Clouts from Clergymen

In Washington one day last week New Jersey's Representative Charles Aubrey Eaton sat down at his House desk, began ruffling through the mail piled up during his vacation. Opening a letter from the White House, he stared for a moment, then crowed with delight. White-thatched Representative Eaton, a Baptist minister from 1893 to 1919, has since 1925 been an ardently Republican member of the House, distinguished of late for his persistent heckling of New Dealers. The White House letter, addressed to "the Rev. Charles A. Eaton," was a copy of President Roosevelt's famed appeal to the nation's clergymen, asking their "counsel and advice," inviting them to "tell me where you feel our Government can better serve our people" (TIME, Oct. 7).

In high glee Representative Eaton summoned reporters, prepared to whisk off to the White House as his "counsel and advice" a copy of the resolution which he introduced in the House last session. This resolution invited the President to address a joint Congressional session and "explain why the solemn covenants and pledges made with the people in the Democratic national platform of 1932 and by himself as the Democratic nominee . . . have been broken."

That the White House had blundered in composing President Roosevelt's letter to the clergy became painfully plain when it was discovered that his secretariat had plagiarized almost word-for-word from an appeal sent to Wisconsin pastors last March by Governor Philip Fox La Follette. That the secretariat had muffed the preparation of a mailing list of "representative clergymen" was revealed not only by the Eaton incident but by a Kansas City preacher who announced that twelve copies of the letter had reached his church, one for every pastor who had ever tended the flock. That President Roosevelt himself had made a serious political mistake in ever having the invitation for "counsel and advice" sent out seemed pretty much of a fact last week. Instead of the mild, private benisons which he might reasonably have expected, the President has publicly received during the month an astonishing series of personal and official clouts as peppery clergymen leaped into print with their replies. Excerpts:

>The Rev. William E. Lampe of Philadelphia: When a man spends so much time bringing back the saloon, pays so little attention to divorce and domestic disorder in his own family and attends worship so seldom, has he a right to expect the wholehearted support of the church?

>The Rev. Ira M. Hargett of Kansas City: I suggest that you cease having political powwows on the Sabbath Day, such as you have had recently; that you cease making the Sabbath a holiday for boating and fishing and that you attend church regularly as an example to the young men of our nation. . . .

>The Rev. Howard Fulton of Chicago: Why should the clergy waste time in seeking to advise a man on social security legislation who has ruthlessly broken his campaign promises, discarded his platform and repudiated the Constitution which he swore to protect, uphold and defend? . . .

>The Rev. John Thompson of Chicago: I feel that the killing of pigs and the burning of cotton was a sin before God and a crime against civilization.

>Rabbi Samuel Schulman of Manhattan: The common sense of the people is bewildered by the tremendous increase of the expense of government. . . . The business sense of the people is timid. . . . The sense of the American people for the spiritual values of the American heritage is disquieted. There is a feeling that we are drifting from the spirit of American institutions. . . .

>The Rev. Ethelbert D. Warfield of Chambersburg, Pa.: This community . . . now labors under a misgovernment not very much less than that which drove the ancestors of this population from their native lands.

>The Rev. Robert I. Wilson of Kansas City: The Administration's seeming intent to act on the principle that all successful business is crooked, we object to. . . . Your administration has . . . contributed to the decay of self-reliance and self-respect. . . . It has undermined confidence with its failure to keep a single campaign promise.

>The Rev. David M. Steele of Philadelphia: If you had half the understanding I have of the people, you would hang your head in shame at what you have done to them. You and your Administration have utterly ruined them. . . .

>The Rev. Joseph M. Dawson of Waco, Tex.: I object to the President's lead in moral liberalism which has inundated the country in debauching liquor and brought on a high wave of gambling and laxity in home life.

>The Rev. Edgar C. Lucas of Augusta, Ga.: In reply to your inquiry relative to recently enacted legislation. . . . Those who favor it . . . are those who profit by it. Those who are indifferent are so in ratio to their ignorance of what is happening. Those who oppose it do so because they . . . are cognizant of what is going on. . . . I wonder about the social security of any or all of us when the Government penalizes thrift, ability and industry; and seems to place a premium on extravagance, the shiftless, the mentally, physically and morally unfit. . . . I wonder concerning your place in history, Mr. President. Will your place in history be that of the first President . . . to raid the public Treasury for campaign funds with which to overthrow the very form of government by which you were raised to power?

Along with many another divine, President John Timothy Stone of Chicago's Presbyterian Theological Seminary publicly disdained even to reply to the President's appeal. Snorted he: "What I am going to do for the President is to pray for him, because he needs it. It is the President's business to know how to run the nation and not the clergy's."

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