Muncie Post-Democrat, Muncie, Delaware County, 29 September 1944 — Page 3

THE POST-DEMOCRAT £ Democratic weekly newspaper repre»entlng the democrats of Muncie, Delaware County and the 10th Congressional District. The only Democratic Newspaper in Delaware County. \ Entered as second class matter January 15, 1921, St the Post Office at Muncie, Indiana, under Act of March 3, 1879. " PRICE 5 CENTS—$1.50 A YEAR MRS. GEO. R. DALE, Publisher 916 West Main Street %i— ■ ■■ - 1 - " " ~ . .. . i j.«—i .» w Muncie, Indiana, Friday, September 29, 1944. Dewey Swings a Low One At F.D.R. and MacArthur Gov. Dewey appears to believe in keeping his preaching high and his punches low. In his acceptance speech Mr. Dewey declared : ' “The military conduct of the war is outside this campaign. It is and must remain completely out of politics.” With those words everyone could agree. Since then, however, Mr. Dewey has pursued a contrary course, a course which skidded far over the foul line on Wednesday when he observed: “Now that Gen. MacArthur is no longer a political threat to Mr. Roosevelt it would seem appropriate that his magnificent talents be given greater scope and consideration.” Any child can get the implication of that . snide remark. It is to the effect that Mr. Roosevelt held Gen. MacArthur down, denied him supplies, x risked the lives of the soldiers under his command—all because the President regarded the general as a “political threat.” In short, Dewey charges the President with putting politics ahead of the war effort in the South Pacific. No more serious charge against an American President has been made by any responsible citizen in this or any other war in which our nation has been involved. No more vicious innuendo has been peddled even by the lowest levels of the GOP organization. One would have to go to Col. McCormick and the Chicago Tribune for anything to equal this backhand indictment of the President’s character. It is as unfair to Gen. MacArthur as it is to the President. Gen. MacArthur has waged a magnificent campaign. It is quite true that in the early stages of that campaign he did not have all the fighting men and fighting equipment he wanted, or that the President wanted to send him. We had been forced into a twofront war and we had to divide what we had, to the best possible advantage. That the course chosen was the right one is written in headlines today. We are invading Germany proper. France, Luxembourgh, Belgium have been liberated. The fall of Hitler’s Reich is inevitable, but in ’42 it seemid a distant dream. In just two years the Allied Pacific campaign, in which Gen. MacArthur has demonstrated such great leadership, has gone from a defense of the Australian mainland to within sight of the Philippines and within striking distance of Tokyo. Gov. Dewey knows quite as well as anybody what has been accomplished. He dare not criticize the nation’s military achievements, but he undermines Army and Navy morale by trying to create the impression that Gen. MacArthur has been a victim of political persecution. It is dirty business. Quite as treacherous in other ways have been Mr. Dewey’s other violations of the pledge he made to “keep the conduct of the war out of this campaign.” Dewey charged here in Philadelphia that the Administration was plotting to keep soldiers in the Army after they were no longer needed—a charge disproved before he even made it, in the Army’s published plan for demobilization. Another tricky bit of “interference with the military” by the GOP armchair commander was Dewey’s plan to have only volunteers police the occupied countries. This served to raise false hopes and to put his inexpert judgmen as to military policing above that of our General Staff. Several weeks ago, when GOP headquarters was writing sme^r speeches for GOP Governors, speeches so bad the Governors censored them, we blamed it all on the ghost writers. Whoever those boys are, we apologize. Mr. Dewey himself shows who is putting the GOP campaign in the gutter.-^-Philadel-phia Record. Why a Vote for Dewey Is a Vote for Hoover More important to Americans than any of the campaign speeches of Governor Dewey was a little-noticed address last Saturday by Winthrop W. Aldrich. It got scant mention in the press, none on the air. Do we hear you ask: “Why should it?” And do you scratch your head and murmur: “Aldrich? Who’s he?” Winthrop Aldrich is head of the Chase National Bank, biggest in the world. He is also financial adviser to Governor Dewey. He is reported as Dewey’s choice for Secretary of the Treasury. In his speech to the Executive club of Chicago, Aldrich plainly told Americans where he and Dewey would lead them: Straight back to Hpoverism. Winthrop Aldrich is the son of that high priest of conservatispi, the late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, of /Rhode Island. Winthrop Aldrich advised Hoover in 1930 that the way out of the depression was to balance the.bud-

