Election 1944: Rep. Luce says PAC striving to make ‘zombies’ of union men (10-16-44)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 16, 1944)

Mrs. Luce to rip CIO-PAC tonight

Women will elect Dewey, she claims
By Kermit McFarland

Here to pitch into the CIO Political Action Committee and its alleged Communist “infiltration,” Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, the Republican “glamor girl,” today predicted that women voters will carry the election for Governor Thomas E. Dewey because: “They want an efficient administration from here out which will bring the boys home the quickest and get them jobs the fastest.”

Mrs. Luce, who speaks at a Republican rally in Syria Mosque tonight, said that after 11 years of failing to keep us out of war and 11 years of unemployment, “there is no hope that Mr. Roosevelt will disclose himself as a better administrator in his declining years than he was in his prime.”

The demure-appearing but sharp-tongued Congresswoman from Connecticut said she has been hurling three questions at the Democrats in her five-day speaking tour of the Midwest, but “nobody answers the questions.”

Here are her questions:

• Would wise statesmanship have prevented this war in the 10 years before the war began?

• If America’s entry into the war was inevitable after 1939, why didn’t the President tell the American people so? If it was not inevitable, why are we in it?

• If the answer to the last question is because we were attacked, why were we attacked if we were truly neutral and trying to stay out?

Then she added another question:

Did the President say in 1940, after Dunkerque, that the Axis war on the world was a “foreign war” or did he not? The answer is that he said it, again and again. But did he believe 11? If he did believe it, where was his vision? If he didn’t believe it, why did he say it?

Mrs. Luce said she was “just asking the questions,” and not, as Congressman Mary T. Norton (D-NJ) charged yesterday, telling “half-truths.”

Speech to hit PAC

She said:

But nobody will answer these questions. All they say is that you are dealing in half-truths, or they don’t like the way you do your hair, or women don’t have any business in politics anyway.

Mrs. Luce said she will devote her speech tonight to the CIO Political Action Committee and “Communist infiltration” into the PAC.

She said the news from Bridgeport, Connecticut, in her home Congressional district, that a PAC chairman had quit because the PAC campaign against her was “un-American,” indicated that “the PAC is going to have a considerable surprise on election morning.”

Women will settle decision

She said:

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it hasn’t done more to alienate the working man than all the Republican logic and other reasonable argument can do.

Mrs. Luce said she was “quite sure” women voters will decide the election.

She said:

Six of every 10 voters are women. They ate responsible for the increased registration.

I think they will vote Republican because they don’t bother with superfluous questions and extraneous matters, the wav men do. They don’t clutter up their minds with so many details. They get right to the heart of it, and the heart of it is that they want an efficient administration which will bring the boys home the quickest and get them jobs the fastest.

I think they also are very anxious to have a little honesty in government. I don’t think they are so swayed by complicated matters like inflation, or sustaining the currency or other affairs which are very important.

First Lady comment refused

Asked by a lady reporter looking for a “woman’s angle” to compare her travels with those of Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Luce replied: “I never comment on Mrs. Roosevelt.”

Later, she broadened this to include all women in public affairs. She said:

I never comment on other women in public affairs. I don’t think it does the cause any good. Men have an unrestrained impulse to call it a catfight, or a hairpulling contest.

Answers Wallace

Mrs. Luce said she noted that Vice President Henry A. Wallace also was asking three questions, to the effect that the voters should decide which man could best win the war, which could best win the peace, and which could best provide employment after the war.

“If I were he,” she said, “I wouldn’t go around asking those questions. I can answer him.”

She said an “efficient administration” would best win the war, that Mr. Roosevelt had failed to keep the peace, and that until the war came along, he had failed to solve the unemployment problem.

“This war saved his goose,” she said.

Mrs. Luce said she wouldn’t accept a challenge to debate Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes over “microphones at 10 paces.”

She said:

Mr. Ickes in private life, some of my friends find, is very interesting, but in public he has the soul of a meat ax and the mind of a commissar. I have no intention of debating him.

Dewey here Friday

In her speech tonight, Mrs. Luce will precede by four days the appearance here of Governor Dewey, who speaks Friday night in Hunt Armory.

The rally tonight will present a long list of Republican speakers and will include entertainment and what Republican County Chairman James F. Malone described as an “old-fashioned” political parade through the aisles of the hall.

