Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
Where the News Ends By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN Bricks in Mail I'M ¦ contrary tort of person. I fairly revel In reading statements of opinion with which I profoundly disagree. No editor ever...
...Cancel my subscription immediately On the contrary, I am an unfailing news-stand sucker for issues of publication to my own views...
...Gertrude , Stein, E. E. Cummings and other erratic stylists should look to their laurels while this gentleman is at large...
...Aldridge expect him to praise the treatment there because German prisoneri were treated as badly at Austrians or Czechs...
...It is a familiar partyline prevarication that I am one of the standbys of Mr...
...For variety's aake I now quote a sentence written by a man who is brimming over with goodwill, but who'succeeds in perpetrating the longest, most rambling, incoherent collection of words\I have ever teen committed to paper without benefit of a period...
...Some of these, indeed, impress me as to funny that 1 am taking them out of a file labelled "Eccentric Lettert" and sharing them with my readers this week, "Tops" in this category is rated by an epistle with a Newark postmark...
...that their bread ration was at good at tas average Russian's, and that their clothes wars at good as the average Russian had...
...Now there is no fury like the cloistered professor enraged and the aforessid savant evidently wounded by some of my writings, took out his feelings in the following outburst, which I publish herewith so that all mey read and know the inner skeleton in my closet: "The pattern of Mr...
...Aldridge expected from the Poles in relation te concentration camps where great numbert ef their countrymen died of overwork and underfeeding lap...
...I opened the envelope with expectation...
...This looked pretty promising...
...And by the ssme token 1 get a distinct kick out of the more picturesque of the brickbats that come hurtling at me in the mails...
...What sort of political marihuana do they feed you...
...No editor ever received from me the missive of that familiar type: I don't like such and such an article in your last number...
...DUT I am very angry over a story from Moscow signed by James Aldridge and widely circulated by the North American Newspaper Alliance...
...They exactly represent the old and new ways of looking at social issues...
...This, to put it mildly, is quite an earful...
...that the wood was for themaelTOf...
...Petersburg to the Pacific ocean, how he spent his nights with the peasant* and good they were to him, read his articles in the most prominent magazine then published, the Century magazine it was, I was behind the counter waiting on trade at that time not quite twenty years of age, listened to the same traveler lecture on his trip later in our opera house at Coldwater, Michigan, now it happens I well know there is no such thing in Russia as communism, except the name of the controlling party, have treated as many 10 young mechanics who have worked in Russia setting up the machines we had sold them and one and all they were well pleased with all they saw while working there, also 1 have a medical friend who lias visited Russia three times...
...A new facing of realities may lead to new decisions...
...Hearst's organization, although, as t happens, I have never written a line for a Hearst newspaper in my life...
...In pencilled handwriting he scrswls over the envelope: Mr...
...Somehow not a single letter in my "eccentric" file has made me angry, although some were certainly written with pens and typewriters steeped in vitriol...
...Etc., etc...
...that Russian women cut weed also...
...and here is part of what I found: "Shameless, treacherous, subtle, villainous villain, who pays you extra for it...
...I pass this on for what it may be worth, with the observation that the picture of myself as a Parsifal or Sir Galahad is just as fictionary as many of the passages in a biographical work in which the aforesaid savant recently indulged one of his hobbies...
...The letter ended-not with a signature but with some mysterious cabalistic signs, apparently intended to strike terror into my heart by suggesting that the writer was a key man in a secret homicidal organization...
...Wilhelm der Crosse, Henry VIII, J'aime Berlin Chamberlin, Hearst's stooge poisoner...
...He breezily pitches in as follows: "What in the hell happens to all you scribes who squat in Moscow for a time...
...Justice Murphy wrote the opinion for the majority, and Justice Roberts is the author of the one which represents the dissenters...
...We are not here dealing," he continued, "with mere chattels or article* of trade, but with the rights of those who toil, of thot* who sacrifice a full measure of their freedom and talents to the use and profits of others...
...I wonder just what attitude of rapturous enthusiasm Mr...
...His attack ta a group of helpless uprooted refugees is a clear winner, ao far at I am concerned, In any contest for tht meat despicable news meaaages of 1944...
...The author modestly conceals his identity...
...Then follow* a graphic and moving description of the men with bodies huddled spoon-fashion and heads drawn below the level of skip tops as they are lowered into th* malodorous shafts.- "Broken ribs injured arms »nd legs and bloody heads often result...
...Then my critic goes on with some phoney figures and facts which proye, to his satisfaction, that bolshev-ism is all the work of the Jews, berates me for concealing this circumstance and endt with the resounding threat...
...Here, for a change, is an abuser who finds me pro-Soviet, a cover-up man for Stalin, a participant in the plots of the Wise Men of Zion...
