Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 12 October 1940 — Page 8

Oy

\ ie

fiscal end of national defense?

PAGE 8 .

The Indianapolis Times (A SCRIPPS-HOWARD NEWSPAPER)

ROY W. HOWARD RALPH BURKHOLDER MARK FERREE President : Editor Business Manager

Owned and published daily (except Sunday) by The Indianapolis Times Publishing Co., 214 Ww. Maryland St.

Price in Marion County, 3 cents a copy; delivered by carrier, 12 cents a week.

"Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance, NEA Service, and Audit Buteau of Circulation.

outside of Indiana, 65 cents a month. :

RILEY 5551

Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way

Mail subscription rates Member of United Press, in Indiana, $3 a year;.

Fair Enough

By Westbrook Pegler

Taking a Tip From the Democrats He Picks Up Some Odds and Ends Clyttering the New Deal Backyard

NEY YORK, Oct. 12.—If there is any royalty on ideas I must be running up quite a bill to the Democratic National Committee, for this is the second time that I have been needled to rebuttal by the daily press release of that agency. This one says : that “a thorough housecleaning is

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1940

, THREE CAMPAIGN QUERIES

OW did we get in the middle of the stream? How did we get on the Burma Road? Do we want to die for dear old Dong Dang?

RESOLVED (1928) :

~

EXT of the La Follette Resolution adopted by the U. S. Senate in 1928 (vote: 61 for; 28 against) — “RESOLVED: That it is the sense of the Senate that the precedent established by Washington and other Presidents of the United States in retiring from the Presidential office after their second term has become, by universal concurrence, a part of our republican system of government, and that any departure from this time-honored custom would be unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions.” . Senators still. serving who voted for the resolution were: : DEMOCRATS — Ashurst, Barkley, George, Gerry, Glass, Harrison, Hayden, King, McKellar, Neely, Pittman, Sheppard, Smith, Elmer Thomas, Tydings, Wagner and Wheeler. ; - REPUBLICANS—Capper, Irazier, Johnson, Nye. La Follette (Prog.), Norris ‘(Ind.), Shipstead (F.-L.).

DR. BUTLER TURNS ON THE HEAT

PRESIDENT NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER of Columbia University, a man of great learning and profound ‘convictions, performed an extraordinary exercise in sophistry the other day before the assembled faculties of Columbia. : While paying lip service to academic freedom, he served notice in effect that the university is supporting the foreign and defense: policies of the Federal Government and that no dissenters are wanted. “Those whose convictions . . . bring their conduct into open conflict with the university’s freedom to go its way toward its lofty aim should, in ordinary self-respect, withdraw of their own accord from university membership ..."” x ] Now we doubt if even Dr. Butler is more anti-Nazi than we are, or more desirous of British victory, or more pleased with the result of the destroyers-for-bases swap. But it seems to us that the time is not yet here for booting out every professor who disagrees with us on, say, conscription. A university which imposes any such limits on academic freedom as Dr. Butler appears to propose, is no longer a university but an institute of propaganda.

GANGWAY FOR THE INSPECTOR!

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT is swinging through pivotal Ohio today, inspecting defenses right and left. It is stated officially that he left Candidate Roosevelt at home. His first stop in the state which has mothered so many Presidents was at Youngstown. According to official Washington announcements to date, out of a total of 1414 billions for defense purposes the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. has defense contracts aggregating $23,000, of which $13,000 is for nails. : : (No matter what any Republican tells you, those nails are not to mend political fences.) : As the President surveys the terrain and fortifications of the great Midwestern frontier, he is flanked by his political advisers (pardon us, his field marshals).

For first-hand report on the lines of the enemy, he relies |

on Democratic gubernatorial candidate (or maybe we should

‘say, surgeon general) Martin Davey. Gen. Davey, in pri- | vate life is in the tree-doctoring business, and if ever our |

«forests are raked by enemy fire the general will know how to patch up the remains.