~ POSTDEMOCRAT, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1941.

get and cut Federal expenditures. He is the same Aldrich who persuaded President Roosevelt, in 1937, to increase Federal reserve requirements, sterilize gold, curtail relief spending, and embark on deliberate deflation. Result, as The Record then forecast, was a temporary set back in the New Deal’s steady progress. It was remedied when the President rescinded the deflationary measures which Aldrich had advocated. Now Aldrich, the biggest Wall Street banker, is monetary adviser to Dewey, as Dulles, one of the biggest Wall Street lawyers, is Dewey’s adviser on foreign policy. Not only did Aldrich attack the Bretton Woods program for international currency stabilization (the one part of his speech which made the headlines), he also let the cat out of the bag by revealing the kind of advice he’s giving Mr. Dewey: “We must be prepared to reintroduce gold redemption The dollar must be free of all foreign exchange controls. We must balance the Federal budget ...” That same recipe once reduced men to selling apples on the street. For all the lip-service Dewey gives to New Deal reforms, for all his promises of jobs, for all his talk of millions of cars, electric refrigerators and electric irons, his No. 1 money* man gives away the real GOP program: Back to Hooverism. Dewey has made a virtue of seeking “expert” advice. That’s why it is important to know whom he regards as “experts.” His “money expert,” Aldrich, in this Chicago speech, shows he has not changed his mind one iota since 1929. Neither the depression nor the war has altered his 1929 thinking. He is against government regulation of international exchange and investment. He wants private bankers to be in full control. He refuses to realize that you can’t divorce international diplomacy from international money. He wants to go back to the gold standard. Why? Because those are the devices by which private bankers used to control the world’s money. The international bankers, like Aldrich, want to control the world’s money, first, because it is enormously profitable for them; second, because it gives them tremendous power. And they like power. Figure it out. If Aldrich’s plans are adopted, the United States and Britain would nominally take control of the world’s money system. The U. S., being the big creditor nation, would be the dominant partner. Since Government control of foreign exchange would be abolished by Aldrich, the New York banks would exercise that control over U. S. money policy—and the Chase bank, being New York’s biggest, would be top dog. So Aldrich, as head of Chase Bank, could be Money Czar of the World. Governor Dewey talks no end about; “stimulating production.” But that has never been a serious American problem. Our productive facilities are unlimited. Our trouble has come in distributing pro-

duction.

It was faulty distribution of the products of American industry which created want amidst plenty in 1929-’30-’31-’32. And since money is the distributing mechanism of our economy, we can quickly see how mismanagement of our money system, for selfish ends, by blind and wilful men, created that want admist plenty. That’s why the No. 1 question in this campaign is whether the nation shall go back to Hooverism with Dewey and Aldrich, or maintain progress and prosperity with Roosevelt and the New Deal. Recently we asked Governor Dewey: “If elected, what would you do to combat depression in 1945 that President Hoover didn’t do in 1930-’33?” Dewey refused to answer. He need not answer now. Aldrich has answered for him. The answer is: Back to Hooverism.—Philadelphia Record.

V

Mr. Dewey On Labor’s Right Gov. Dewey’s Seattle speech on labor revealed the Republican candidate shifting to a new approach in his attempted “prosecution” of the New Deal. He sought to adapt arguments of liberals. He criticized Mr. Roosevelt’s administration not because it is “prolabor” but because it “abuses” labor. If this seems strange from a Republican candidate, the answer is that no other course

was open to him.

