The Charlotte News

Wednesday, December 3, 1952

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Secretary of State-designate John Foster Dulles had declared at the State Department this date that "loyal servants of our Government have nothing to fear" from the incoming Eisenhower Administration. He promised that the foreign service would be protected as a nonpartisan career group, but that "many angles … need to be looked into and will be looked into very thoroughly," not amplifying the latter point, an oblique reference to the criticism of Communists within the Department, promoted by Senator McCarthy and others. He conferred for a half hour with Secretary of State Acheson during the morning, then talked briefly with reporters before going to the Pentagon to confer with Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett. He said that he would receive from Undersecretary of State David Bruce five books describing the country's foreign policy and its urgent present problems and plans for resolving them. It was the first visit for Mr. Dulles to the State Department since the campaign, during which he had bitterly criticized the present policies of the Department. He said that he would visit Washington intermittently until the inauguration.

Senator Joseph McCarthy said this date that he assumed the Justice Department would follow up its grand jury investigation of Owen Lattimore with similar action against career diplomat John Davies, Jr. Attorney General James McGranery had announced the previous day that he had ordered evidence about Mr. Lattimore, a Far Eastern affairs specialist and formerly a State Department consultant, submitted to a grand jury in Washington beginning the following day, after having ordered the FBI to make a thorough investigation of him, with special emphasis on the matters about which he had testified, that investigation having been completed and provided the grand jury. The Senate Internal Security subcommittee, chaired by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, had recommended the previous July 2, following a year-long probe of subversive influences on American policy in the Far East, that perjury proceedings be brought against both Professor Lattimore and Mr. Davies, formerly of the State Department's policy planning staff and presently deputy political adviser to U.S. occupation authorities in West Germany. Senator McCarthy told reporters that the presentation of the case to the grand jury regarding Mr. Davies was more urgent than that of Mr. Lattimore because the latter had already been thoroughly exposed, while Mr. Davies still held an important job in Germany. Both men had denied that they had perjured themselves while testifying before the subcommittee. The subcommittee, in its report, had stated that Mr. Lattimore had been "a conscious articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy", claiming that he had testified falsely on five separate matters involving whether he knew that Outer Mongolia was Soviet-controlled and whether persons with whom he had worked were Communists.

A Federal grand jury in New York, in a report made public the previous day regarding alleged American Communists working for the U.N. Secretariat, said that the State Department had given "disloyal officials a clean bill of health" in some of "the most flagrant and obvious cases of disloyalty." They found that such disloyal Americans had moved from one U.S. Government post to another and finally had infiltrated the U.N. as part of a "definite planned pattern". No individuals were named in the report. It said that many witnesses before the grand jury, including American employees of the U.N., had refused to answer questions concerning past or present Communist Party membership, and, in some cases, past or present espionage against the U.S. It said also that in some instances, the State Department had supplied adverse reports on American employees of the U.N., but that the U.N. had not taken action. It further indicated that the Department had "stymied" the grand jury's inquiry into the matter, and one member claimed that there appeared to be Department pressure to withhold the report. The Department stated the previous night that it had no authority over U.N. personnel but it had drawn the attention of the U.N. to Americans on the staff of the Secretariat whom it believed to be Communists. It said that it had withheld from the grand jury names of certain Department officials who had reviewed and cleared four of the cases because questioning of the officials would have concerned confidential files. The Senate Internal Security subcommittee was investigating the matter and made the grand jury report part of its record. Senator Herbert O'Conor of Maryland, a member of the subcommittee, said that the subcommittee would consider the report in light of forming necessary remedial legislation.

At the U.N. in New York, the compromise plan submitted by India for resolving the months-long voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war issue, the remaining roadblock to a truce in Korea, would be approved this afternoon by the General Assembly after the 60-nation Political Committee of the Assembly had given its approval the previous day by a vote of 53 to 5, with abstention by Nationalist China, which believed that the Indian plan would not work. Delegates expected the vote to be the same in the Assembly. The proposal called for creation of a four-nation commission, with a fifth nation to sit as umpire, to handle repatriation of prisoners following an armistice agreement. It was already anticipated that Communist China and North Korea would reject the proposal, but it would be placed before them anyway to establish the record and show that the Communists were standing in the way of peace.

In Korea, three U.S. pilots claimed credit for destruction of two enemy MIG-15s this date in an air battle over North Korea. Otherwise, there was no news on the front page from the war.

