THE WEEK IN REVIEW
THE WEEK IN REVIEW PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT bombarded Congress with 12,000 words in the form of two messages last week. The first, some 4,000 words of home front demands and foreign policy evasion,...
...1, Americans will no longer have to surrender an empty toothpaste or shaving cream tube to buy a refill...
...Crowded with astronomical figures beyond the grasp of ordinary mortals, the President's budget message emphasized these basic facts: 1. The United States had spent 153 billion dollars on war through December, 1943...
...This amount is more than the total expenditures of the federal government as late as 1931...
...The Treasury Department's bill for $10,000,000,000 in new taxes has been whittled down to $2,275,000,000 by the Senate Finance Committee...
...Smacks Of Slave Labor' The President pointed out that present tax laws were inadequate, but again he failed to present a definite program for paying a greater share of the fantastic cost of the war out of current income...
...It should read, she said, "Win the War and Win the Peace...
...Anaconda Found Guilty Two actions in federal courts last week threw revealing light on the wartime practices of some American corporations...
...In Providence, R. I., a federal jury convicted the Anaconda Wire & Cable Company and four of its officers of conspiring to manufacture and deliver defective wire to the Army Signal Corps...
...2. Actual expenditures will hit a total of 202 billion dollars by June 30, 1944, and will near the 300 billion dollar mark by June 30, 1945...
...Clearly," wrote Labor in a scathing denunciation of the demand for "involuntary servitude," "the President recognized the inconsistency of his position, because he sought to sugar-coat the proposal...
...expansion of the nation's social security program to cover millions of additional workers and provide disability, hospitalization, and national unemployment insurance benefits, was recommended to Congress this week by Federal Security Administrator Paul V. McNutt...
...Readers of The Progressive will recall the amazing story of Anaconda's dumping of worthless equipment on the Army...
...Permanent conscription, he claimed, would correct "one of our more glaring weaknesses, which the war has disclosed, our physical weakness...
...G. S. Stevenson, medical director of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, declared last week...
...A Gallup Poll last week reported that women are a bit more inclined to favor President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party than men...
...Peace Draft...
...Earl Browder, general secretary of the Party, announced that American Communists will not only drop their status as a party, but they will soon abandon their traditional objective of establishing communism and will cooperate with the "free enterprise" system of private capitalism...
...Many American soldiers are brooding about the infidelity of their wives at home, Rabbi Barnett Brickner of the National Jewish Welfare Board reported last week after circling the globe in a tour of war theaters...
...A typical reaction to the whole proposal was voiced by Labor, organ of the Railroad Brotherhoods and long a warm defender of the President...
...Names And Notes In The News Field Tax...
...The Altmeyer-McNutt program would abolish the present state systems of unemployment compensation in favor of a single national system...
...Swedish dispatches this week reported that a secretly circulated pamphlet telling how to fake illness has resulted in so much "sickness" in the Nazi Army that its fighting capacity is affected...
...The second message, an 8,000-word dissertation on the budget and taxes, calling for the expenditure of nearly 100 billion dollars in the next fiscal year, created hardly a ripple...
...In New York, a federal grand jury returned two indictments charging the Chase National Bank of New York, one of the nation's biggest, and Leonard J. A. Smit, an industrial dealer in diamonds, with "conspiring and engaging in" the illegal sale and export of industrial diamonds in violation of the Trading with the Enemy Act...
...Fake...
...State Ballot For Soldiers Another round in the fight over legislation to expedite voting by overseas soldiers went to opponents of a federal ballot last week when the House Elections Committee voted 7 to 5 for a slightly amended version of the Senate-approved bill placing control of absentee balloting in state hands...
...An 'Ominous Silence' Although he had indicated when he returned from his December conferences in Cairo and Teheran that he would give the nation a full report when he sent his messages to Congress, the President ducked the issue of foreign policy almost entirely, aside from saying that he had agreed to no secret treaties or political or financial commitments...
...5. When the debt hits 258 billion in June, 1945, it •will take five billion dollars to pay the annual interest...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested last week that her husband's new political slogan, "Win the War," is not enough...
...All of the nation's political parties made news during the past fortnight—the Republicans by deciding to hold their 1944 national convention at Chicago beginning June 26 and the Democrats by indicating that they will soon discard Postmaster Frank C. Walker as national chairman—but the strangest politi--cal news was made by the Communist Party...
...His message was full of platitudes picturing the bright new world, filled with all kinds of social reforms, to which he urged the workers to march contentedly, but in chains...
...The proposal for compulsory labor was universally condemned by all units of organized labor not controlled by the Communist Party...
...Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox demanded last week that there be universal military training for American youth in peacetime...