Aboard the special train also are Democratic National |

Committeeman (Judge Advocate General) Charley Sawyer and sundry Democratic Congressmen and candidates for other offices (advance sentries), not to mention the battalion of New Deal palace guardsmen from Washington. 2» il an 8 : It was the same yesterday when the Commander-in-Chief inspected the front lines in Pennsylvania. Hi§ train stopped at Johnstown, a boys’ band played “God Bless America,” and Senator (we're sorry, Admiral) Joe Guffey

came aboard, with Democratic National Committeeman |

(Lieutenant Commander) David Lawrence, and assorted orderlies. From the car windows the inspection party then inspected the flood walls of Conemaugh River as the train passed slowly. We trust they found no flaws in the dikes. In the Pittsburgh area the party detrained for close-up Inspection of vital points. At the Munhall works of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Co., 21 minutes elapsed from the time the Presidential limousine entered the gate until it passed out, which must have set an all-time speed record for inspecting a huge steel plant. ; : At the big Mesta Machine Co. plant, where many millions of dollars of defense orders have been placed, the President did even better. He inspected the whole shebang in 16 minutes flat. : So goes the grand tour of defense inspection through the no-man’s-land of doubtful ballots, by strange coincidence backtracking a route followed a few days ago by a politician named Willkie, who was on no military mission, who was not traveling at the taxpayers’ expense—who, in fact, was so unsophisticated that he admitted out loud that he was looking for votes. » » » 2

By the way, and speaking of taxpayers, we wonder whether the Commander-in-Chief found time to discuss with Admiral Joe Guffey a small item of $4165 in Federal income tax which the Admiral neglected to pay for the tax years 1921 and 1923, and which the internal Revenue Bureau has since marked off as “uncollectible.” Or is it impolite to mention this little afterthought concerning the

x

needed now and again in a political campaign just to clear up a few odd bits and shavings which pass for genuine issues.” I am thus reminded that it was Harold Ickes who officially took up the matter of Wendell Willkie’s home address on Fifth Ave. as a political issue, and that while he was standing there, his potty abdomen shaking in mischievous mirth, his half-brick boomeranged and knocked him for a spiral. ; The very mention of Willkie’s home address naturally directed attention to Ickes’ home address, which is two-fold, one being a country estate that really is an estate, a little outside Washington, the other an old family home in Winnetka, Ill, in a neighborhood so socially high-busted that the. very street on which he lives is described as “private road.” ”» » 3

CKES’ reference to Willkie’s home address plainly was intended to suggest that Willkie had a lot of money and to raise some question as to how he got it. He thus, unintentionally, conveyed a public invitation to himself to tell how he got his money, but he hasn't pursued either fork of the subject, for the fact is that, unless he has some very positive information that Willkie stole the rent for his Fifth Ave. .apartment, then Willkie’s method of acquiring money was at least as manly and as creditable by all the moral rules and social traditions by which Americans measure such things as Ickes’ method.

Ickes didn’t come out and say there was anything questionable about the Willkie method. He was dealing in some odd bits and shavings which, in the words of the Democratic National Committee, were intended to pass for genuine issues. By the same token, the question how Ickes got his money is not a political issue, either, but it is just as pertinent as the question of how Willkie got his. He isn’t tonguetied ‘and people will -listen whenever he decides to tell. Now I see also, in the same press release of the Democratic National Committee, an Enright cartoon showing Willkie heaving something at a wall-eyed hound labeled “utility record,” and saying, “you quit following me around.”