Dewey could not appeal for labor votes' obviously by repeating the calumnies and slurs poured forth against unions by newspapers which support him. He could not do openly what his New York headquarters tried in secret to get Gov. Earl Warren to do —feed the flames of prejudice and hate by shrilling the “Communist” cry at millions of

decent, patriotic Americans.

His alternative was to do precisely what he did—express indignation about the suffering of labor under the “mismanagement” of President Roosevelt. The troubles of a Republican campaign orator on this theme, how-

ever, are thorny ones.

He can promise to eliminate overlapping agencies. But. Mr. Dewey has not thought very deeply if he means, without finding an adequate substitute, to destroy the War Labor Board, the only agency with the wartime function of arbitration. The big-business complaint that the National Labor Relations Board is “biased” would scarcely be stilled by placing the now-independent agency under a Secretary of Labor, drawn, as Mr. Dewey promises, “from the ranks of labor.” The WLB, despite its weaknesses, has worked with over-all effectiveness. Its worst difficulties have come from a minority of defiant employers such as Sewell L. Avery, one of Mr. Dewey’s ardent supporters. Its

operations last year kept the percentage of man-days lost in strikes to what would have been, save for one factor, the lowest in history. The ruinous factor was the mine strikes of John L. Lewis, another Dewey supporter. And Lewis called them to destroy the WLB. Mr. Dewey tried to hang the Smith-Con-nally anti-strike law around the New Deal’s neck. But Mr. Roosevelt vetoed that measure, and Republicans in Congress voted more heavily than Democrats to repass it. Most union members are well aware of their interests in the political campaign. Nonlabor independents and progressives are not likely to accept the Dewey portrait of labor throttled by Mr. Roosevelt and the G.O.P. galloping to its rescue.—Chicago Sun. y

«

Political Apathy Despite the effort of politicians to stir them up, the American people are not taking much interest in the political campaign. The people are concerned chiefly with the war. Every family has one or more persons in the army and navy in whom it is vitally interested. The fate of these men and boys and the great enterprise in which they are engaged is the major interest. What candidates have to say can scarcely compete with the headlines based on stories from Europe or the Pacific. The war is a hard, brutal fact. It is concrete. It is action. It differs from words, words, words. Sure, everybody would like to know whether Roosevelt or Dewey will be elected on November 7. But that is not nearly as absorbing a question as this one: When will the war in Europe be over? Or this one: How much longer will it take to lick the

Japs?

Then, too, everybody on the home front is working longer hours than usual. This work is not on politics. It has to do with some phase of the war effort, or is affected by war time conditions. There is not the leisure for political discussions, or for listening to, or reading, campaign speeches. Neither Dewey nor Roosevelt is making the kind of intensive speaking campaign that Willkie made in 1940 which stirred up interest and kept the country talking. Hundreds of thousands of people have left their former homes to take war jobs in other communities and other states and, as relative strangers in their new positions, are not taking the same interest in political activity that they formerly did. All of this may be a bad thing from the standpoint of government, but it is true. It is harder to get persons who are away from their old homes to register and to vote. Those who try to arouse interest by direct methods are not too successful. Although one might think that in important times like these everyone would want to go to the polls, the indications as of today are that the vote will not be heavy. Many more ought to take a greater interest in their government and in voting. But if a man or a woman wants to disfranchise himself or herself in a given election, nobody can prevent it. It is not a healthy thing in a democracy, but who has the cure for it?—Journal Ga-

zette.

V , x

Look Who Defies Congress! The Roosevelt-haters yelled loudly for an investigation of Sidney Hillman’s Political

Action Committee. They got it.

Hillman appeared before the House Committee on Campaign Expenditures, gave clear-cut testimony, hid nothing, offered the committee full information and records. He

made an excellent impression.