Governor Edward Martin will introduce Mrs. Luce.

Following her speech. Scheduled for 9:30, which will be broadcast over a statewide radio network, Governor Dewey’s address in St. Louis, to begin at 10:00 p.m., will be tuned in for the Syria Mosque audience.

Other speakers

The speaking program at tonight’s rally will be opened by Mrs. Nelle G. Dressler, vice chairman of the Republican County Committee. Other speakers include Mrs. Margery M. Scranton, Pennsylvania member of the Republican National Committee; Mrs. Edna H. Carroll of Philadelphia, vice chairman of the State Committee, and Mr. Malone.

Republican State Chairman M. Harvey Taylor will introduce Judges J. Frank Graff and Arthur H. James, candidates for the Superior Court; Justice Howard W. Hughes, candidate for the Supreme Court: City Treasurer Edgar W. Baird of Philadelphia, candidate for State Treasurer, and Rev, James R. Cox of Old St. Patrick’s Church.

PAC chairman quits, charging unfairness

Bridgeport, Connecticut (UP) –
Chairman Daniel Hannon of the Political Action Committee of the CIO Brass Workers International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers local here resigned today. charging the PAC campaign against Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut was un-American.”

Mr. Hannon also charged that a voluntary contribution of $1 collected from each union member for the PAC was “unfair.”

Edward C. O’Brien Jr., president of the local, said the executive committee would meet to select Mr. Hannon’s successor and that the work of the local PAC organization would go on despite his stand.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (October 17, 1944)

Rep. Luce: PAC striving to make ‘zombies’ of union men

GOP ‘glamor girl’ speaks at Syria Mosque; control of Democrats also called goal
By Kermit McFarland

It is the purpose of Sidney Hillman and his CIO Political Action Committee, in supporting the fourth term, to take over the Democratic Party and to make “political zombies” of the members of America’s labor unions, Clare Boothe Luce (R-CT) told a Republican rally in Syria Mosque last night.

Mrs. Luce, principal speaker at the second major Republican campaign meeting of the season, devoted her entire speech to an attack on the CIO Political Action Committee, which she described as a “political putsch on the American working man and woman.”

Warns of dire results

She said:

Under pressure from the Political Action Committee, the whole far-flung organization of the CIO has been forced to turn its locals in nearly every city, in every town, in every industrial village into cells to be put at the service of Mr. Hillman’s political high command.

She asked:

What is that going to mean, carried to its logical conclusion? It means that if Mr. Hillman wins in November, from there out no CIO working man’s or woman’s job will be safe unless he votes the way he is told by Mr. Hillman in any election, local or national.

For it is Mr. Hillman’s idea that the basic political unit isn’t an individual citizen, is not you and you and you. He holds that the basic political unit is a collective labor group, to be voted like heads of cattle, by orders from above, and without reference to the individual preferences at the members.

Mrs. Luce spoke to an overflow audience of 5,000 which jammed Syria Mosque and compelled the management to take down even the SRO signs. It was a far bigger crowd than heard Ohio Governor John W. Bricker, the Republican candidate for Vice President, who spoke in the same hall last month.

‘Monstrous idea’

The slight lads from Connecticut, prim and precise as she stood before the microphones, described the Political Action Committee as a “monstrous idea by every traditional American standard of freedom or democracy.”

She said:

It stems from the philosophy of Herr Karl Marx, the German father of Russian Communism. In this new interpretation of the Hillmanites and their Communist cohorts. however, this Political Action Committee plot is a dish no real American can stomach. I say it is Nazi German sauerkraut with Russian dressing.

And yet without the support, the active vociferous tireless support of this Communist-dominated PAC today, not one single political analyst in the country believes that Mr. Roosevelt can be reelected for a 16-year term in office.

Martin speaks

Mrs. Luce was preceded on the platform by Governor Edward Martin, who had escorted her to the hall. Mr. Martin, before introducing the flaxen-haired Republican “glamor girl,” briefly scored the proposal of a group of Democratic U.S. Senators who propose to shift industry to the South and West by government decree.

The Governor said:

No part of this nation is more concerned… than the Pittsburgh district.

This would mean the death to many of your industries and would destroy the wellbeing of our working people. We will fight this sectional discrimination to the bitter end.