In Prague, Rudolph Slansky, former boss of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, was hanged this date, along with ten other defendants convicted of trying to overthrow the Communist Government and eliminate President Klement Gottwald. The executions occurred only six days after the men had been sentenced to death. Eight of those executed, including Mr. Slansky, were Jews. Three other defendants had received life sentences. Mr. Slansky and former Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis, also executed, had confessed to a long list of crimes against Stalinism, including plotting with "Anglo-American imperialists". The executions suggested that the purge, insofar as its anti-Jewish tone, would spread to all other satellite Communist countries and perhaps even to the Soviet republics comprising the USSR. Within the Soviet Union, there were signs of a growing reign of terror, particularly in republics such as the Ukraine, where a military court had just sentenced three high party trade officials to death as "enemies of the people" for embezzlement, a sentence unusually harsh for such a crime, prevalent throughout the Soviet Union. The three had been charged with hiding gold acquired in their operations, suggesting that the Ukrainian underground movement was active again and was the real target of the crackdown. Trials were expected soon in Rumania, where Ana Pauker, former party boss, also Jewish, had fallen from grace, along with many others. Other crackdowns were expected in Poland and the other satellites.

Senator Taft's criticism the previous day of President-elect Eisenhower's appointment of Secretary of Labor-designate Martin Durkin, a Democrat and head of the plumber's union who opposed the Taft-Hartley law, suggested that the new President might face a rebellious Republican Congress in the new year, as much so as had President Truman in recent years from the coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans who had opposed most Fair Deal domestic legislation. The Senator had called the appointment "incredible", causing members of Congress to wonder whether there would be a war between the new Administration and Senator Taft or whether it was a temporary blow-up. Some Republican Senators were hoping that Senator Taft's criticism stemmed principally from his concern for maintaining the basic principles of Taft-Hartley and was not more generalized.

Defense Mobilizer Henry Fowler indicated this date that wage, price and production controls would remain in force until the end of the Truman Administration, and that it would be a grave error to remove them presently. He said that it was his personal view and that it would take a public repudiation by the President to alter the policy.

In Atlantic City, N.J., at the annual CIO convention, the group backing executive vice-president Allan Haywood for the presidency of the labor organization refused to concede that UAW president Walter Reuther had sufficient votes to win the election the following day. It was still hoped by the Reuther forces that a compromise could be effected to avoid a floor fight at the convention. The convention this date memorialized the late Philip Murray, who had died of a heart attack on November 9. Governor Adlai Stevenson was the featured speaker scheduled for the afternoon session.

The striking flight engineers of Eastern Air Lines stated this date that they would not return to work by the afternoon deadline set by Eddie Rickenbacker, president and general manager of Eastern, and that they were not resigning their jobs. The president of the Miami chapter of their union indicated that if anyone could prove it was an illegal strike, they would return to work immediately. Mr. Rickenbacker had told them to return to work by the deadline or lose their jobs. One of the grounded Constellations, on which the flight engineers flew, had taken off from Miami International Airport during the morning, manned by a flight engineer supervisor. Another Constellation, with an all-supervisory flight crew, departed from New York for a flight to Miami later in the morning. Seven other Eastern flights in and out of New York's LaGuardia Airport had been canceled because of the strike. Eastern announced that the first Constellation flight into Charlotte's Municipal Airport would arrive this evening from Newark, en route to Houston. Foggy weather the previous night into the morning had forced Eastern flights to bypass Charlotte, but air traffic returned to normal during the morning.

Across the country, another wet, cloudy day was forecast, but there was no severe cold weather predicted. Traffic continued to be slowed by snow-covered and icy, wet highways, with hundreds of accidents reported, resulting in at least 14 deaths in the New England region and along the East Coast. Snow had also hit the Northern Rockies.

In Colombo, Ceylon, a weekend cyclone had killed at least twelve persons and destroyed food and tobacco crops, plus thousands of palm and tropical fruit trees on Sunday and Monday.

In New York, columnist Earl Wilson reported in the New York Post that comedian Red Skelton had telephoned from Hollywood this date to announce that he and his wife were obtaining a divorce. They had been married in March, 1945, while he was on furlough from the Army. It was Mr. Skelton's second marriage.