...You subtle poisonous rat, the hour of reckoning si.all surely arrive when you'll be squaring your bills...
...If I had more time 1 could describe the charitable critics who recommend the Dean of Canterbury's books as a cure for my lamentable blindness about Russia, the less charitable ones who darkly insist that I am bought and beyond redemption, the satellites of a California lady of great wealth, good heart and limited intelligence, whom she apparently sicced on me like household canines because I had written what I considered a goodnatured kidding article about the aforessid lady...
...that the clothing they got was terrible...
...Noble aspirations in the young are most commendable, imitation heroics may even be tolerable for a very short time...
...1917, 1920 and 1»23...
...pose an Austrian or a Czech should escape frost Dachau...
...Justice Murphy speaks clearly against a narrow and grudging interpretation of the law...
...Justice Murphy, on the contrary, sets down the fact that judges cannot be "guided by any precise statutory definition of work or employment...
...That is, he sticks to the notion that precedents are decisive...
...There'll come a time 111 reveal my identity, but these lines might be misunderstood by those your writing hsd predestined to temporary blindness and ignorance...
...Aa IsUterial— ^ The Supreme Court Looks at Life 1 AST Monday the Supreme Court gave us perfect examples of two approaches to social problems...
...In a world where so much goet wrong, this document stands out as a shining victory for human decency...
...The theories snd substance of the two documents are perfect exhibits...
...Chamberlin's mind has been obvious for a long time...
...Here goes: "Reading your article in June Atlantic Monthly gives me the idea, that you look on the present Government of Russia as communistic, hope 1 am mistaken seeing you are a world traveller and well posted as a writer but it happens I have been interested in Russia ever since Jules Vern made a trip across Russia from what was th*fn called St...
...THE "eccentric letters" 1 have quoted so far were all written by distinctly angry men...
...The climax of prejudice and absurdity in the message is reached in the following paragraphs: "Everyone of them would talk about nothing else except the terrible time they had had in Russia____ A large number of aaiddleclasa girla were vets good «t this...
...In the future your /tuition Enigma may never achieve the distinction of being a textbook, which will be the obscurity and ignomity it deserves...
...J'aime Berlin) <My unknown correspondent is rather inordinately proud of this linguistic wisecrack...
...fJJOMEWHAT subtler, but equally amusing wSs the expressir- of opinion by an American savant whose favorite sidelines are the circulation of Stalinite apologetics and he alleged promotion of national morale...
...Aldridge is obviously the kind of person whose sense of humanitarian values could only be aroused if he were set to cut wesd in a nice cold Soviet concentration camp on a daily ration of fifty grams of bread himself...
...Etc., etc...
...would Mr...
...In a 7 to 2 decision the justices laid down the rul* that certain Alabama iron mining companies muat pay their workers from the time when they bid farewell to daylight to the moment when they return to it...
...Chamberlin set out as a noble young man to expose evil, denounce the wicked and reform the world—a rather large task but characteristic of aspiring youth...
...One reason doubtless is that not one of the epistles conveyed the impression of being composed by a first-rate mind...
...Berlin...
...The pattern is a quite common one, known to every student of elementary psychology...
...that they got only fifty grains of bread a day...
...It is not to b* taken for granted that all old ways and customs »r* to l>e maintained...
...They complained that they had see* pat into concentration camps In Russia, that they had been sent out in winter to cat wood...
...Persons who gratuitously recommend others to the care of a psychiatrist would perhaps benefit in some cates by trying that remedy themselves...
...Well, it.it hard to suit everyone...
...It is a simple rase of retarded development, of immaturity trying to appear grown-up and important...
...and one which very readily yields to the ministrations of the psychiatrist where there is no organic deficiency...
...When you questioned them, as a rule they admitted that the camps were clean...
...How is it you all 'go soviet' so easily...
...Justice Roberts, who ia personally a fine, human* person, opens with this revelation of his basic theory: "The question for decision in this rase should b* approached not on the basis of any broad humanitarisa prepossessions we may all entertain, not with a desire to construe legislation so as to act omplish, what we deem worthy objects, but in the traditional and . . . essential attitude of ascertaining what Congress has enacted rather than what We wish it had enacted" later on the Justice goes beyond the language of th* Wages and Hours Act and depends on ideas current or derisions rendered in 1903...
...1928 first, then again in 1934 and the last lime 1939 he is a prominent surgeon located in Toledo, Ohio, and he also assured me the only communism to be found in Russia was the name of the ruling party headed by Stalin...
...even fatalities »r* not unknown...
...From the first word to the last it is a vicious tirade against the Polish refugees who survived the experience of deportation and forced labor in the Soviet I'nion and reached Iran...
...Mr...
Vol. 27 • April 1944 • No. 14
