,000 letters from laborers and other American toilers in the last few years that it is no minor concern.
These people and many more are thinking of some very precious liberties that have been taken from them at home by a government which has been glib with promises of unwonted and, in some areas, unwanted freedoms, everywhere else in the world.
