The Pittsburgh Press (October 16, 1944)
Background of news –
The campaign in 1940
By Bertram Benedict
The 1944 presidential election is just three weeks from tomorrow. The day three weeks before the 1940 election was Oct. 15. What was the situation then?
On Oct. 15, 1940, London and Berlin were being heavily bombed. American nationals were heeding their government’s warning to get out of Japan.
The presidential campaign had been under way for two months, beginning with Wendell Willkie’s acceptance speech on Aug. 17. On Oct. 13, Mr. Willkie announced 55 more speeches, bringing his total to more than 200 before the final week of the campaign. He was now to concentrate on the Northeastern and the East Central states. In Detroit, his party was pelted with missiles; he himself was struck by a potato in Boston.
President Roosevelt was on a “nonpolitical” inspection trip of defense plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio; he gave a talk on national defense at Dayton, Ohio, on Columbus Day. He announced the six major speeches he was to make during the campaign – in Philadelphia on the 23rd; New York on the 28th; Boston on the 30th; Brooklyn on Nov. 1; Cleveland, Nov. 2; Hyde Park, Nov. 4.
Jim Farley replaced
James A. Farley was out as Democratic National Chairman, succeeded by Edward J. Flynn of the Bronx, New York. Mr. Flynn charged on Oct. 16 that the newspapers as a whole were under a “dictatorship” of advertisers and stockholders. He disavowed an attack by the colored division of the Democratic National Committee on Mr. Willkie because of German ancestry.
Republican speakers were criticizing the award to Elliot Roosevelt of a captaincy in the Air Corps Reserve.
In a broadcast from Washington on Oct. 14, Col. Lindbergh asked why a nation of 130 million people should be told that its frontiers lay in Europe, and that its destiny depended on how the European War resulted. Why, he asked, take sides in a foreign quarrel, or defend Great Britain? What the United states needed, he said, was an efficient, but small, defense force, not an “astronomical” number of lanes, guns and warships.
On Oct. 14, Mr. Willkie, at Syracuse, New York, charged that the New Dealers had taken over the Democratic Party and betrayed the principles of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Cleveland, Wilson; that a third term would lead yo dictatorship, and asked why anybody should think the President was indispensable.
Mr. Willkie on the stump
At Cincinnati on Oct. 16, Mr. Willkie promised to get jobs in private employment for three million on relief, the “slavery of idleness.” He charged that the Democrats had used relief for political ends. Governor Bricker told him that Ohio would “certainly” go for him (it was to go for Roosevelt by almost 150,000). Alfred M. Landon predicted that if Mr. Roosevelt were reelected, American boys and even American girls would be sent to labor camps.
District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey of New York said in Michigan that the New Deal was after a totalitarian form of government. He said that it had abetted internal strife, repudiated pledges for a sound currency and a balanced budget, and that if the administration could perpetuate itself, American freedom was at an end. On the next day, Mr. Dewey here in Pittsburgh called the New Deal much like the Popular Front which had wrecked France.
A Gallup poll published on Oct. 17 gave a more accurate picture of the final result than did the poll published on the eve of the election. It had only three states in the wrong columns – Illinois and Wisconsin, shown as leaning toward Mr. Willkie by 51 or 52 percent, Colorado leaning toward Mr. Roosevelt by 51 percent.