OCR Text |
Show Released by Western Newspaper Union. LUXURY OR LIBERTY? ANSWER IS EASY IN ORDER that we may win the war in which we are engaged, and so preserve our liberties, we must forego the luxuries we have learned to enjoy and to accept as necessities. necessi-ties. We can, and must, do without some things so that our armed forces may have guns, tanks, planes, ships and all other essentials essen-tials of modern warfare. Our grandfathers and grandmothers grandmoth-ers lived without electricity or gas, and some of them without kerosene for lights. Our grandmothers, most of them, did not know the luxury of a washing machine. They scrubbed the dirt from the family clothing on a washboard. Our grandmothers dried the apples from the family trees for the winter supply of fruit. They dried the corn for a winter vegetable. They used the well or a springhouse or a deep dugout in lieu of ice. For them the family cook-stove cook-stove provided the means of preparing prepar-ing food and the only heat the family fami-ly knew for the cold of winter. We, too, can, and will, go back to the primitive ways of our grandparents grand-parents in order to provide our armed forces with the essentials of victory. We can, and will, do without with-out electricity, gas, kerosene, washing wash-ing machines, refrigerators, home furnaces, canned fruits and vegetables, vegeta-bles, and all the many other things that, in these war times, are considered con-sidered luxuries. But there were some other things our grandfathers and grandmothers did without that we, too, could dispense dis-pense with as a means of providing war essentials. i In the days of our grandfathers and grandmothers, or in fact, as late as the days of our fathers and mothers, there were not close to two million people on the federal government's civilian payrolls, more than one and one-third million connected only with civil activities of the government. As late as 1913 the federal government collected as all taxes loss than three-quarters of a billion dollars. In 1940 it collected as taxes S5,5!Je,000,000. For our civil activities wc could do with the kind of government we had in 1913, and the approximately five billion dollars dol-lars saved would go far toward supplying sup-plying the war essentials for our armed forces. Even the two billions Senator Byrd and the Brookings Institution In-stitution say we could save in the civil activities of the government would pay for thousands of planes and guns and tanks and ships. POLITICAL DICKERING ON A MILITARY MATTER CONGRESSMAN WADSWORTH of New York is proposing a permanent perma-nent military training law for America Amer-ica which would put every American Ameri-can youth into a uniform for one year before he reaches his 21st birthday. From 1916 to 1919 an effort was made to enact just such a law. Congressman Wadsworth was then Senator Wadsworth and as chairman chair-man of the military affairs committee commit-tee of the senate, favored the bill and urged its enactment. I know the details because I was one of those responsible for the preparation prepara-tion of the bill and the effort to pass it. In 1919 we could get it through congress as introduced by a Republican Repub-lican member. President Wilson, however, told us he would veto it, if passed, unless it came to him as an administration measure, and advised ad-vised that the bill be withdrawn and a new one containing the same provisions pro-visions be introduced as an administration admin-istration measure by a Democratic member. That was done, and then a Republican senate and house would not pass it as a Democratic administration measure. Such is the "dog eat dog" attitude atti-tude of American politics. Our purpose in proposing such a law was more to preclude the rise of class distinction in America, than to train soldiers, but had it passed, America would have had not less than five million trained men, eligible eligi-ble for immediate service, when the Japs struck at Pearl Harbor. Intense In-tense partisanship prevented that. DOES HE REALLY KNOW? "CONDITIONS CREATED BY, or credited to, the war will not really real-ly tighten up until after the elections," elec-tions," said a congressman to me recently. He is a Republican congressman con-gressman and may not know the details de-tails of the program. Just to illustrate: illus-trate: Of several thousand bills passed by congress within the past two years, 19 were introduced by Republicans. THOUGHTS OF BOYHOOD OVER THE YEARS, since passing pass-ing from the stage of a boy in Iowa. I have often thought sympathetically sympathetical-ly of the boys in the towns and on the farms who must, as I did, cut red elm logs into stove lengths. Before Be-fore this coming winter is over, with its threatened shortage of fuel oil, it is possible that many a city boy would welcome red elm logs and an old wood burner as a means of keeping keep-ing warm. Buy War Bonds |