The Pittsburgh Press (September 18, 1944)
Stokes: Dewey’s strategy
By Thomas L. Stokes
With Dewey party –
Governor Dewey is taking on a progressive Republican coloration as he begins his campaign to win the three Pacific Coast states.
Almost simultaneously with the Republican presidential candidate’s arrival in the state of Washington a Gallup Poll was released giving President Roosevelt the edge in the Coast states as of August, with slight percentage gains since an earlier survey.
Governor Dewey, who pins much faith in the Gallup Poll, was well aware of the task confronting him as he prepared to open his Pacific Coast campaign with the third of his major speeches scheduled for tonight at Seattle. He went to Seattle from Spokane where he spent the weekend.
At the outset of his Pacific Coast tour, which takes him later to Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles, he selected as his theme the need for an expanding economy as the hope for both industry and labor.
Buoyancy in the air
He chose well.
For expansion fits the optimistic mood of these people out here in the Pacific Northwest, a bustling, lively land. They are moving forward rapidly and their progress has been accelerated by the great war industries which dot a countryside for which nature has provided so lavishly.
There’s buoyancy in the air.
Governor Dewey is trying to tack on to the New Deal the label of a static economy. He quoted from a speech made by President Roosevelt at San Francisco in 1932 to the effect that our industrial plant is built and distribution was the problem. Repeatedly he raised this quotation and scoffed at it.
On the political side he recognized the cry here for representation of the West in the high councils at Washington. He promised, if elected, a Cabinet post for the West, as well as representation in other high policymaking jobs.
On the economic side he recognized the need of these people for power and water in a region which pioneered in public power, against a heavily entrenched private utility interest, and which has made great advances in public power through the help of the New Deal.
New Deal strength
He said he always had believed that great natural resources should be developed by the federal government for the benefit of all the people.
But he stopped short on distribution of power by the federal government. He took the middle course that while the federal government should produce the power, it should be distributed according to the wishes of local communities:
The chief New Deal strength in this region is that the New Deal under President Roosevelt gave the people such magnificent benefactors as the Grand Coulee project in Washington and Bonneville in Oregon after four years of Republican resistance in Washington.
This counts heavily with average folks in this section who do not take seriously Governor Dewey’s charge that the West has been deserted by the New Deal.
Governor Dewey tried to make up for the past lack of interest among Republicans in such great projects as Grand Coulee and Bonneville by expressing his own interest and his familiarity with them. He visited both four years ago when he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. But he did not dramatize them on this trip by visiting them.
The Republican presidential candidate encounters one continuous demand from people in the Pacific Coast area, which is to retain the war industries which have been located here. This was emphasized when one local newspaper reporter told the Governor that Democrats are spreading the word through the coast area that if he was elected the war industries would be turned over to “eastern monopolists,” which Governor Dewey labeled as “one of the most astonishing misrepresentations of the campaign.”