New Approaches

Congressman John Elliott Ranlcin of Mississippi, who hopes to succeed his late, filibustering Tweedledee, Theodore Bilbo, in the Senate, let go a memorable tweedledum as he promised to carry on the filibustering. "A filibuster is legitimate," said he, "when it is legitimate."

Clement Attlee, opening an educational center as a memorial to oldtime Fabian Socialist Beatrice Webb, hoped aloud that the place would not be full of radio and gramophone music. "One of the hardest things at this time," observed Britain's much-criticized Prime Minister, now deep in hard times, "is to get some quiet to speak."

Designer Christian Dior, who claims to have brought about the fall of the hemline, told an inquiring Los Angeles reporter that the cocktail-gown neckline should be "low enough to be attractive, but not low enough to be indecent."* Just where is that boundary? "That," philosophized Designer Dior, "is a philosophical question."

"Europe has shrunk," observed Poet Stephen Spender in Manhattan. "It is now only a small nose on a vast body which is Asia." He turned to the subject of writing. "Journalism," said he, "has a way of killing the creative writing in a man, because . . . you have to put more and more of your thoughts into your articles, in a simplified form. . . . Soon you find you're producing a kind of perpetual Reader's Digest of yourself."

"Coldblooded murder" was Randolph Churchill's phrase for the execution of the top Nazis. Winston's far-flinging lecturer-son was now talking in Australia. "They were not hanged for starting the war but for losing it," he pursued. "If we tried the starters, why not put Stalin in the dock?" But he was not afraid of the Russians, said Randolph. "The people who scare me are the British and Americans, who . . . are now letting all they won slip through their butter-fingers."

Rosika Schwimmer, famed war-to-war pacifist (who persuaded Henry Ford to send his "Peace Ship" to Europe in 1915), turned 70 in Manhattan, plumped for world government, laid the blame for war: "Men, women, young people, old people, capital, labor, militarists, churches, educators, scientists," said she, "accuse each other for causing and keeping up the war system they all proclaim to hate. They are all wrong and equally guilty. . . ."

* Copied from an original model by Herbert Bayard Swope.

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