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Show Released by Western Newspaper Union. MEANINGLESS WORDS-LANGUAGE WORDS-LANGUAGE OF BUREAUCRATS WORDS, UNINTELLIGIBLE, MEANINGLESS words have been a major product of the federal government gov-ernment bureaus and departments as far back as I can remember, and that is quite some years. During the years when the administrative admin-istrative government consisted, primarily, pri-marily, of cabinet departments, before be-fore we were afflicted with the innumerable in-numerable bureaus, administrations, administra-tions, corporations and what have you of today, the treasury and agricultural agri-cultural departments were the chief producers of imponderable verbiage. The treasury could so I tangle its instructions to the tax payer pay-er that his only solution in making mak-ing out a tax return was to employ a high-priced expert who might understand the meaning of the law if he did not understand the treas- i ury's instructions. In the agricultural department there were then, and are now, employed em-ployed agricultural experts whose 1 province was that of making two stalks of grain grow where only one had been growing, and telling the farmer how to accomplish the same result. On each subject they covered cov-ered they wrote a long winded treatise treat-ise which no farmer, including the thousands who held college degrees, could understand. They were printed in large quantities and stored in warehouses in Washington, subject to such call as farmers might make, if any. ; It was, as I remember, about 1909 that I, as editor of a syndicate syndi-cate service used by country newspapers, news-papers, conceived the idea of inducing in-ducing the agricultural department to have the real facts, buried in the verbiage of each of the thousands thou-sands of pamphlets and brochures, interpreted into a short statement, expressed in simple English, to be used in these country newspapers. It took four years of insistent urging, and a change in administrations, adminis-trations, to secure a result. At the end of four years, the bureau of information of the department depart-ment of agriculture was organized or-ganized with George Wharton in charge. The personnel of the bureau consisted of Wharton and two assistants, all capable newspaper news-paper writers. By interviewing the experts, rather than through reading, they did a good job, and through them much valuable valua-ble and understandable information informa-tion reached American farmers, with the country press as the medium of distribution. It continued contin-ued until after the establishment of the county agent system, which brought scientific farm methods, applicable to each farm, directly to the farmer. The bureau of information, greatly great-ly enlarged in personnel, still exists, but I do not know what function func-tion it now performs. The department depart-ment issues a year book, an expensive expen-sive publication for which the tax payer has been paying for many years, and of which many thousands thou-sands of copies are printed. The last one issued in 1942 again demonstrates demon-strates the need of trained interpreters. inter-preters. Of its content covering many farm subjects, there is practically prac-tically no one treatise that -can be understood by either the farmer or the county agent. Its several hundred hun-dred pages are filled with the same type of imponderable verbiage that characterizes instructions from the treasury, the OPA, WFA, WMPA, WLB and countless others of the bureaus, administrations- and corporations cor-porations whose job it is to tell us what to &d and how to do it. Words, unintelligible, meaningless words, are the bureaucrat's ammunition, ammu-nition, a war product of which there is no evident shortage. It is not new. The present is but a many times magnified replica of what was produced in the past. IF THEY REALLY WANT a job that would be helpful to the people that Un-American activities committee com-mittee of the house might investigate investi-gate many of the regulations issued by OPA and others of the Washington Wash-ington bureaucracy. If the committee commit-tee could do nothing more than interpret these instructions it would be more than the farmer, processors and distributors have been able to accomplish. They are certainly un-American un-American and a proper subject for that committee. A PART OF THE PROPOSED compulsory military training can, and should, be a schooling in the working and operations of the American government. Familiarity with government makes for better citizenship. Better citizens make better soldiers. VERBAL OR WRITTEN PROTEST PRO-TEST is an American privilege, disobedience dis-obedience of the law is not. We may write or speak against the moving In of what we consider undesirable neighbors. When they do move in we may decline to be neighborly, to loan or borrow across the back fence. That is our privilege. To do violence to the person or property of that neighbor is a violation of law, and is not our privilege, whether the neighbor be white, black, red or yellow. There is nothing to prevent our moving out if we If'-' I |