The Brooklyn Eagle (May 21, 1944)
New Liberal Party lines up for Roosevelt and Wallace
World peace unit plank is adopted
The new Liberal Party, organized by former right-wing leaders of the American Labor Party and allied groups as the nucleus of a potential national liberal party, threw itself once into the 1944 national campaign yesterday by voting by acclamation to nominate President Roosevelt for a fourth term.
The action, climaxing a two-day convention in the Hotel Roosevelt in Manhattan, was voted by 1,124 delegates who. shortly afterward, also now chose by acclamation Vice President Wallace as their nominee for reelection. The same method was used to vote the renomination of Senator Robert F. Wagner for a new six-year term in Washington.
Claim 400,000 votes
Convention spokesmen predicted at the close of the proceedings the new party would poll 400,000 votes lor Roosevelt. The new party comes into existence less than 60 days after former right-wing leaders of the ALP withdrew from the latter organization after a losing primary fight in March which involved the issues of party control and alleged ALP domination by Communists and their so-called fellow travelers.
Under the state election laws, the new political group, in order to place the names of the President, Vice President and Senator Wagner on the ballot, must nominate by petition as an independent party. Its nomination of the Roosevelt-Wallace ticket will require 12,000 signatures of state voters, with at least 50 from each county.
A demonstration of between 10 and 15 minutes was staged when President Roosevelt’s name was presented to the delegates in a nomination speech by Samuel Shore, vice president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the most powerful union group behind the new party.
Delegates parade
Horn-tooting, cowbell-ringing, banner-waving delegates paraded around the main ballroom, in which the convention was staged, and went into a similar demonstration later when the nomination was made.
Mr. Shore said:
In hours heavy with uncertainties, we need men who are unswerving in their certainty of principle, their devotion to justice, their loyalty to ideals. Small men cannot perform great tasks – no matter how big their ambition or how wealthy their backers.
The speaker placed the President’s name before the delegates without a reference to a “draft” movement.
O’Leary endorses choice
Joseph V. O’Leary, former State Controller, made a seconding speech. The convention howled with laughter later when Prof. William Withers of Queens College, in another seconding speech, declared:
It is a privilege to second the nomination, not of an Ohio Governor, not of a naval officer from Minnesota, not of a Pacific war commander, not of a man in a blue serge suit, but of a real liberal, the greatest of them all, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The nominations came after the convention, at its morning session, had adopted a declaration of the need for the formation of the new party and a program containing 12 planks.
The plank dealing with foreign policy called for the immediate creation of a United Nations Council and the post-war creation of a permanent international organization with power to maintain peace and carry out its decisions. One of the specific recommendations was for the formation of an “effective system of international policing to suppress aggression.”
Rejects isolationism
The plank rejected “isolationism and imperialism for American” and warned against alliances of the big powers, declaring that after the war there must be collective security and world organization.
The platform also included planks on a post-war economic policy; the transition from war to peace economy; democracy and equality; labor’s rights, agriculture, cooperatives, civil rights, education, housing, social security and civil liberties.
Prof. John L. Childs of Teachers College, Columbia University, was elected party chairman. Alex Rose was chosen chairman of the party’s administrative committee, and 21 members were named as vice chairmen, including Andrew R. Armstrong and Alexander Kahn of Brooklyn. The vice presidents include Mr. Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.