Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 94, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 July 1907 — GEN. M'KEE SHOULD BE KICKED OUT [ARTICLE]

GEN. M'KEE SHOULD BE KICKED OUT

The desperately long and hard marches in broiling and boiling heat, and drenching storms, practically with no food but what they bought and paid for themselves, and with no adequate shelter from the weather, and practically all the men in the ranks mere yonng boy s not at all inured to hardship and such severe and long-continued labor, as the Third • Regiment was pat thru this week at Fort Benjamin Harrison, could only have been justified in a time of actual war and with an actual enemy near at hand. The experience even what there was of it is mueb more than likely to result in a long and perhaps permanent injury to the health of many of the boys who were forced to nndergo it, and had not the brave and humane Co 1 . Thayer, commander of the regiment took matters into his own hands, in defiance of all the inhuman and outworn rules of warfare which still control, and cut short these miserable manuevers aud ordered his men back to camp, the results would have been very much worse, and a pitched battle nnder command of officers fit for their position scarcely have been more injurious to the physical conditions of the men. We are now fully convinced of a fact which we have long suspected, and that is that Gen. McKee is not only a hard, cruel and inhuman man, but is totally unfit for the position he holds, from the point of view of military ability and knowledge. He should be kicked out of the service at once, if the national guard of the state is to be saved from ntter demoralization. x