Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 61, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1919 — AN INDECENT SPECTACLE [ARTICLE]

AN INDECENT SPECTACLE

Coarse and brutal are the only adjectives that appositely describe the language and demeanor of certain! Republican senators when the president of the United States hectares the subject of their discussion in the public forum of the senate. They are not merely without sympathy and consideration for the nation's chief executive as he lies in a bed of sickness they seemingly" lack even the ordinary sense of decency. One example off what is the typical attitude of this group Of heartless partisans has been furnished by Senators Poindexter and Fall. The former is the author of a request ffor certain information Which, he contended, was necessary to the senate’s consideration of the so-called Sihantung amendment to t'he peace treaty. When Another senator suggested that it would not be in good taste to press this request, in view of the president’s condition, Fall, unable to resist the promptings of political partisanship, proposed that a Democrat should move a recess "until such time as the president is able to resume the responsibilities of his office.” Senator Moses, , who sent to a constituent alarming and erroneous reports of the president’s Illness, followed that act of Impropriety by an unseemly joke at the expense of the president’s physician.

The climax of Indecency was reached —at least thus far—when a Republican senator challenged the genuineness of the president’s signature on recent communications from the White House to the senate, and left clear the Implication that some off the chief executive’s assistants had unlawfully affixed his nahne. The signature was "strained:,” said these partisans, making no allowance for the trem-

bling of a hand that was enfeebled by the president’s loss of bodily strength after a physical and mental pressure which the biggest iproblems and events of the world’s history have exerted on him during the last five years. When it is known that the Republican majority in the senate had no hope or prospect of forcing the adoption of the Shantung amendment —even if they had the sincere desire ta add it to the treaty —and when it* is understood that the very leaders publicly conceded that this amendment could not prevail, their use of it as an occasion for cruel flings at the president in his hour of suffering will be properly characterized by every honorable American of whatever party.