National Reports
VOTAW, ALBERT N.
National Reports Old Guard Takes Over Illinois Legion By Albert N. Votaw Chicago Last year, the Illinois Department of the American Legion condemned the Girl Scouts. This year the venerable Don...
...His statement, which was answered by Breakstone, compensated in a sense for an earlier report by a Legion committee placing his stamp of approval on UNESCO...
...At the national Legion convention opening in Miami October 8, the two tendencies will in all probability be given a chance to fight it out over a motion to make Education For Freedom a national program...
...They are not the type of persons whom the majority here wanted because both are more international-minded, more UN-minded, more welfare-minded than the rank and file feel desirable," commented right-wing king-pin Charles V. Falkenberg...
...WASHOUT Financially-straitened cities, especially those situated on waterways, may find inspiration in the saga of Beardstown...
...A suggestion was made at the state convention that this gift be turned back, but it was hooted off the floor...
...Unfortunately, the bridge has been condemned, and, with the opening of new, high, toll-free bridge by the state, will be torn down...
...For it represented an attempt--some will say a last-ditch attempt--by the Old Guard to gain some sort of leverage to use against their triumphant opponents in the GOP and against the apparent defection of men like Stratton and...
...His material, he said, was sent to him by a "high Legion official...
...He heaped insult upon injury by bringing to address the convention in Springfield such notorious one-worlders as Governer G. Mennen Williams of Michigan and Harold Stassen, the Eisenhower appointee to posts of global import...
...This may be in part caused by the fact that he is himself up for re-election in 1956...
...Events in Miami may show whether the antics of the Illinois comrades or the report on UNESCO and Education For Freedom represent Legion thinking today...
...Labor Secretary Mitchell and Governor William Stratton addressed the official meet...
...In return for a change in procedure which would permit the post of commander to be held two years out of three by a downstater, the Abraham Lincoln group gained a convention majority for their political program...
...The report was carried 15 to 4. A quorum is 125...
...It is against this background that the state Legion convention must be viewed...
...The town fathers stood at the water's edge, lawyers at hand, and sued for damages--collecting some $35,858 last year over and above the tolls, enough for a street sweeper, parking meters and news street lights...
...The convention majority proffered this completely gratuitous and ill-mannered insult by refusing to name Irving Breakstone as chairman of the delegation to the national convention--a position to which he is by tradition and precedent entitled...
...Breakstone had incurred the enmity of the Legion Old Guard by clearing out the mossbacks from patronage posts in the state organization, supporting the UN and denouncing the antics of the stale anti-subversive commission...
...Traditionally the state commander is drawn alternately from the Chicago area and down-state...
...What this group did was make a deal with downstate elements...
...This year the venerable Don Quixotes of the anti-subversive brigades voted to withdraw from the United Nations, demanded yet another investigation of tax-exempt foundations and administered a resounding and unprecedented rebuke to their outgoing-state commander...
...A. V...
...His Fund for the Republic gave the Illinois program $50,000...
...That is, of course, a fairly common phenomenon...
...Breakstone, who made the program state policy, refers to it as "positive Americanism" and has taken the occasion to use it as an excuse for laying out against the wild men of anti-subversion...
...One of the casualties of the Springfield convention may very well be Education For Freedom...
...These last have proven, by the tactics used against Education For Freedom, that they have learned something from the Communists they investigate...
...Where Beardstown differed was that barges were constantly being slammed into the structure by the tricky currents...
...This is the outfit that achieved prominence of a sort last winter by holding a rival, anti-Eisenhower Lincoln Day dinner...
...This is a town-meeting type of program, originated by the American Heritage Council of Chicago, in which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are discussed and de-baled as if they were current proposals...
...Education For Freedom is the program that persuaded Robert M. Hutchins, of all people, to say kind words about the Legion...
...That very evening, by a strange coincidence, news commentator Fulton Lewis Jr...
...Lewis's broadcast provided the material for Legion national commander Seaborn Collins's subsequent blast at the Fund...
...Their report was kept from the floor of a pre-convention meeting of the Cook County Council until almost midnight, when there were only 19 comrades present...
...Senator Everett M. Dirksen attended both meetings, but he has since prayerfully called for the re-nomination of President Eisenhower...
...Falkenberg is also a bulwark of a Chicago group called the Abraham Lincoln Republican Club...
...devoted his program to an attack on the American Heritage Council and the Fund for the Republic...
...The effective repudiation of "positive Americanism" in its home state, however, is not calculated to advance the chances of those Legionnaires who are anxious to see their organization for once take a positive and constructive position in the community...
...This Illinois River community is blessed with a 56-year-old loll bridge which last year brought in $98,229 at 25 cents a head, even though the cost had been long since repaid...
...The Abraham Lincolniles heard such luminaries as Governor J. Bracken Lee of Utah (who called for a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans), Senators McCarthy and Ma-lone and then Representative Kit Clardy of Michigan, since retired by his constituency to obscurity...
...This committee queried neither the state Education For Freedom chairman, the state commander nor the American Heritage Council...
...First they set up a loaded committee to investigate the program...
...So has GOP House whip Leslie Arends, a downstate conservative who has recently been complaining that the Democrats are benefitting from the existence of "two Republican parties...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 40