2 o =

HAT makes me ask, just as a scandal-loving member of the general public, what the Social-Dem-ocrats have got on Willkie that is so sinister as to justify this cartoon and why they don’t let us in on the secret so that we can judge whether the man was a crook or not? : And if he wasn't a crook, what is the idea of this cartoon, anyway, especially from an outfit which decries insinuation and “odd bits and shavings” which “pass for genuine issues?” The mere fact that Willkie worked in the utility business, if he didn’t do anything ‘crooked, is nothing discreditable, and Willkie, far ‘from eoncealing his employment in this line, has been campaigning as a believer in private industry and the employment of the American people in in‘dustries owned and operated by them, as stockholders, as opposed to the Social-Democratic or New Deal system, in which: the Government eventually becomes the only employer. . I understand that this New Deal campaign copy is turned out under the supervision of old Charlie Michelson, and I insist that the fact of his employment at $20,000 a year as a “public relations consultant” by a big radio corporation having important dealings with the Communications Commission while he was constantly hanging around the White House and sitting in on the President's press conferences in a confidential role is no mere chip or shaving. That should be an issue in the campaign, because no big corporation should be allowed to post its press agent in the White House as observer or adviser of the President in his conferences with the daily press.

Aviation

By Maj. Al Williams |

Fleet of Flying Fortresses Needed To Keep Hostile Navy From Shores.

SSUMING that our first concern is truly and exclusively the defense of America—the United States in particular, or the hemisphere in general. How, and with what, would we be most likely to keep foreign seapower from attacking our shores? * We might do it with our own fleet. But we have only one fleet for the two oceans. The one instance where British seapower had a chance to demonstrate what it could do was when three cruisers caught a German pocket battleship and smashed it. In all other theaters, seapower 1s evading airpower. When Gibraltar is bombed, British warships put to sea. Isn't it about time to build ourselves e€nough Flying Fortress type, long-range bombing planes —say 500 or 1000? The mere possession of such deadly aircraft would give any seapower pause. They could roam and patrol, not only the waters adjacent to our coasts, but a thousand or more miles offshore. At an easy 180 miles an hour, carrying thousands of pounds of high explosive, these planes could range

he

‘the Pacific, Caribbean, Atlantic and Panama Canal

areas. Based in the center of the continent, these great ships would constitute single or multiple fleets that could be swung from one coast or ocean to another in a rhatter of hours. And does any one dare to maintain that such striking air forces would he unequal to smashing any imaginable seapower machinery that any nation or nations could muster against us?

» » »

BVIOUSLY, as the European war has already demonstrated, no sea fleet could last more than hours against such destruction from the skies. Eyes aloft always spot surface warships long before they are detected by seapower’s sentries. One call from the patrolling bomber, traveling 180 miles an hour (instead of the surface warship’s 35 miles an hour), would bring a hornets’ nest around such an enemy fleet in a few hours. Furthermore, if it is hemisphere defense we are thinking of, tell me what admiral would dare to split his forces to defend the coast of Brazil on a rumor, no matter how strong. On the other hand, a small detachment of Flying Fortresses sent to the Brazilian coast would suffice to patrol that area. Definite reports of enemy presence, in force (not rumor), would enable a great fleet of flying fortresses to swing south and return before a sea fleet could make the oneway journey. o : The new $5,000,000,000 sea navy we are going to at the earliest—and we could get the flying fortresses in jigtime. Since we have no definite, comprehensive and modernized plan for our national defense, and a pitiable lack of one for our air defense, isn’t a little constructive suggesting in line? Build the new Navy sea fleet—but get the 1000 flying fortresses now!

So They Say—

IF ROOSEVELT is re-elected, he will go on serving as long as the people elect him.—Raymond A. Moley, former New Dealer. : - » . ALL THE stories you've heard about shortage (of men and equipment) are sad but true—Maj. Gen. Lesioy J. McNair, chief of staff of U. S. Army general staff,

GOVERNMENT and business are necessarily in-

terdependent and must get along.—Jesse Jones, seCretary of Commerce, “

a ®

build or have “on order” won't be ready until 1946

THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES _oooo a Royal Setting for a Throne Room, Boys!" ~

2]

£2

1 wholly

- - ; : : The Hoosier Forum disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.—Voltaire.