Novelist Margaret Culkin Banning testified before a special House committee investigating obscene literature, that about 1,100 magazines sold on newsstands had "no purpose except pictorial prostitution." The committee recognized her as an expert witness because of research she had performed for an article, "Filth on the Newsstands", published in the October issue of Reader's Digest. She said that of the 1,231 magazines currently being published, all except about 100 were classified as "girlies", which she regarded as "vicious and provocative". There were two billion copies of the "girlies", she said, sold annually. She found that the newsstands displayed "sex provocation" in a way nowhere else found in the world, that such magazines were not for "fun, nor play, nor beauty but simply issued for straight provocation." She found that people would accept the sight of "drum majorettes wearing hardly anything at all marching down the street" but protested against the type of covers they saw on most magazines. She had visited some of the girls who posed for the near-nude photographs and found that they were all types and seemed far removed from the pictures for which they had posed. She found their reactions to be that they did not mind after awhile as the pictures did not look like them anyway. She said that 50 cities had taken action during the previous three years to drive indecent literature from the newsstands, movements usually started by civic or religious groups.

She has obviously never been a boy. Wait until you get a load of what's coming out of Chicago in less than a year, with Miss Monroe, in birthday attire, gracing the first issue, with no spare tire to show, not even in the Continental kit. You might wish that you had never opened your big, fat mouth in protest of a little cheesecake. Stick to wholesome novel writing. It is what it is. You cannot repeal the human sex drive. It is the basis, after all, for survival of the species, and therefore quite wired into all of us humans, at least those who have not unduly repressed it to the point of near insanity. The superego is present, in the form of conscience and religious beliefs, to prevent excess, so that the monkey will not continually hit the pleasure bell to the exclusion of most productive activity and thereby overpopulate the species. The "girlies" are merely a societal expression of the needed outlet in an over-socialized society, geared too much to making a living, and by any means possible including war machines, and not enough to living a natural life, perhaps, somewhere between the unrestrained jungle and open frontier, where the strongest grabbed the prize, and the Puritanical underpinnings of New England society in the Seventeeth through Nineteenth Centuries, before the age of commerce, mass production and mass communication, was made possible by rapid invention. With steady advances during that same age in photography, ultimately leading to Kodacolor film and improving lithographic reproduction in magazines, the needed outlet made itself increasingly apparent as an anodyne to the other advances of mass society which had steadily reduced the individual to an alienated facsimile of a human being, compartmentalized and regimented, lost of individualized expression, autonomic in response to stimuli, forced by systemic influences to conform to survive, bending and misshaping the while the normal affinities.

Put another way, gen'ral, the guided missiles have to be stood down one way or the other. Some choose a bottle, or other similar manner of escape into the high country to drown the potency in exhaustion, while others observe images and learn from mistakes of thou and thee, to become more proficient, more naturally selective. Take your pick. But don't pick your feet in Poughkeepsie.

On the editorial page, "An Inning Is Over, and Taft Is Out" reviews the Cabinet appointees of President-elect Eisenhower, finds that three of the eleven men had received their jobs primarily through political activity, including RNC Chairman Arthur Summerfield, to become Postmaster General, Herbert Brownell, to become Attorney General, and Sinclair Weeks, just appointed as the Secretary of Commerce. Three other of the appointees, Charles E. Wilson, as Secretary of Defense, George Humphrey, as Secretary of Treasury, and Ezra Taft Benson, as Secretary of Agriculture, had not been active supporters of the General, the latter two having been nominal supporters of Senator Taft. Four others had solid accomplishments in their own right in addition to considerable effort on behalf of General Eisenhower, including Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., as the new U.N. Ambassador, Harold Stassen, as the new head of the Mutual Security Agency, Governor Douglas McKay, the new Secretary of Interior, and the new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.

That left the new Secretary of Labor, Martin Durkin, the president of the plumbers union who had been a Democrat and opposed Taft-Hartley, sticking out like a sore thumb. It ventures that the appointment might be an effort to head off the proposed merger of AFL and CIO, as Mr. Durkin had been on closer terms with the AFL, or it might be a clear message that the new President would not be under the thumb of Senator Taft, who had denounced the appointment of Mr. Durkin, as well as a message to labor that the new Administration would seek to cooperate with it, and thereby achieve cooperation with many Democrats.

