Truman ‘stumps’ to help friend’s bid for Congress
Vice-presidential candidate makes 4-hour tour of Fayette County with Snyder
By Robert Taylor, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
Uniontown, Pennsylvania –
U.S. Senator Harry S. Truman, Democratic candidate for Vice President, included a four-hour trip through Fayette County in his Western Pennsylvania campaign tour yesterday to help a friend, Democratic Rep. J. Buell Snyder, in his campaign for reelection.
Mr. Truman praised the Fayette County Congressman in a speech yesterday afternoon at the Courthouse here in which he urged an audience of 1,000 not to “place an inexperienced man in office today.”
Earlier, Mr. Truman’s official party, escorted by a squad of Pittsburgh motorcycle policemen and a delegation of Allegheny County officials, had called at Rep. Snyder’s home at Perryopolis. The Congressman introduced Mr. Truman later to the Uniontown audience.
Speaks in McKeesport
Still earlier, the Missouri Senator told a McKeesport gathering that three members of Congress present – himself and Reps. Thomas E. Scanlon and Samuel A. Weiss – were not isolationists, and denounced the voting record of U.S. Senator James J. Davis, Republican candidate for reelection, against Democratic Rep. Francis J. Myers.
He said at a luncheon at the Penn-McKee Hotel:
You’ve got an isolationist running right here in Pennsylvania and I hope you won’t have another isolationist Senator after this election.
If the Republicans were to get control of the Senate, which won’t happen, Jim Davis would be chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs. After the last war, the Republicans sank our Navy and Jim Davis was a member of the administration that sank it.
Raps GOP votes
Calling attention again to Republican votes against Selective extension and other pre-war measures, Mr. Truman told his audience: “If we had gone the way they wanted, we’d have been slaughtered by now.”
In little more than an hour, Mr. Truman yesterday spoke before audiences totaling some 9,000 persons in the Turtle Creek Valley – 5,000 in East Pittsburgh, 2,000 in Braddock and 2,000 in Wilmerding, at rallies at mill gates and a street corner location.
Thousands of persons lined streets in the industrial suburbs through which the campaign party passed, and the welcome Mr. Truman got was pronounced the best of his campaign trip.
Seeks seventh term
In Republican Uniontown, however, the crowd was smaller and less responsive, although Fayette County, with its large miner population, is counted on to produce a sizeable majority for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket.
Rep. Snyder, beneficiary of the side-trip by the vice-presidential candidate, is chairman of the subcommittee on War Department appropriations of the House Appropriations Committee, and is seeking his seventh term in Congress.
Last time he ran, Mr. Snyder narrowly escaped defeat in the light vote of 1942, winning by only 1,466 votes out of 65,494 over Carl H. Hoffman, Somerset businessman.
Mr. Hoffman is again the Republican candidate for Congress this year, and the 1943 Congressional reapportionment may better his chances of winning.
In 1942, the district consisted of Republican Somerset County and Democratic Fayette and Greene Counties. This year, Greene County, with its certain Democratic majority, is transferred to the old Washington-Greene district and the 23rd district now consists only of Somerset, certain to go Republican, and Fayette Counties.