TRACES POSSIBLE STEPS LEADING US TO WAR By The Fishin Filosopher Germany, Italy and Japan enter into an alliance. Attack one and you attack all. ‘Japan invades French Indo-China and menaces the Dutch East Indies. We threaten a blockade of Japan.

A blockade is a definite act of war.|

Presto, we are not only at war with Japan but with Germany and Italy, its allies. Automatically we are shoved into the European war by the back door. Neither Congress nor the people will have anything to say about it. It may be all right. I don’t know.

” ” 2 CLAIMS OUR EDITORIALS NO LONGER LIBERAL By H. J. Holt The Indianapolis Times at one time was a very liberal paper. One could sit down and enjoy it from the first page to the last. The editorial section was a page you could

turn to and get a view of just what was new in the community and the world at large, and presented in a very intelligent manner. But now, Oh boy! . The old editorial page is gone. In its place is the Willkie page. The editor has taken unto himself the task of explaining Mr. Willkie’s blunders and explaining them so fluently that the poor dumb suckers who read The Times can be fooled into ‘believing them (he hopes). = Keeps you quite busy, doesn’t it? ” ” 2 CLAIMS WILLKIE AVOIDS SPECIFIC ANSWERS By Warren A. Benedict Jr.

Willkie says that if elected he is going to create more jobs, for one thing by creating more new businesses to give more jobs. Here is a concrete, specific case that would bear discussing, and it’s right down your alley. Opportunity is constantly shrinking in the newspaper field. Casualties are bad among dailies in even the larger cities, much worse in the smaller towns. The big dailies in New York and Chicago

(Times readers are invited to express their in these columns, religious controversies excluded. Make your letters short, so all can have a chance. Letters must be signed, but names will be withheld on request.)

views

are profiting at the expense of newspapers even in cities like our own. Many good newspapermen are out of jobs, and the field is practically closed to eager young people who have studiously prepared for that field. What would the Great Hope do here? Dissolve unions, in order to encourage new capital in this field? Restrict the big dailies in favor of the smaller ones (and thus antagonize his best supporters, and interfere with that precious “freedom of the press”)? Would the great press associations be willing to break down their monopolistic practices to encourage more good dailies? It would be interesting to see some newspaperman try to answer these questions. You can be sure Willkie won't. To date he hasn't given a single specific answer to what he

‘would do in a single specific case.

Generalities don’t go with people these days. :

” ”» 2 FEARS DEFENSE SPENDING WILL BRING DEPRESSION By Edgar A. Poe ; In our dear friend Henry A. (In-

.| dispensable man No. 2) Wallace's

speech at Kansas City under date of Sept. 25th, he said: “If peace comes, there will be a day- of reckoning.” ; : To me it seems that Wallace should know that even the people who are “too dumb” know that the days of “reckoning” will be the same as the ones that followed the last war (which, by the way, took place under another Democratic Administration) only they will be just twice as bad. ! After the last war the U. S. had a national debt of about 29 billion dollars and this time with a debt of over 45 billion dollars and ap-

Side Glances—By Galbraith

"I've got a surprise ih

COPR. 1940 BY NEA SERVICE. INC, T. M. REG. U. 8. PAT. OFF.

for you tonight—you won't have own way to the movies.

10-12

to pay your

propriations already made of over 15 billion tor national defense, the

debt will be twice as great in two’

years as it was after the end of the last war; therefore, our next depression will be twice as bad as the one for which Wallace blames Hoover. And, by the way, the little matter of appointing the son of our dear Indispensable Man No. 1 to a ¢aptaincy in the Army, without one day’s experience, should cause the mother and father of every son in

our dear old U. S. A. who is eligible |

for draft, or who will ever be eligible, to raise up in arms and denounce ‘by their ballots such tactics which have always been exercised by the present Administration. Is he any better than my son or the son of any other father of the U. S.? I was in the last war and the promotions given then were earned and not handed out on a silver platter.

