Press Release, Speech of President Harry S. Truman, Amsterdam, New York

IMMEDIATE RELEASE IMMEDIATE RELEASE REAR PIATFORM REMARKS OF THE PRESIDENT AT AMSTERDAM, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 8, 1948 NATIONAL 10:30 A.M., E.S.T. ARCHIVES AND RECORDS SERVICE" Ladies and Gentlemen: You know, I certainly do highly appreciate this turn-out. I thank Mayor Carter most sincerely for that fine introduction, and I hope he is a good prophet, that I will be the next President of the United States 1 and I think he is right. This is a very ha ppy day for me to be in your city of Amsterdam. During the war, it was my business as Chairman of the special Senate Committee investigating the defense program to become somewhat familiar with your factories here in this city. You made a great contribution to the war effort. You turned your factories over from war work to peace work and you did it expeditiously. I want to express my appreciation as President of the United States for the contribution that you made. Now, this campaign that I am making up and down the country is a campaign in the interests of the people. This is a campaign in which I am trying to explain to you that it is your own interest that you vote for on November 2nd. It is not necessarily me you are electing President, you are voting for your own interests for this campaign is a campaign of the people against the special interests. The Republican Congress conclusively proved that, as soon as they got control. What was the first thing they did when they got control of the Congress of the United States? They immediately began to tear up labor's bill of rights. The first thing they did was to try and amend the Wagner Labor Act so it would no longer work in the interests of labor, but would work in the interests of special privilege. I vetoed that, and I hope everyone of you will read that veto message, because it strikes at the fundamental foundation of the Democratic plan to make the government for all the people. The next thing they did was to try to tear up the farm program. They tried to leave the farmer out on a limb so he could no longer have a floor under bis prices, and they are trying to tell the people that that floor under prices to the farmers is causing the high cost of living. That is not true. You cannot tell how much the price sup. ort program has been worth to this great co untry of ours, because the farmer was willing to go out and raise tremendous cfops that have been necessary to feed the world and to keep enough in this country so that prices would not go sky high. If these people had been willing to give me the necessary controls for allocation of these things, everybody would have had his fair share, and prices would not have been out of sight. I want you to weigh these things. I want you to consider very carefully the record of the Congressman in this district, then I think you will want to vote for Professor Murphy for Congressman from this district, who knows what these issues are and has been trying to tell you what they are. The best interests are the people's interests - in voting for a Government that is of the people and for the people. Now, you are the Government. You are yourselves the Government, when you exercise your rights to vote. When you do not exercise that right to vote, you are shirking your duty. In 1946, two-thirds of the people of the United States who were entitled to vote stayed away from the polls - and look what they received as a result of that! They got a Congress that immediately began working for special privilege. There were more lobbyists and more higher paid lobbyists around this 80th Congress than ever before in the history of the Country. And rhose lobbyists got just what they wanted. The real-estate lobby kept the housing bill Brom going through. The big corporation lobbyists got the Taft-Hartley Bill through. Mr. Taft said that he wrote that bill for the benefit of employers. I don't think that is anything to brag about. (OVER)