Then the House Committee summoned Frank Gannett, publisher of the Gannett Newspapers, and other men active in the Committee for Constitutional Government. This organization has been fighting Roosevelt and most New Deal measures ever since 1936. It tried to suppress John Roy Carlson’s “Under Cover.” It sponsored the so-called “millionaires’ amendment” to the Constitution, which would cut taxes on the rich, boost them on the lower brackets. Gannett’s committee refused to submit ■ its books for the House Committee’s inspection. Claiming to be an educational, nonpolitical organization, the committee has also announced that it will defy a Congressional subpena for the books when the sub-

pena is served this morning.

Rep. Andersen, chairman of the House Committee, says he will ask the House as a whole to declare Gannett’s group in contempt. For that the punishment is a fine of $1000, or up to 12 months in jail. What a contrast! The “terrible” PAC, which the Republicans have been cursing up hill and down dale, lays all its cards on the table. The hoity-toity Gannett Committee, and its Big Business backers, risk going to jail to hide their smear activities

against the President.

Finally, yet another Roosevelt-hating organization, the Constitutional Educational League, headed by Joseph H. Kamp, former associate of Fascist Lawrence Dennis, also has defied the House Committee’s demand for access to its books. ' ; > C We wait impatiently to hear what the Republican High Command, which has been denouncing PAC, now has to say about these outfits which come right out and tell the Congress of the United States to go to hell. Speak up, gentlemen!—Philadelphia Rec-

ord.

Dewey Loves the New Deal But He Hates New Dealers In Seattle Monday night, Presidential Candidate Thomas E. Dewey came out for virtually the entire labor policy for which President Roosevelt and the New Deal have waged a continuous and victorious fight during the last 12 years. He indorsed collective bargaining. He defended the right to strike. He praised the National Labor Relations Act as a “good and necessary law.” He advocated, as Roosevelt has so often done, stronger and freer labor unions. He even went so far as to predict that the President would do even more for labor before election. That speech just about completed Dewey’s thorough indorsement of the New Deal. For Dewey has yet to find fault with any of the major reforms promoted by President Roosevelt—and he has yet to advocate any further reforms of his own. He said in his two previous major speeches that he is all-out for social security, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. He said he is in favor of protection for returning veterans. He said he is in favor of the New Deal’s agricultural policies. He said he favors SEC and the guarantee of bank deposits. He said he is in favor of an international organization to enforce peace. He said he favors a Fair Employment Practices Committee. He said he would not change the nation’s military policies if he were President. He even said—in 1944—that our fighting the Axis was a good idea. And now, finally, he favors the New Deal labor policy. In short, Dewey is in favor—or so he has been telling us—of everything the New Deal has done. But he is against the New Deal itself. It would take an extremely clever lawyer to assume both those positions at one time. But Dewey has managed it. His system, as now revealed in his campaign speeches, is remarkably ingenious. It is simply this: Praise New Deal reforms because they are popular. . Attack the New Deal because it took the steps necessary to make its reforms effective. In other words, praise the omelet, but say that it was all wrong to break the eggs. And then, finally, say that the whole thing was really a Republican idea anyway and his party can administer Roosevelt reforms much better than Roosevelt. Dewey used this precise method Monday night. He declared himself in favor of everything the New Deal had done—but said it had mistreated labor and caused strikes. The record shows, of course, that President Roosevelt has fought for labor as no other President ever has; that union membership has expanded enormously under him; that he has been bitterly denounced by some of Dewey’s best friends for “coddling” labor. The usual vague denunciations followed, and then Dewey tried to whitewash the Republican labor record. He said that the Republicans under President Taft had established a Department of Labor — forgetting to mention the fact that the law which created it was passed in 1912 by a Congress in which there were 67 more Democrats than Republicans. , He said that the Smith-Connally anti-strike act had falied, “like other New Deal interferences with collective bargaining” — forgetting to point out that the act was fought by the New Deal, and passed by Congress after a strongly worded veto by the President in which he predicted that the act would fail, as Dewey now admits. Let’s not blame Dewey too much for so confused and contradictory a policy. He has to favor the New Deal—^the people are for it. He has to oppose Roosevelt—or withdraw from the campaign. So he is doing both, with all the skill of the clever young man on the flying trapeze. What else can he do?—Philadelphia Record. V Who Follows in His Train? In Belgium The Sun’s H. R. Knickerbocker has learned of a Catholic family which for two years sheltered a Jewish rabbi from the Gestapo, and of a Catholic sister who saved Jewish girls and women by dressing them as nuns and permitting them to live in a convent. In Chicago, on the same day Mr. Knickbocker was reporting those facts, two women distributed hate literature of the socalled Gentile Co-operative Association outside a Protestant church whose pastor, the Rt v. Paul J. Folino, has been a fearless leader in combatting anti-Semitism. Those are contrasts worth consideration by Christians. Who are they that truly rep_ resent Christianity? The Christians who, like the Belgian nun and the Rev. Mr. Folino, are neighbors to men and women not of their creeds—or the Gentile Leaguers, the Christian Fronters, the followers of Gerald Smith and other hatemongers? The answer should not be difficult to followers of Him who taught that all men are brothers.—Chicago Sun. V President Roosevelt Says .. Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes#, but the ammortal. Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the coldblooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.—The Union.

