MINUTE MEN ON THE WESTERN FRONT

A delegation of Lexington citizens left for Washington on Tuesday to protest against the "unreasonable interference by the Federal Government" in the affairs "of a free people." They presented a petition signed by 1200 townsmen to Congress, protesting against interference in business, against extension of emergency legislation, against increase of bureaus, boards, and commissions, against wasteful expenditures; and against the overhasty passage of legislation.

This Declaration of Liberty, coming on the 159th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington is just another example of the ignorance some good people have of the remarkable change which has taken place in the technique of liberty-seeking revolt in the last century. The D.A.R. was shown, in these columns, to have closed its eyes to the revolution in American revolts.

In the heyday of Hamiltonian federalism these protests from Lexington would have added to its considerable glory throughout the Small America of that time. Every pioneer and farmer would rise to the support of the Yankee patriots, every banker and broker would tremble with rage. But the sincere patriotism of those latter-day Minute Men of 1934 hits the Middle Western farmer, receiving regular handouts from the government, as a particularly sharp annoyance from some small-town Old-Dealers of the East. And the bankers, knowing from experience, what the Minute Men know from feeling, join chorus with Lexington.

It is the force of sectionalism and the tremendous multiplicity of interests in this country which cause this shot fired round the world to hit the Lexington men in the back, without ever having found its mark in Washington. There is undoubtedly much fear and to-do in the South, West, and Middle-West; of the planless planning, the extravagance, and the new-booms-and-depressions of the Roosevelt regime. But the expressions of this are not going to come from the East, if at all. In the popular mind, the voice of the East is the voice of the Bankers, and the intensity of this feeling can be blamed on the policies and speeches to the New Dealers, and their attendant nuisance, Father Coughlin, Huey Long, Jim Farley and the rest.

The imprudent outcry from Lexington will for this reason play right into the hands of the administration, just as did the miscarriage of the Wirt inquisition, and the blasts of the Seven Wise Men of Harvard. In the long run the President will find himself in the difficult position of interpreter between a hostile East and West, speaking different economic language. It will be his impossible job to prove to the East that the West has the best interests of the Country at heart, and explain to the West that the Yankees are not opposed to reasonable agrarian reform. For the present, however, criticism from one section will be answered from another. The national policies can best be attacked by bodies of national representation.