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Show Kathleenjjorrisjays: Good Medicine for Foreign-Bom Isms (Bell Syndicate-WNU Service.) I . Lively arguments will trail themselves right out of the dining room and continue over the dishpan, but that's exactly what you want. Drill them all in realize the simple truth, that there is no reform, no desirable change, to benefit humanity and right wrongs, to control privilege and extend ex-tend opportunity, that they can't accomplish ac-complish right here in their own country, under their own flag." If our worrying parents, alarmed at the half-baked red doctrine that so many of our college students seem to be imbibing today, would take this simple suggestion to heart, we should soon see not only the decline of anti-American influence, but the healthy growth of new American Amer-ican movements that might bring our country back once more to the standards' of the great Fathers of the Constitution. Revive Dinnertimp Discussions. It has often occurred to me that it is a pity that the old fashion of good talk at dinner-time has gone out. Judging from old American books and biography and letters it was a pretty usual custom a hundred hun-dred years ago. It may do the whole family good to have you revive re-vive it. ' The father or man of the household house-hold may greet this idea with a groan. "Darling, I'm dead tonight. Do we have to have politics at the table?" ta-ble?" he may plead. But persist anyway. The best system is quietly to produce the book that is to be read; handing it from one to another, an-other, and keeping steadily to a 10-minute 10-minute program, night after night Of course it will presently run to far more than 10 minutes, and lively arguments will trail themselves right out of the dining room and con- By KATHLEEN N ORRIS PERHAPS you are one of the mothers the many, many mothers! who are vaguely worried today for fear that a "fifth column" is forming, or is already formed, in America, and that Nazism and Fascism and Communism are about to break out in our midst. "Fifth column," you know, is one of the phrases coined in the late Spanish war. It means those enemies within our own ranks, those quiet forces that operate underground, under-ground, winning converts and gaining strength that is someday some-day to be used against America. Amer-ica. How strong these elements are, in our country, I don't know, and I don't suppose anyone else , does. When I was young it was the Socialists So-cialists who were appealing to the restless and rising generation. But they never put a candidate into office; of-fice; they never formed anything like a formidable party. And so much more violent, radical and unnatural un-natural are the isms of today that much that the Socialists advocate has come to seem to us quite practicable. prac-ticable. America Has Progressed. For although we never adopted a socialist platform, our ideals have changed. Working hours and wage scales and living conditions have all undergone changes. Time doesn't bring about ALL that the reformers want but it does much, and to read Henry George's great land value classic "Progress and Poverty" today to-day is to realize that the world really HAS grown better at least in America, since 1878. If fear for Americanism, our institutions in-stitutions and ideals, our Constitution Constitu-tion and our Bill of Rights, really haunts you, there is a simple thing that you can do to check, combat and eventually destroy the last shred of anti-American activity in our midst. For these foreign doctrines, brought here by the disaffected from other lands, reach our rising generation genera-tion first. In other words they reach your children and mine. And those children, like the children of every generation, are looking about the world critically, wondering why so many things are stupidly done, wrongly done; why there is so much preventable poverty and idleness and suffering and sin. When strange panaceas are presented to them they accept them gladly, neither able nor anxious to criticize them too keenly. The cure for this situation, which is actually worrying America very much, was suggested to me a few days ago by a fine old American woman who has raised sons, taken an active part in the hundred civic and social activities, and who served America as one of California's representatives rep-resentatives in congress for many years. I see no reason to conceal her name: Florence Kahn. Study the Constitution. Mrs. Kahn and I were talking about the recent awakening or beginning be-ginning of awakening, of American women to a sense of civic responsi-. responsi-. bility and civic, power, and I told her that many of our groups in the National Legion of the Mothers of America were taking their first interest in-terest in the Constitution, and had formed clubs to study it. "I wish," she said, "that they'd go a little deeper than that. I wish they'd take the matter right into their homes, read the Constitution aloud at the dinner table, discuss it, get the children to discuss it, and keep it up keep it up keep it up! Until," she finished, "every growing grow-ing American girl and boy would tinue over the dishpan, but that's exactly what you want. Drill them all in Americanism until there remains re-mains no question as to the potentialities potenti-alities of their own Constitution that they need leave unanswered. Don't warn anyone of what you are doing, for both husband and children have a deep-rooted objection to being educated, edu-cated, but make your dinner-table a little political forum for a few months, and you'll find that they want to keep it up longer than you do. It is a great tragedy that with a governmental system as flexible and as inspired as ours; with a beginning begin-ning only 165 years ago that startled star-tled the whole world with its ideals of universal suffrage, equality and humanity, we should let our chil-dren chil-dren grow up with the idea that we are just about as reactionary, as filled with class distinctions and social so-cial injustices as are the old nations of Europe. It is surely no fault of America's founders that we know so little of our own country's ideals and use so imperfectly those that we do know. - History's Greatest Experiment. Truly, injustices and suffering have long had a foothold here We have slums, we have unemploy-ment, unemploy-ment, we have crime. But we also have, a5 an excuse, the largest in-ternational in-ternational population that the world has ever seen; we are making history his-tory s greatest experiment in the amalgamation of races, and inciden-tally inciden-tally succeeding at it. It is inevitable that to the top of our great melting-pot scum shall arise. The laws of all the European Euro-pean countries are far from beins themame; U iS '0r US 10 reconc"e thf,7ica must tea us the lesson that Europe never has learned, that all these may live together in peace Meanwhile, if that hot-headed revol utionary boy of yours can be made to read the Declaration of Independ ence. the Constitution, the Bill nf Rights, and if you ask him temper ately and sympathetically what he and his new red friends want from their country that is not obtainable under these franchises. you w taking a great step to reduce all our little soattered disease spots of f r e.gn isms to our one grcat isni Americanism. lsm- |
