COL. KNOX WARNS BUSINESS MEN
Col. Knox Warns Business Men An EDITORIAL From THE CHICAGO DAILY NEWS SINCE Leland Stowe's historic dispatch revealing the details of the "inside job" perpetrated by the. Brown Burglars in Norway,...
...IT is easy to spot these elements of the fifth column...
...Two years ago there was a great commotion in some of the more easily stampeded parts of the country over the antagonistic ballyhoo of Herr Fritz Kuhn's Bund and Tovarish Browder's Reds Isn't that laughable today...
...But it is equally desirable that we have complete knowledge of the composition of the fifth column...
...Real Americans are willing to let a large part of the past slide over the dam of oblivion rather than let the nation slide to disaster...
...FROM all sides comes news of proposed activities against the fifth column in America...
...unfortunately for America, there are still some fatheads and screwballs in places of power...
...Today they are unusually conspicuous because of attitudes and utterances that seem to show that they would prefer to leave this country wide open to invasion rather than to support a national administration they do not like, even to the extent of co-operating with Washington for building up national defense Granted that the present administration has sinned against sound economics, baited business and harbored an army of alien-minded radicals in office, it is nevertheless the duty of patriots tc co-operate with any administration In taking measures to guard this country from Invasion and alien-engineered revolution...
...that no person of substance in this country could be longer deceived about the anti-capitalistic aims of Hitler and his plunderbund...
...Like other phrases that become intellectual shorthand, fifth column may be worked to death...
...As late as four years ago a number of American financiers and industrialists were indulging in that kind of talk in little private conferences...
...Nor is the public deceived as they go goose-step-pine alone a highway of psychopathic hatred that would lead u(, all to ruin if we followed them...
...In general that is a good idea...
...If ever Americans should be on the alert against sabotage, subversion and alienism, that time is now...
...It will not do to be kidded by mock activities of one fifth column gang against another fifth column gang...
...They are sympathizers with Hitler, who at one time constituted a not inconsiderable group...
...Those who hesitate and obstruct are operating as a fifth column, whether they think so or not...
...It was like that former praise of Mussolini for "making the Italian trains run on time...
...All of them are ready-made dupes of shrewd scoundrels who prey upon their fears by purveying Red scares and any sort of raw-head and bloody-bones tales of plots that will induce the scared sap to shell out liberally for "protection" in the form of detectives, "publicity" and the like...
...We now have new modes of treason, but these late editions didn't have to bt changed very' much —snakes have always been streamlined...
...One would think, after the well-known experience of Fritz Thyssen, "man without a countiy and capitalist without a capital...
...But it is even more important at this time to pay closer attention to a part of the fifth column that heretofore has maintained a status of perfect respectability...
...As a rule they are third or fourth generation inheritors of wealth and position, or stuffed shirts overwhelmed by egomania...
...Only the dumb clucks among leaders of finance and industry can persist in such illusions now, but...
...Since Adolf and Joe openly acknowledged that they were brother yeggs out to crack any crib that contained swag, no real American gives a hoot for hairsplitting pleas that Brown is not quite as red as Red...
...But there are unmistakable signs that there is a considerable survival of the notion that 'Hitler showed how to handle labor...
...Already there are signs that the term is being exploited by gangs and groups seeking profit from the world crisis regardless of national safety...
...Brown Burglars in Norway, the "fifth column" has become the most convenient collective term to describe treason in its characteristic 20th century forms...
...It is imperative to ferret out and restrain the better-known components of the fifth column such as Reds, professional trouble-markers and exploiters of alienism and unassimilated nationalistic groups, if the country is to be put in a proper posture of defense...
Vol. 10 • June 1940 • No. 22