8 ” ” ASKS MOTHERS TO PRAY ON REGISTRATION DAY By American Mother « . . Let all us mothers set next Wednesday, Oct. 16, as a very special day for prayer. Let us unite in prayer wherever we may be in asking that our sons be kept on our own shores and not be sent abroad to be slaughtered as they were before, for it’s very plain we are drawn nearer war every day. They say now they will not send our boys overseas, but they have sent everything else possible and how do we know our boys won't be next. How often do we hear our ex-soldiers alluded to as crazy vets? In 20 more years will our young men of today be called just a bunch of crazy vets who were sent overseas to war .and for what? : # 2 8 PREFERS WPA TO STATUS UNDER HOOVER By Artie Stepheasen, Milltown, Ind.

In answer to Mr. Maddox’ letier of Oct. 7 about the WPA being badly treated. When we work out by the day for a living we have to take the bitter with the sweet. They are pretty sure of a job for 18 months and then they get reinstated. I think the most of them realize where their bread and butter is coming from. They also: have clothes to wear now where back un-

1| der Hoover they did not have them

to even wear to get their free soup on every corner. I think the time has come when there will be more of them put on the New Deal shackles and vote for F.D. R.

HOMES By JOSEPHINE DUKE MOTLEY I have seen lonesome houses all the

way Along the streets and roads of discontent Personifying wealth some soul has spent So he might seem immaculate and

gay, What pity, tis that many a heart and hand ’ Gropes blindly to pursue some hapless dream : Of rainbow chasing like a witless gnome When all the time there rests at his command ‘ . The power to make the shell he lives in seem i A lonely house no longer, but a home,

DAILY THOUGHT

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and yqur reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.—Luke 6:35. :

8 » »

A MERELY fallen enemy may rise again, put the reconciled one

SATURDAY, OCT. 12, 1940

Gen. Johnson

Says—

Agrees With Pegler "What-the-Hell Philosophy’ Accounts for People's Tolerance of New Deal Foolishness

HICAGO, Ill, Oct. 12—“There will be no protest because the people long ago wearily abandoned principle and surrendered to the what-the-hell philosophy, which holds that any crookedness short of ‘downright criminality is all right if it is clever and produces results.” So wrote Westbrook Pegler about what he called the shysteresque cunning ‘and mocking dishonesty of the method by which we sent our destroyers to join the British Navy. It is the most certain and unpleasant truth of our times, Marvelous enough is the audacity of such magnificent frauds as the . “third term draft,” the forcible feeding of Henry A. Wallace to the Democrats, the methods of the destroyer deal and the Attorney General's opinion approving it. More marvelous still is: the reckless, audacious constant shoving of this unwilling country into wholly unnecessary war in: the Pacific. But marvelous past thg point of understanding is the whipped and beaten public acceptance of these contemptuous affronts to public morals—without re--sentmeént, without even important protest. There can be only one credible explanation, the one Pegler has given. This country has become completely slaphappy from repeated jolts to so many of the high principles it once delighted to honor.

2 2 s

HIS being the case in so. many more important things, it is probably not worth the effort to comment on the President's “tours of inspection of national defense.” Yet to omit comment is to accept Peg’s “what-the-hell philosophy,” and that I am not ready to do. The President's story is that he is too busy in Washington with national defense to make any political tours—much less any political speeches, or to debate the issues of this critical campaign. The President's performance is to cover as much electioneering territory as usual; greeting crowds, issuing statements and covering a good deal of his opponent’s political itinerary. But this is not “political.” It is just being “too busy with national defense.” Does that fool anybody? What difference does that make? It produces many results. Being the performance of an “official duty of national defense,” it can be done at public expense. It is very expensive campaigning, but the Government itself pays the bill and it cleverly avoids the Hatch Act. It uses national defense for a purely partisan political purpose while seeming not to do so. Above all, the whole attitude permits the President to escape debate on his record of uninterrupted seven years of failure. 2 u ®

OF course, all that leaves open the only possible Justification for his showmanship. What do the President's “tours of inspection” do to help national defense? He doesn’t know anything about manufacture and scarcely more about technical armament. What we need above all is concentration and speed on armament production and we are not getting them fast enough What we do not need is the injection of partisan politics and other attractive distractions on the production lines. The President could not bring one ounce of aid by his visits, but he can and does bring plenty of delay and distraction.