On the whole it finds the new Cabinet to reflect a moderate course, internationalist in terms of foreign policy and intending in domestic policy to retain the advances of the previous 20 years, while also favoring business over labor. It finds that the key personnel of the Cabinet would show concern with increasing expenditures and taxes, while being appropriately aware of the country's worldwide obligations. The new Secretary of Agriculture was an ardent supporter of the cooperative movement. The new Secretary of Interior recognized compatibility of private and public power interests. Thus, it finds, the progressive wing of the Republican Party would solidly control the executive branch while maintaining a middle road. It finds, however, that given Senator Taft's bitter statement of the previous day, displeased with the fact that none of his recommendations had been followed in the Cabinet selections, the traditional "honeymoon" period accompanying most Presidents to office would likely not last through the coming holidays.

"Flushed" finds the new Secretary of Labor, Mr. Durkin, head of the plumbers union, and the new AFL President, George Meany, who had started as a plumber, along with the new CIO president, Walter Reuther, UAW president who had started as a plumber's helper, to suggest that the old dominance of labor by former coal miners, among whom having been Philip Murray and William Green, respective recently deceased heads of the CIO and AFL, as well as executive vice-president of the CIO, Allan Haywood, had given way to the plumbers, John L. Lewis being the last exception.

"We're not sure what significance all this has, unless it's simply that the coal miners' influence has gone down the drain."

By the summer of 1973, you may have a better understanding of the significance, and what your overlooking in September, 1952 of that little matter of the secret fund established for Senator Nixon by California millionaires back in 1950 wrought for the country over the ensuing 22 years. Believe us when we say that it will be a rocky journey, not at all what you have envisioned in your naïve, idealistic view of it in 1952, when you thought that nominating and electing a World War II military hero to the office of the Presidency would resolve all problems of influence-peddling in the Government and other forms of corruption, eliminate wars, and that all else would be hunky-dory in the land of Nod.

"Parker's Face Is Only Thing That's Red" tells of Louis Parker, former state commander of the American Legion, after having told an Armistice Day audience that there were teachers at Duke University who had made contacts with the Communist Party, and after having been urged by Senator Willis Smith, who was also a member of the Duke Board of Trustees, to come forward to the Internal Security Committee, of which Senator Smith was a member, if he had such information, having finally confessed in a letter to the Committee that in fact his information was based on the investigation by the FBI of one person at Duke. He did not even indicate that it was a faculty member.

The piece finds it a prime example of irresponsible accusation irresponsibly made, casting a cloud over an institution. It finds it fortunate that Senator Smith was close to Duke and called Mr. Parker to account quickly. It hopes that the subcommittee would make it a permanent policy and invite other such purveyors of sinister information to provide the proper support for their assertions instead of shouting it "to the four winds".

"Let's Save the Rebel Yell, Suh" indicates that few of the old Confederates remained who could properly recall the rebel yell used during battle in the Civil War. H. Allen Smith, writing in the Saturday Evening Post, claimed that he had tracked down an example of the true rebel yell, but in fact, it had only been a rendition provided by Virginia's Professor Douglas Southall Freeman. And his rendition, the sound of which the newspaper seeks to duplicate in print, differed from North Carolina's James Street, who rendered it with a series of "yips", which, in turn, a UNC professor said were not present, delivering up yet a third variant. A police officer in Chapel Hill came up with another version, and a Charleston attorney provided a fifth. In Charlotte, there were at least three versions going around, including one provided by former Governor and Senator Cameron Morrison, whose authority the piece does not care to dispute.

It asks all "true sons and daughters of the South" who had authentic knowledge of the yell to come forward and record it for posterity. "Is it 'Yeeeeeee-ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!' Or 'Woooooo-oooooooooo-wow'? Or '…........... yip-yip-yip-yip-yip!'?"

You decide between the real McCoys and the renditions in print. They were all equally crazy sounding, as dogs stuck in their behinds with a hot poker or Number 9 boot. Those old, sexually repressed boys, overly steeped in backwoods religion, informed by the barely literate, and also overly fecund in most instances as a result, needed a Playboy or some other "girly" to settle their jumpy nerves. The inherently destructive nature of the minie-ball can perhaps best be understood by resort to Freud.