...The first, some 4,000 words of home front demands and foreign policy evasion, provoked a storm of controversy...
...Overriding the strenuous objection of the Roosevelt Administration's Senate leadership, the Senate voted 37 to 26 last week to adopt the so-called Marshall Field amendment to the pending tax bill which would limit the amount of tax reduction by individuals because of businesses which regularly lose millions...
...The secretaries of state would forward the ballots, and, on their return, distribute them to local precincts...
...Nerves...
...Robert M. La Follette, Jr., reflected a widely shared Congressional viewpoint when he declared that "the American people and Congress are certainly entitled to more information on the Cairo and Teheran conferences than they have been given...
...Hence, it will soon be necessary to secure another extension of the legal debt limit, which is now 210 billions...
...Winthrop W. Aldrich, chairman of the, board of Chase National, dismissed the indictment as "simply making no sense" and asserted that the bank "resents having its reputation damaged in this manner...
...Social Security...
...Doubt was expressed whether the amendment would bar Field from deducting the losses of his papers because these properties have been incorporated to prevent full taxation...
...Before adopting this measure, the House Committee rejected an Administration bill which would invoke federal supervision over service balloting and prescribe the use of federal ballots...
...4. Indicated deficits will raise the public debt to 198 billion dollars on June 30 and 258 billions a year later...
...The troops are generally bitter over reports of decline in standards of sexual morality back home, he said...
...Sentence was to be pronounced this week...
...Based on a report prepared by Chairman Arthur J. Altmeyer of the Social Security Board, the proposals submitted by McNutt would extend coverage under old-age and survivors insurance to 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 workers now excluded—farm and household workers, employes of public and non-profit organizations, and the self-employed...
...Addition...
...Women also take a somewhat different attitude toward various Republican candidates, being more in favor of Gen...
...Bridges noted an "ominous silence" in recent months about the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms...
...William Green, AFL president, declared that a national service law has not prevented strikes in Great Britain where "in 1942, the number of strikes was greater proportionately than in the United States...
...Sen...
...I think that up to now such information has been conspicuous by its absence...
...H. Styles Bridges, New Hampshire Republican and long an ardent champion of interventionism, challenged the President to tell whether the rights of small, weak nations were traded off on the auction block of power politics during the secret negotiations with Stalin and Churchill...
...R. J. Thomas, president of the United Automobile Workers, summed up the opposition of many another labor leader when he asserted that the measure "smacks of slave labor...
...Marshall Field III, heir of the multi-million dollar department store fortune, annually loses millions of dollars on his English and American racing stables and his two newspapers, PM in New York and the Sun in Chicago...
...A coalition of four Republicans and three Southern Democrats won out over three Northern and two Southern Democrats...
...Reds Embrace Capitalism...
...Half the men discharged from the Army are suffering from mental and nervous disabilities, Dr...
...The War Production Board announced that effective Mar...
...American Reds have been giving fervent support to the Roosevelt Administration, even to endorsing its anti-labor policies, and the withdrawal of the Communist Party from the political field will enable it to make a greater noise when it throws its negligible numbers into the Democratic column...
...The new wrinkle in the Committee-approved bill authorizes the Secretaries of War and the Navy to send cards to all members of the armed services requesting them to inform the secretary of state of their home states whether they wish to file an absentee ballot...
...Sen...
...Women's Vote...
...Supporters of such a proposal still hope to reach a compromise in both the Senate and the House...
...Douglas MacArthur than the men are, and slightly less in favor of Wendell Willkie...
...Infidelity...
...Tubes...
...Capitalism and socialism have begun to find the way to peaceful co-existence and collaboration in the same world," Browder declared...
...In a democracy policy can only be given any continuity and permanence when the people and their representatives have sufficient information upon which to base a judgment...
...The President's demand for such power was surrounded by high-sounding promises of a new economic "Bill of Rights...
...But the budget and the tax bill held the stage for only a day as the nation debated the Roosevelt Administration's sudden demand for a national service act which would give the government vast new power to control and regiment the employment of every physically fit man from 18 through 64 and every able-bodied woman from 18 through 49, except mothers of children under 18, and expectant mothers...
...A five-point program for...
...Marxists will not help the reactionaries by opposing the slogan of 'free enterprise.' " Just who the reactionaries are to be—if capitalists, suporters of free enterprise, Republicans, and Democrats are to be acceptable to Communists—was not made clear...
...Philip Murray, CIO president, characterized the proposal as "quack medicine...
...3. Appropriations for the new fiscal year were placed at $99,769,000,000, of which $90,000,000,000 will be for war purposes...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 4