1. The desk at which Mr. Hastings opened his monthly hills and wrote an indignant letter to the electric company, protesting against their advertising that the average family gets twice as much electricity for its money as it did fifteen years ago. 2. The electric clock at which Mr. Hastings looked to see if He had time to mail his letter before dinner. 3. The family radio, with Junior parked close beside it, listening, to "Jerry and the Jeeps.” 4. The porch light which Mr. H. switched on to guide die ' dinner guests. 5. The percolator, ready and waiting to do dinner duty. 6. The electric range, filling the kitchen with appetizing odors. 7. The refrigerator, from which Mrs. H. was taking trays of tinkling ice cubes. 8. The iron, with which Nancy was pressing a dress for her date, , 9. The back porch, on which Mr. H. paused to think things oves — realizing that his family </«/ use a lot more electricity now* adays, and maybe the company was right after all! 10. The trash can into which he tossed his crumpled letter.

> DON'T WASTE ELECTRICITY JUST BECAUSE irs CHEAP AND ISN’T RATIONED! -in —

INDIANA GENERAL, SERVICE COMPANY

BUY MORE THAN BEFORE - IN THE FIFTH WAR LOAN! <

I

ifc-fA Rrom where I sitJoe MarshJ

TroubletOftenj Starts rat . Home

Read the other day where some folks have put up $100,000 to establish a bureau to combat intolerance and prejudice. Reckon we all agree that that’s a mighty worthy cause. But I wonder if tolerance, like so many other things, doesn’t begin at home. You take a family where Ma objects to hubby’s smoking in the parlor; and Pa can’t stand his wife’s hats; and they both yell at Sis for liking to listen to swing music—and you’ve got the seeds of trouble! Trouble

that spreads to intolerance among neighbors, and ' intoleF-: ance among nations.' From where I sit, you'can put your faith in the family that lives and lets live—where Pa enjoys his smoke and maybe a mellow glass of beer or two; and Ma wears funny looking hats and likes ’em; and Sis grows up as healthfully full of spirits as a child should T

GAS Is an economical servant in the home. It is also serving as a vital part in war production. Be patriotic. Help conserve gas by keeping your present equipment in good repair for higher efficiency. Central Ind. Gas Co.

O. W. TUTTERROW — : STORES: — 901 No. Brady, Dial 2-4883 In Whitely

729 Macedonia, Dial 3241

Finest Foods Of Highest Quality In Populaf Brands At Moderate Prices

*

!!ll!HMUUIIIII!lllilUt(!!ll!l!!