During the war years, the income increase in Pennsylvania has fallen far below the national average and far below that of many other states.

If the McCarran plan should be carried out, this situation would be further aggravated. All of us – labor, agriculture, industry and government – must unite to defeat this dangerous plan to cripple our industry and our state.

Dewey speech tuned in

After Mrs. Luce’s address which took a half hour, the Republican management tuned in Governor Thomas E. Dewey’s speech from St. Louis.

When Mrs. Luce finished, the crowd started moving out. At first, there were dozens to take the seats of the departing. But before the presidential candidate had completed his radio speech, empty seats began to show in the great auditorium.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Luce, accompanied by the Governor had buried to a downstairs hall to greet the overflow arenes which presumably occupied it. But the audience down there was scanty and she and the Governor beat a hasty retreat back up the stairs.

However, the hallways, stairways and the outside sidewalks were jammed with people seeking a glimpse of the demure-looking lady of the bristling speeches.

Colorful ceremony

At the conclusion of the Governor’s speech, a great backdrop was raised and behind it stood four long lines of troops, brought in by the Governor. Then, while a chaplain spoke briefly and a trumpet blew taps for the 7,500 Pennsylvanians who have lost their lives in the war, a giant American flag was lowered slowly in the background.

Mrs. Luce entered sedately from side stage and shook hands before the microphones with Governor Martin.

She wore a black suit and a ruffled American Beauty shade blouse, set off by a single American Beauty rosebud a favorite with her. Her high-heeled suede shoes were toeless and heel-less. She wore no hat, and her hairdo was described as “simple and severe.”

PAC called a ‘plot’

Her delicately flashy earrings were matched by a costume pin on her dress.

All this may not be a part of political reporting, but every woman in the audience noted these items and commented on them.

Mrs. Luce’s speech, delivered with less fire and punch than some of her previous oratory, described the Political Action Committee as a “plot.” but she said it was “equally accurate to describe it as an accident, a major political accident which has befallen the Democratic Party, and with it the whole labor movement in America.”

She said:

It befell as a result of Mr. Roosevelt’s vacillating, unstable and confused labor policies all during his last term, and his increasing inability to chart any coherent domestic course, either for his own party or for the working people of this nation.

Farley praised

When the President “dropped” James A. Farley, former Democratic National Chairman, she said, “the regular Democratic organization lost its ablest organizer.”

She went on:

Today, engaged in a desperate rearguard fight for the Presidency, Mr. Roosevelt cannot be choosey about where he gets help. So, holding his nose and closing his eyes no doubt, he is taking plenty of it from the Communists and fellow travelers.

His enemies in 1940 are today his last great vocal supporters. In 1940, the Communists in America were against the President because at that time only America was in danger from Hitler. Soviet Russia seemed safe. Soviet Russia was Hitler’s ally.

But when Soviet Russia was attacked, the American Communists abruptly altered their whole position. Today they are for the President for two reasons. First, because Russia came into the war, and secondly, because they see a way of exchanging their support at the polls for the right to take over the whole CIO union today, and tomorrow the whole union movement and the Democratic Party.

Requotes Governor Dewey

Mrs. Luce requoted Governor Dewey’s recent speech in which he said:

The indispensable man is only indispensable to those who plan to control the destinies of the United States – to Hopkins, and Hague, and Hillman – to Earl Browder.

She said:

And, as a woman, I would like to add, indispensable to Mrs. Earl Browder, the Communist librarian who has helped the cause so dear to her brain, slavishly and fanatically, during her 11 years of unlawful residence in our country.

Oh, yes, Mr. Dewey’s opponent is indeed dispensable to the Communist-controlled Political Action Committee. For only if he succeeds in reelection can they succeed. And then they will take over his ancient policy of “divide and rule.” And when they take him over, you will see the beginning of the end of the American labor movement. For whoever divides the house of labor against itself can rule the working man of America forever.

Malone speaks

Republican County Chairman James F. Malone accused the Political Action Committee of going into “the numbers racket to raise money for the campaign.”

He held in his hand a lottery ticket he said was sponsored by Local 21, “FGCSSW of A,” which he said sold for $1 and gave the winner $650. The drawing, he said, is scheduled for Nov. 1 on the New York Stock Exchange number, commonly used for payoffs by the numbers racket.