"Time for a Change"

Candidate Dewey opened the week with a 15-minute radio address on taxes, delivered from his desk in the dark, mid-Victorian Governor's Mansion in Albany. He had a clear opening of the kind he likes: the President's own Harry Hopkins had just announced himself a convert to free enterprise and the use of taxes to stimulate business rather than reform it (see BUSINESS). Said Governor Dewey: "The highest New Dealers at last admit that this Administration has created an impossible situation."

The "New Deal's lack of consistent tax policy was rich ground. Tom Dewey plowed it up & down and crosswise. After hammering again at "The Roosevelt Depression," with its 10,000,000 unemployed in 1940, he argued that a main reason was "that our present Administration never once established a policy encouraging people to do business. It never once had a stable policy that allowed people to make plans."

He said that "the New Deal changed our tax laws 15 times in twelve years and only made things worse," that "it actually passed two revenue acts that were out of date before they could even go into effect, because new laws had been passed."

The GOPIedges. He criticized the unnecessary complexity of the laws, citing a ripe example from the present Revenue Act: "They shall not be deductible under subsection (a) but shall be deductible, if deductible under subsection (a) without regard to this subsection, under this subsection, but only to the following extent." Added Dewey dryly: "From there on it gets technical."

As the G.O.P. tax policy, Dewey then made a set of six pledges, aiming them basically at a consistent, national tax policy--directed toward achieving full employment and a rising national income. The pledges included reductions of personal and corporate income-tax rates, and a complete overhaul of the entire tax situation toward clarity, simplicity and stability.

The address, though brief, was shrewdly aimed: Candidate Dewey was picking an inviting and wide-open target; he knew that it would take an extraordinary amount of New Deal ingenuity to devise an honest and sense-making defense of eleven years of tax boggling by the White House, the Treasury, and a Democratic Congress.

Candidate Dewey then took it easy, awaiting the President's second speech. And while Mr. Roosevelt's V-1 had jarred him visibly (TIME, Oct. 2), the White House V-2 speech seemed to make Tom Dewey actually happy. He listened to Mr. Roosevelt's repudiation of Communist support, and then, with the air of a man who has held back too long, said "I shall be compelled to discuss it quite openly."

The Confidence. The Governor and Mrs. Dewey visited St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Al Smith's casket lay, then boarded the ten-car train for Charleston, W.Va. The Governor was in a confident mood. This mood the Governor carried into his speech that night. Clearly he felt that he had taken the Champ's hardest blows, and that his own steady body-punching was wearing his opponent down. The speech kept up that hammering of the Administration.

Into it Dewey again wove the main themes and catch words of his campaign, from the base of his continual "It's time for a change."

The themes: the Administration is "very tired," too tired for the job ahead; the Roosevelt Depression left 10,000,000 still unemployed in 1940; he will make no change in the military leadership, and will make the construction of the peace a nonpartisan matter;* the New Deal means confusion, bungling, bickering. And, once again, one of his most effective lines: "On Jan. 20 of next year we shall restore honesty to our government, so that its spoken word can again be trusted."

Four times Tom Dewey called Franklin Roosevelt's disavowal of Communist support a "soft" disclaimer. He attacked Earl Browder -- "now such a patriot" --as a man "convicted as a draft dodger in the last war, convicted again as a perjurer and pardoned by Franklin Roosevelt in time to organize the campaign for his fourth term." Then Tom Dewey explained why, in his view, the Communists are supporting Mr. Roosevelt. He dug up a quotation from a memorandum written by Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939: "Over a period of years the Government will gradually come to own most of the productive plants in the United States."

To make this sentence stick as something more than a sentence torn out of context, Candidate Dewey pointed out that in traveling "down that New Deal road" there are now "55 Government corporations arid credit agencies with net assets of $27,000,000,000," that the Government now owns or operates one-fifth of all the manufacturing plants in the U.S. (Actually, most of these are war plants.) Governor Dewey charged that thus "little by little, the New Deal is developing its own form of corporate state." That, said Candidate Dewey, was why Comrade Browder favors Term IV --that and the fact that the Communists "love to fish in troubled waters," and know that "their aims can best be served by unemployment and discontent."

This was hard slugging, and the crowd of 6,000 liked it. They applauded Dewey again & again; a "pour-it-on" spirit was obvious even over the radio.

Dewey also attacked the President's accusation that the Republicans had opposed the soldier vote; he noted that, while in 1940 only 62.5% of the eligible U.S. electorate actually voted, already 77% of New York's soldiers & sailors have received ballots, under the Dewey-guided state law. On the subject of balloting he noted further that the President's main support comes from the South, "where millions of Americans are deprived of their right to vote by the poll tax and by intimidation. Not once in twelve years has my opponent lifted a finger to correct this, and his platform is cynically silent on the whole subject."

Dewey also took time to trace, in considerable detail, the long record of Administration bungling in setting up and tearing down defense agencies, from WRB through OEM and NDAC down to OPM and SPAB and finally WPB, which only a month ago "fell apart . . . and the head of the board was given a ticket to China."

The speech was almost wholly satisfactory and convincing to GOPsters and anti-Roosevelt voters. Certainly it irritated New Dealers, who know that Candidate Roosevelt must make some really substantial answer to the long list of Dewey charges besides pointing out how badly things went under Herbert Hoover.

* Albany correspondents this week wrote "authoritative" stories saying that Dewey, if elected, would ask Cordell Hull to stay on to help him. Said Cordell Hull in careful reply: "My support and loyalty belong primarily to the Government and its present official head, President Roosevelt."

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