Opportunist Knocking

The pea-shooters and small arms used by its critics to snipe at the War Administration were put aside this past Lincoln's Birthday weekend. This opposition, grasping the opportunity presented by the all-quietness of the military fronts and the American people's susceptibility to pseudo-patriotic harangue on a national holiday, let fly with its heavy artillery, and the ammunition was spotted with verbal dum-dum bullets.

From the cornfield constituency of self-styled "country boy" Alf Landon to the Capitol Hill offices of smooth politician Joe Martin, the anguished cry went up: "Power-mad bureaucrats." "Bossism." "No milk for Hottentots." All the threadbare, empty rhetoric, spouted in the name of the "American Way" by the same coterie who have, at the price of disunity, taken the public by its ears and dragged it away from the cesspool of a global war to get a whiff of the Administration's "sewer of bureaucracy." Visions of the 1944 election are crowding the nation's war and peace problems out of the minds of these political snipers.

Big gun in the latest series of reactionary blasts is one-time presidential candidate Alf Landon, whose shallow mind is unable to discriminate between bureaucracy of a Nazi slave state and the government by delegated authority in a social-security democracy. The old-guard Kansas Republican picked Henry A. Wallace as his target. Seldom has there been an attack as malicious, insidious, and completely unconstructive as this short-sighted diatribe directed at a political figure recognized by our Allies, from Left to Right, as the spokesman for the common man.

In words that were a mockery of the man of the people whose birthday he was commemorating, Landon, with the landslide defeat of 1936 still rankling in his 1920-style mind, asked "a coalition of real Democrats and the Republican party as a guarantee that Vice-President Wallace and his fellow travelers will not lead us down the same disastrous primrose path in which Hitler has led his people."

His unsubtle comparisons of the Hitler and Roosevelt governments are mere hollow re-cchoings of the reactionary chant of the politically blind and deaf: the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Legion, the Tydings-Cox-Dics entente in Congress. His branding of Administration officials as "Nazi New Dealers" carries the systematic trend towards national distrust and confusion one step further. It borders on sedition.