THE EDITOR RESERVES THE LAST COLUMN
The Editor Reserves . . . The Last Column JOE BALL REVERTS TO TYPE WHEN Joe Ball, a medium-good St. Paul, Minn., newspaper man, was handed a seat in the U. S. Senate a few years ago by his...
...In the days when the lib-labs were trying hard to pretend that the only test of liberalism was a yearning for war and interna 'onalism, Joe Ball, representing the Tory interests of Minnesota, was palmed off as a great liberal...
...Robert Wagner of New York...
...M.H.R...
...Bingay pondered the fact that Hitler was supported and financed by the same reactionary crowd, American-style, which fights democratic progress here at home, and he recalled, too, that Hitler had the backing of "capital and business leaders of other nations: England, France, and the United States...
...The refrain of the German people, "We did as we were told," is too often the refrain of the American people when a Boss Hague or a Ku Klux Klan rises to power and meets either indifference or acquiescence on the part of great masses of people...
...he asks, *T do not know...
...Harold Stassen, he turned up in Washington with a trunk full of anti-labor bills...
...While the measure was piously advanced as representing the best features of the Railway Labor Act, Labor, official organ of the Brotherhoods, promptly and vehemently castigated the bill as an attack on the hard-won rights of organized labor...
...that Germany had 80 million people crowded into an area much smaller than Texas, and that the Nazis could apply the Boss Hague-Al Capone methods, while the vastness of America precludes such efficiency in destroying opposition...
...A distinguished exception was Malcolm W. Bingay, editorial director of the Detroit Free Press...
...Nor do I know, as I look over America, how deep is purs...
...Yes, I found in the hell that once was Germany, an indictment of my own beloved America," Bingay reported...
...The only difference between what happened in Germany and what could happen in America is that the Germans, for countless generations, have learned to obey while we have not...
...Last week Ball bounced back into the news—as the co-author with Sens...
...Here in free America, with our great tradition of freedom and tolerance, the Ku Klux Klan had 5,100,000 members in its hey-day after World War I. "There are men in high places today who gave the same excuse for joining it as the German civilians now give for Nazi membership: They thought it good business and good politics...
...I have a melancholy hunch that the boys who diluted the meaning of liberalism and handed the badge of progressiv-ism to everyone who wanted war before war was thrust upon us, will discover in the days ahead that Ball's reversion to type is only the first of many to come...
...Bingay was just as horrified at the enormity of Nazi persecutions as his colleagues, and just as shocked at the acquiescence of the German people in the brutalities of their leadership...
...But this editor was not so sure that the crime of Germany was unique in Germany...
...The great debate over foreign policy and later America's entry into the war put a damper on Ball's plans to "reform" the New Deal's labor program to death, but the patient Minnesotan bided his time...
...When he jumped his own party to support Franklin D. Roosevelt last year, he made it clear that he was making the flip-flop only on the issue of foreign policy...
...But so great was the build-up for Ball (and his B2H2 associates) as great liberals that it is difficult for many a person who relied on the publications of the lib-labs to understand how so shining a knight in liberal armor can be discovered with his spear in labor's back...
...In the interim he blossomed out as a rampant internationalist—and soon was taken up by the Eastern lib-labs, the well-meaning but slightly nutty crowd of somersaulting liberals who had become the panting errand boys of Mars...
...Paul, Minn., newspaper man, was handed a seat in the U. S. Senate a few years ago by his friend, the then Gov...
...How deep is the guilt of the German people...
...The fact is, of course, as The Progressive has tried so often to point out, that Ball was never a liberal...
...Bingay's powerful article is no plea for a whitewashing of the German people, but rather an eloquent reminder that a policy of drifting and indifference plays into the hands of the forces of repression and reaction in all countries—America as well as Germany...
...Although labor is split deeply on many issues, it is completely united in opposition to the Ball-Burton-Hatch anti-labor bill...
...A DISTINGUISHED EXCEPTION NINETY-NINE per cent of the American editors who were chaperoned through a tour of the Nazi torture chambers and concentration camps a month or so ago came back to perform the same chore—write a series of violent diatribes against the German people as a whole for permitting such bestial activities by their government...
...Burton and Hatch (see Page 3) of a so-called "industrial peace" bill bitterly denounced by every branch of organized labor—the CIO, the AFL, the Railroad Brotherhoods, and the United Mine Workers—and by such proven friends of labor as Sen...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 27
