Taxes & Truth (Cont'd)

With a blizzard of pamphlets, dodgers, press releases, charts, pictures and displays, the Republican National Committee lately set out to rouse the nation's ire against taxes, make President Roosevelt the butt of that resentment (TIME, Sept. 14). One of its brightest ideas about dramatizing "the Roosevelt New Deal Party's taxation raids on the family pocketbook'' involves the use of blackboards and butchers. The National Committee's blackboards, promised but not yet generally in use, have space for three columns of figures. The butcher chalks up his prices as follows:

Price Taxes Total

HAM 30-c- + 5-c- = 35-c-

Last week a stumbling block was placed in the National Committee's way when Attorney General Cummings warned that its blackboard users might be prosecuted for violating a Federal law. The law, an obscure one passed in 1918, states that anyone may be fined $1,000 and imprisoned for one year, if, in making a sale or lease, he ascribes any part of the price to a Federal tax. The Attorney General, who said his warning had been provoked by about a dozen complaints from the Midwest against Republican tax propaganda, had never heard of anyone being prosecuted under the law. He did not know whether it applied to filling stations and theatres, which regularly list taxes separately in advertising their prices. Nor did he really expect to do anything about the Republicans unless they provoked him to it. "The Department of Justice," he declared, "does not want to be drawn into any controversy that it can avoid that has any partisan significance."

In response to this gentle warning, the Republican Committee let out a full-throated bellow. "The Republican National Committee," it roared, "will welcome a few prosecutions, instead of just intimidating propaganda designed to scare people, to stop them from talking about high taxes imposed by the New Deal. . . . What is the Department of Justice going to do to Governor Alfred M. Landon? At Buffalo he said that people paid 2-c- taxes on every loaf of bread."

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