WHO WON THE ELECTION?
Curtis, G. L.
Who Won The Election? By G. L. CURTIS IF President Roosevelt knows that he has been reelected, he must suppose that the votes of the J. P. Morgans, the Rockefellers, and the most conservative big...
...Robert M. La follette, among others, will fight the nomination if the investigation develops the facts which are anticipated...
...But this fight teaches a broader lesson...
...Paying Off Wall Streeters In making the appointments to the Surplus Property Board, the President may have been trying to pay off political debts...
...Wheeler arose to address his fellow Democrats, and in doing so he turned his back on the Republican side of the chamber to give emphasis to the fact that he was appealing to his own Party members...
...7, 1944...
...The Board will have control over the disposition of so many billions of dollars worth of property that, as a realistic matter, they control the economic future of this country...
...What would we Democrats do ? I have been a member of the Senate for more than 20 years...
...The State Department has now been reorganized, and every liberal in Washington is crying aloud for the good old days...
...As this article is written, the Foreign Relations Committee has just voted to hold open hearings on the State Department nominations...
...The job to be done calls for limitless imagination and ability, but the President has seen fit to turn it over to political hacks...
...The Farmer's Union objects to Clayton for many reasons, including particularly his efforts as the recent Surplus Property Administrator (to be succeeded by the new Board of three) to turn all agricultural land over to big real estate interests instead of to farmers...
...Then Sen...
...The official Communist party line, in accord with the position of Harry Hopkins, now is to let big business have whatever it wants...
...Certainly that is the way it is being done...
...The fight on Clayton will be hard, particularly if the Farm Bureau Federation pitches in to help beat him...
...Chandler said: "Mr...
...Of the five new Assistant Secretaries, one is Nelson Rockefeller, who supported Dewey in the last election...
...The third, tossed in as window dressing and as a minor sop to the liberals, is Librarian of Congress and poet Archibald MacLeish, who is to head a division which has virtually no responsibilities...
...Congress, as a result of the hard work of the liberal members, passed a law which could be administered well...
...The two persons already appointed to that Board are Robert A. Hurley and Lt...
...The nominations were sent back by a vote of 37 to 27...
...The Philadelphia Record, a newspaper which has consistently supported the President, had this to say last week: "One of the reasons for the defeat of Gov...
...He was an active political manipulator in California, and it is said that his wife will become the Democratic National Com-mitteewoman there...
...For all practical purposes, it was Mr...
...Instead of poor folks obtaining jobs, the Wall Street boys are obtaining jobs, and we are clearing everything with Harry Hopkins...
...Debate opened with Sen...
...He said: "Reference has been made to the Democrats...
...Regardless of which individual candidate may have won the election, we now know what interests won the election...
...The new Undersecretary, Joseph C. Grew, also of Morgan associations, is widely regarded as an excellent Ambassador to Japan...
...Up to the eve of Pearl Harbor, Clayton's firm was shipping cotton to the Axis countries, including Japan, through its South American subsidiaries...
...It is assorted, and with plenty of evidence to back it up, that Clayton was the person most trusted by German interests in the '30's to negotiate barter deals with Germany—deals which were later prohibited by the Treasury Department as in violation of the American anti-dumping laws —and it seems clear that Clayton's firm was chosen by German interests to lobby against enforcement of those laws...
...I was told that the poor folks would be given opportunities as the result of the election, and it was said that the common man would be given a better chance, I am certain that a great majority of the average citizens of the country voted for the re-election of President Roosevelt...
...Rockefeller, or the nomination of Mr...
...or, as the Washington Post put it, he may have been using the Surplus Property Board as a handy way of ridding himself of his own personal surplus political property...
...Clayton...
...The most dramatic moment of the entire debate was the statement of the veteran Montana Democrat, Sen...
...Readers of The Progressive may, if the fight is not over when this issue reaches them, be able to do a great deal of good if they will write or telegraph their opposition to their Senators...
...He is a dead duck whom the voters knocked off years ago...
...The little people the country over deserve to have some attention paid to their interests, too...
...A point to be investigated is whether these deals were in violation of various export control acts and proclamations...
...handle the Undersecretary's job...
...Who Was Elected...
