The Pittsburgh Press (September 12, 1944)
Stokes: Farmers, sore at New Deal, hope Dewey will ‘free’ them
GOP candidate doesn’t have to sell them; they’re fed up with Washington policies
By Thomas L. Stokes, Scripps-Howard staff writer
With Governor Dewey’s party –
Governor Dewey today took his presidential campaign cavalcade into Nebraska on what amounted to a carrying-coals-to-Newcastle expedition.
Both Iowa and Nebraska are staunchly Republican. There’s no doubt about that. The people decided some time ago.
Out here, Governor Dewey met an intriguing political paradox, best illustrated by the contrast between today and 1932.
Then there were poverty on the farms and hardship in the towns here. Angry farmers armed themselves with pitchforks to keep the sheriff from foreclosing their acres. The desperate farmers swept up behind Franklin D. Roosevelt as their deliverer, and admittedly his New Deal program helped put them back on their feet.
Farmers ‘rich and sore’
Today, the farmers are prosperous. The war is making many of them rich. They are paying off their mortgages. They are, in the local idiom, “rich and sore.” The majority has deserted President Roosevelt.
What has happened is that the farmer, an individualist by nature – except when he is desperate, as in the depression years – again has become a capitalist in psychology, now that he is again a capitalist in fact. He swings naturally back to political and economic conservatism.
The farmers wrap up all the evils, of which they see themselves victims, in OPA, although this is really just a general term for virtually every agency in Washington which issues regulations for them.
Hot about labor policies
They complain about price restrictions, although prices are good and they are making plenty of money. They have a problem in the shortage of labor, for which they blame the wages for labor at war plants and the draft. They resent gasoline rationing.
Most of all, perhaps, they resent New Deal labor policies, complaining that the New Deal has been weighted heavily for labor and against the farmers. Today, the divisions between farmers and labor in this country is wide and deep and any attack on Sidney Hillman’s CIO and its Political Action Committee is relished.
So, Governor Dewey didn’t have to sell anything here. It was already sold.
But Governor Dewey kept busy consulting with representatives of farmers, business and labor, and politicians. He is making valuable political contacts in this section, not so necessary now, but which will be helpful if he is elected, and, perhaps, even if he is not. For there are some who think the young man, if he fails this time, will try to get control of the party organizations for four years hence.
Nobody has done that successfully in recent years, but he did it in New York, being the only defeated candidate for governor in our time who was renominated.