Any veteran production manager will tell you that an inspection visit of a big shot to a greater or less degree disorganizes work for two or three days—one day to “pretty up” the works for the inspection party, one day to put on the show and another day to get back to normal. Thus, from every angle, this inspection act and political abstraction is just another mountain of magnificent Sunk. : \

A Woman's Viewpoint By Mrs. Walter Ferguson

Horr ELLIOT, only woman member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, hands out some good advice—to those who need it ‘least— when she says that the chief patriotic duty of the housewife is to learn to spend her money wisely. We hope Miss Elliot will sound off on the same note to her- fellow members on the Defense Commission. We could do with more economy in high places. The politicians are spending money like drunken sailors, and some of the tales of waste in the War Department make our hair stand on end, Yet ‘Mrs. America is still getting the curtain lectures. And this in spite of the fact that home management is just about the only enterprise carried on with a minimum of expense and a maximum of efficiency. The average woman would be sunk deeper than a frog in a well if she conducted her household as statesmen carry on the national business. The thought of spending her way to prosperity has never entered her head, of course; if it did her husband would quite properly knock it out again. She does understand enough about general finance to know that hoarding is folly, but she has not yet sufficiently mastered the new economy to feel that borrowing will put the family on Easy Street. And evidently it is not ‘intended that she shall practice the doctrines set forth by its advocates. The housewife is the one person in the land who must abide by Benjamin Franklin's definition of thrift. Nobody wants her to start off on any new-fangled economic tangents. May we therefore amend Miss Elliot's motion to say that, in our opinion, the patriotic duty of every American housewife is to see that those with the power to tax learn how to spend money wisely? And let’s quit preaching to the housewife. Economy has already begun at home; the job is now to move it into wider spheres. What women save in their kitchens during a year is tossed off by Congress in a couple of minutes—and we pay them to bankrupt us. Here's one housewife who is getting a little hot under the collar about it.

Watching Your Health

By Jane Stafford |

E are likely to hear a good deal about foot trouble and foot defects after the first contingents of young men have been examined for Army training this fall. Over 30 per cent of those who failed to qualify for military service in the World War were rejected because of foot defects, you may recall According to present estimates, 90 per cent of the population suffer from some kind of foot trouble. Shoes, which can cause much foot trouble if they do not fit properly, have been improving and people are now buying shoes for fit as well as for looks, the U. 8. Public Health Service finds. Other factors besides poor-fitting shoes, however, can cause foot

| trouble.

One of these is poorly fitting stockings. Women with an eye on thrift may learn to buy sheer hose long enough so holes will not be pushed through at the toes. Most mothers buy their children’s shoes long enough to allow for the rapid growth of the child’s feet, but forget that stockings may be outgrown just as rapidly as shoes. Much foot trouble is caused by faulty use of the feet in standing and walking. When you must stand for long periods, your feet should be placed two to four inches apart and pointing straight ahead. Your. weight should be supported on the outside of the feet. To avoid forming the habit of standing on relaxed feet one should, Federal health authorities say, delib= erately exercise the muscles of the arch from time to time by drawing up and relaxing the toes. Walk with your feet pointing ahead or slightly toward each other. This is said to be the ideal position of the feet in walking. In stepping forward the weight ‘should fall first on the heel and as the body is carried forward the weight should be applied along the out-

side of the foot from the heel to the small toe and

_ across the forward part of the foot to the great toe.