MRS. LUCE ASSAILS ‘BUMBLEDOM’ TREND
She says women no less than men resent practices ‘distorting our democracy’
Hails ‘G.I. Joe and G.I. Jim;’ declares party best fitted to serve men who return and vindicate men who die
By Kathleen McLaughlin
Chicago, Illinois – (June 27)
Once again, a woman had the last word, and Rep. Clare Boothe Luce, who spoke it, also made it the most effective of the evening at the Republican National Convention. Her ringing address was undeniably the peak of the program as she arraigned the Democratic Party and warned her own party to prepare for the homecoming of the G.I. Joes.
Spotlighted by many kliegs, the playwright and legislator was a cynosure of attention from every corner of the crowded hall. She was simply clad in a short-sleeved, navy dinner dress, with a crisp white plastron caught at the throat into a narrow white bow.
Her voice, clear and penetrating, reached every point in the hall and the close of her speech found the crowd on its feet acclaiming her with shouts and waving banners while Chairman Martin summoned a mixed chorus to serenade her with “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
Theme of war and peace
Addressed to the convention but aimed beyond the tiers of delegates and visitors at all the women of the country whose hears and thoughts are with their men in uniform, her speech carried an indirect plea for support of the man the Republicans will nominate as the man best fitted to insure a quick homecoming and a secure future for those in the Armed Forces.
Proclaiming her credo that “American women do not wish their praises sung as women any more than they wish political pleas made to them as women,” Mrs. Luce asserted that women “feel no differently from men about the ever-growing threats to good government.”
She declared:
They feel no differently about the inefficiency, abusiveness, evasion, self-seeking, and personal whim in the management of the nation’s business, which are little by little distorting our democracy into a dictatorial bumbledom.
And certainly, they feel no differently about pressing this war to the enemy’s innermost gates, or creating from the sick havocs of war itself, a fair and healthy peace.
The G.I. Joes, she insisted, wanted the country to be secure from here out, not only because, no matter how confused people at home were, he knew what he was fighting for, but to vindicate and avenge G.I. Jim, his pal who was “immobilized by enemy gunfire – immobilized for all eternity.”
Memorial for ‘G.I. Jim’
Of G.I. Jim, she said:
His young bones bleach on the tropical roads of Bataan. white cross marks his narrow grave on some Pacific island. His dust dulls the crimson of the roses that bloom in the ruins of an Italian village. The deserts of Africa, the jungles of Burma, the rice fields of China, the plains of Assam, the jagged hills of Attu, the cold depths of the Seven Seas, the very snows of the Arctic, are the richer for mingling with the mortal part of him.
The objective of the convention, she went on, was to nominated a candidate for President “who will make sure that Jim’s sacrifice shall not prove useless in the years that lie ahead.
She added:
For a fighting man dies for the future as well as the past; to keep all that was fine of his country’s yesterday, and to give it a chance for a finer tomorrow.
She flung a direct challenge at the Roosevelt administration by questioning whether the war might not have been averted or whether, once proved inevitable, it might not have been lessened in horror by better preparation.
She noted that Republican Presidents had been “overconfident” during the 1920s that sanity would prevail abroad.
She added:
But it was not a Republican President who dealt with the visibly rising menaces of Hitler and Mussolini and Hirohito. Ours was not the administration that promised young Jim’s mother and father and neighbors and friends economic security and peace. No Republican President gave these promises which were kept to their ears, but broken to their hearts.