Drew Pearson tells of Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah having worked backstage to put his fellow Mormon, Ezra Taft Benson, across as the Secretary of Agriculture-designate in the new Cabinet. Senator Taft, a distant cousin of Mr. Benson, had initially recommended Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas for the position, but the President-elect told Senator Carlson that, while he could have the position if he wanted it, he would prefer him in the Senate. Senator Carlson began promoting Congressman Clifford Hope of Kansas, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, for the post, while Senator Fred Seaton of Nebraska pushed for Governor Val Peterson of that state. Allan Klein of the Farm Bureau was opposed to Congressman Hope because of his views on price-support parity, while brother Milton Eisenhower had quarreled with Mr. Hope when the former had been president of Kansas State College. In the meantime, Senator Watkins persuaded Senator Taft to support Mr. Benson for the position, and Senator Taft cleared the latter with Milton Eisenhower and the President-elect, resulting in the appointment.

Mr. Pearson notes that the appointment probably prevented Marriner Eccles, former New Dealer and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who, as vice-chairman, had earned the "undying enmity" of President Truman, from obtaining any appointment in the new Administration, as he also was from Utah and no President could favor too many men from one state. Mr. Eccles had been under consideration for appointment to a post in the new Administration.

Congressman Thurmond Chatham of North Carolina, whose family manufactured Chatham blankets, had tried to insert an ad into the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker, saying, "For Sale—By Democrat", listing his Georgetown house, prompting a response from the advertising manager of the New Yorker that they wished there were some way they could split the agency commission between them, but that the following year, as there would be no more taxes to pay and "pie in the sky", it would not matter much, and so accepted his check for the fee. The Wall Street Journal had regarded the ad as a credit risk, informing that it would cost $15.40 for one insertion, indicating that if Mr. Chatham was listed in Dun & Bradstreet and was a subscriber, or had previously established credit with the publication, they would be glad to open an account in his name, but otherwise he would need to remit payment with the order. Mr. Pearson notes that the Congressman had not been defeated in the election, but was moving from a smaller to a larger home, having bought the mansion once owned by the late Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

President-elect Eisenhower had a significant meeting recently with one of his early boosters, Wes Roberts, who had helped to win various Republican primaries and was presently under consideration to become the new RNC chairman. The new President told Mr. Roberts that he wanted to strengthen both the RNC and the state Republican committees, and wanted to hand out plenty of patronage below the rank of Cabinet officers, in jobs such as the Assistant Secretaries of Defense, Army, Navy, Commerce, Interior, and Treasury, provided the state committees and the RNC came up with good appointees. He wanted to use patronage to clean up certain local situations, such as that in Pennsylvania where bitter Republican factions had been at war with one another, wanting to strengthen Senator James Duff, another earlier supporter of General Eisenhower for the nomination, making him the real Republican leader of that state, which would also work to the advantage of Governor John Fine, who had announced support for the General over Senator Taft during the Republican convention.

Joseph Alsop, in London, states that beyond the difficult problems posed by the Korean War, the situations in Iran, Indo-China, and the issues regarding German rearmament insofar as its contributions to the NATO Army, President-elect Eisenhower faced the problem of strengthening and stabilizing the Western Alliance, ultimately resting on whether the countries could be made economically viable. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, an old friend of the President-elect, intended to press the issue with the new President at the earliest opportunity after the inauguration. Preparations were being made by British Commonwealth leaders, present in London for a conference, to determine the course the Prime Minister, notoriously uninterested in economic matters, should follow in such talks with the new President. They overwhelmingly favored, as did other Western European leaders, "trade not aid", as phrased by Chancellor of the Exchequer R. A. Butler, as a means to stabilize the economy.

Through heavy sacrifices, Britain had now recovered from its third postwar economic crisis and was paying its own way again. Yet its reserves of hard cash, constituting the working capital of the nation, were dangerously low, under two billion dollars, previously considered the bare minimum to avoid disaster. It meant that Britain and the other Commonwealth countries were nearly completely unprotected against unfavorable downturns in the world economy, especially problematic should a recession hit the U.S. The reserves were far lower than they had been in the crises faced by Britain in 1947, 1949 and 1951, each of which had nearly resulted in bankruptcy. Another crisis would not be merely economically disastrous, but also politically catastrophic, as it would drive the British to give up their struggle to continue as a world power and the chief ally of the U.S. Mr. Alsop finds it no wonder, therefore, that Mr. Churchill had entered the unfamiliar battle for economic stability "breathing his old war-like fire." But all of his courage and determination could not win the new battle should the President-elect turn him down in what ultimately would be his quest for relaxed trade barriers to permit acquisition of dollars.