...Now he has the opportunity of trying again...
...A State Department reorganization for greater efficiency and liberalism has been in the cards for a long time...
...The President by his appointments has frustrated the hopes.of those who created the statute...
...A. B. Chandler, Kentucky Democrat, arose to demand open hearings...
...President, sometimes I wonder who won the election which we recently held...
...Edward Heller...
...Heller is so obscure that very little is known of him...
...They are the appointments for the three members of the Surplus Property Board and the five positions in the State Department...
...The Progressive has time and again emphasized the importance of sound appointments for the Surplus Property Board...
...The new Secretary, Edward R. Stettinius, is the son of a Morgan partner and the head of United States Steel by right of birth rather than by right of merit...
...On the other hand, the conservative Senators, the conservative press, and the Communist Daily Worker will support Clayton to the end...
...The fourth Assistant Secretary is the man in the Department with the strongest pro-Franco sympathies, and the fifth has only minor duties...
...Stettinius was sent to us for confirmation...
...As to Hurley, on the other hand, a great deal is known...
...Turned Over To Political Hacks Those appointments are some of the most important the President has ever made...
...Clayton is the biggest cotton dealer in the world...
...However, here's what seems to be in the cards at this writing: All the nominations will go through with the possible exception of Clayton's...
...By G. L. CURTIS IF President Roosevelt knows that he has been reelected, he must suppose that the votes of the J. P. Morgans, the Rockefellers, and the most conservative big business elements of the country put him in...
...Until his current stay in Washington, Clayton was head of the cotton dealing firm of Anderson, Clayton, of Houston, Tex., and all points north and south...
...These dealings with Axis nationals do not seem to have stopped with Pearl Harbor, and one point which interests Senators is the charge that the Anderson, Clayton firm may not have started to work toward winning this war at the same time that the rest of the country did...
...In other words, Mr...
...The Administration might send the nomination of Mr...
...Other farm leaders protest that Clayton has carefully and deliberately stimulated cotton production in foreign countries in competition with the American crop...
...Another is Will Clayton, a notoriously anti-Administration Democrat who contributed a good many thousands of dollars to the Liberty League in 1936...
...Suppose we had a Republican Administration, and the name of Mr...
...The newspaper PM and the Philadelphia Record have already done a superb job of getting their readers to notify the Senate as to how they stand...
...His offices stretch north of New York and south through most of the Latin American countries including Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina...
...Wall Street must wonder today why it spent so much money for a futile cause—only to get exactly what it wanted for free...
...By the time this issue of The Progressive appears, final action may have been, taken...
...but before he became Ambassador he was Undersecretary in the Hoover Administration and had to be removed to his Ambassadorship because he could not...
...The time has come when liberals must let the President know that Big Business is not the only force in the country which he must conciliate...
...Hurley, after serving a term as governor of Connecticut, has twice been rejected by the voters of that state...
...When the State Department appointments came before the Senate, having been rushed through the Foreign Affairs Committee without hearing, the country had the unusual spectacle of seeing liberal Administration Senators demand that the names be sent back to the Committee for careful consideration...
...Burton K. Wheeler...
...In other words, he is not even a lame duck who is going out of office...
...Hoover sent up to the Senate a nomination in the way in which these nominations have been sent, the Democrats seriously questioned the appointments...
...It is no exaggeration to say that the President's major appointments since the election have broken the hearts, but not the spirits, of most of the ardent New Dealers both in Congress and in the Administration...
...But in his appointments to the State Department positions, the President was paying off Wall Streeters alone...
...That may be the way the people voted, and it may be the way they intended to vote all the time...
...When Mr...
...The final vote on the motion to refer the names back to Committee was one of the greatest upsets in recent Senate history...
...He is a one-man cartel...
...Dewey was that the majority of voters believed he would put the administration of our vital foreign and domestic policies in the hands of the Wall Street interests which supported him so generously...
...Other serious charges have developed...
...If riot, we know who was elected President of the United States on Nov...
...In the recent election, he was the only prominent Demo- -crat who was not elected on the state ticket...
...Joseph Guffey, Pennsylvania Democrat, reading into the Congressional Record an editorial sharply critical of all the appointees...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 51
