U.S.A. PRESIDENCY

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 September 1944, Page 6

U.S.A. PRESIDENCY

ROOSEVELT’S CAMPAIGN

NEW YORK, September 24. President Roosevelt opened his Presidential election campaign with an address to the Teamsters’ Union of the American Federation of Labour. Mr Roosevelt said:

“The object of the Republican Party’s oratory these days is to persuade the American people that the Democratic Party was responsible for the 1929 crash and depression, and that the Republican Party was responsible for all of the social progress under the New Deal. Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but I am afraid that in this case it is .the most obvious common garden variety of fraud. There were sorpe, in Congress and out of it, who raised their voices against our preparations for defence before and after 1939 as hysterical war-mongering, who. cried out against our help'to the Allies as being provocative and dangerous. There were some politicians who said that the Lend-Lease Bill would bring an end to free government in the United States, and who said only hysteria entertained the idea that Germany, Italy and Japan contemplated war upon us. These very men are now asking American people to entrust to them the conduct of our foreign and military policy. “There are Labour-baiters among the opposition, who, instead of calling attention to Labour’s achievements in this war, prefer to pick on occasional strikes which occurred at our peak. American Labour and management yearly turned, out 'aeroplanes at the rate of 57,000, combat vessels totalling 573, landing vessels 31,000, cargo ships 19,000,000 tons, and small arms ammunition twentythree billion rounds. Since Pearl Harbour only one-tenth of one per cent, of man hours have been lost by strikes. “We have been told that it was not a Republican, but a Democratic depression from which the nation has been saved, and that this Administration was responsible for the misery that the history books and American people always thought hart been brought about during twelve ill-fated years when /the Republican Party was in power. I know that the American people, business, labour, and agriculture, have the? same will to do for peace what they have dene for

"The- keynote of all that we propose fo do in the re-con version can be found in the one word “jobs." We shall follow a wage policy which will sustain the purchasing .power of labour. The present policies of wages and prices were conceived to serve the needs of the great masses of the people, They have stopped inflation, and kept prices on a stable level. Through the demobilisation period policies will be carried out with the same objective, th serve the needs of the great masses of the people. The victory of the American people and the Allies in this war will be far more than a victory against Fascism, reaction, and the dead hand of despotism and of the past. It will be a victory for democracy, • constituting such an affirmative strength, power and vitality of government by the people as histor- 1 '- has never before witnessed.”