That latter path was the only way to provide strong, permanent economic underpinning to the Western Alliance. The Truman Administration, Mr. Alsop indicates, had essentially been impotent to act in reducing trade barriers, another reason why Americans could be thankful for the "decisive national authority which the Eisenhower Administration can surely exercise if the new President so chooses."

Robert C. Ruark applauds a recent episode in the Yale versus Harvard football game, in which the Yale manager, Charles Yeager, was slipped into the line-up and caught a pass for a point after touchdown—the two-point rule not having come into being until 1958 in the N.C.A.A. He finds that not since Harold Lloyd had played "The Freshman" had anything so "nice and fresh" entered the national football spectacle.

He laments that the earlier time in his youth, when Red Grange had been in flower and it was still possible for the average student to be placed in the game and hold his own without anyone noticing much, had passed in favor of a mechanized, industrialized and impersonalized sport, to the point where "only a sea of burly young men, rushing in and out according to whether they pushed a defensive button or pulled an offensive lever" appeared to the average spectator. Thus, he gives a cheer for Yale and its managerial hero.

Mr. Yeager, incidentally, only recently passed away, on November 3, 2019.

A letter writer from Princeton, N.J., expresses that he had been impressed with the editorial page of November 15 and its report from The State and the editorial commentary on the literary activity of Mecklenburg County, especially its exhortation of the younger generation to take up creative literature. He ventures that a great and valuable ability was being bypassed because of a lack of emphasis in the Charlotte schools. He hopes that the newspaper would continue to encourage Charlotte students to engage in literary pursuits.

A letter writer from Morganton indicates his belief that the country had been shying away from the foundation of a sound economy based on supply and demand. He had worked for 25 cents per hour and now received $1.50 per hour, but could live on the 25 cents in earlier times, whereas now he could barely make ends meet. He suggests that the current labor leaders were causing more inflation than any other group, that every time they received an increase in pay, prices increased and the gains to workers were thereby neutralized. He asks whether it was a democracy or a dictatorship, indicates that he had to join a union to work on a local government job, and that when he had gone to Oak Ridge, Tenn., he had to obtain union clearance prior to employment.

It may be that you have a poor memory. Perhaps you ought to follow the advice of the first letter writer. But we only raise a second-hand suggestion, as we were not there—yet.

A letter writer indicates that Socrates had started something and she intended to keep it going—presumably not the hemlock part. She finds asking questions and discussing matters necessary incidents to progress. She believes that most people favored some sort of world cooperation and that the many plans offered for world government probably had strengths as well as weaknesses. She professes to know more about the United World Federalist plan than that of other organizations, believes that limited world government with membership open to all appeared the better course than regional pacts, such as NATO. She urges working for a world for all, including Africans, Americans, Asians, Europeans, Indians, and Eskimos, urges correcting the faults of the U.N. where possible and using it for the betterment of mankind.

A letter writer remarks that the President-elect was going to Korea, and hopes that every father and mother would pray and beg God to protect him and pray for peace, indicates that no peace would come except through Christ.

A letter writer from Norwood indicates that it was fine that "Mr. Eisenhower" was to be the next President and thinks that God had a hand in his election. He asserts that many votes had come from his position on Korea, that the country was willing to risk its prosperity if it could see war ended. He finds that the worst war was that against "King Alcohol" at home, which, he asserts, took five persons for every American soldier killed in Korea. Yet, he finds, little was being done about the alcohol problem, with hundreds of thousands of boys and girls falling victim to the "dreaded monster". He indicates that the country had legalized traffic in alcohol which was making "slaves, drunkards, wild drivers that kill and then go to court and plead that they were intoxicated and not responsible for their deeds." He asks God to help the country awaken, that it had whiskey because the members of the churches had so voted, finds that an awful record for "Christian America", hopes that the people would put a stop to it.

That worked out so well the last time you tried it, encouraging so much Christianity in places such as Chicago, trickling down to every village and burg in the country, like that. Education regarding the problems with any potentially physically addictive substance and the demystification of it as either a purported pathway to supernatural understanding or an expression of rebellion to parental authority, not prohibition, are the better remedial approaches, while restricting, to the extent possible, access by age.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>—</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date Links-Subj.