International Firecracker

Bright & early on the Fourth of July, the Madison (Wis.) Capital Times began a journalistic stunt calculated to prove that Red-baiting and loyalty investigations have cowed the American public. A reporter set out with a petition composed of excerpts from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights--addressed to no one in particular--and began trying to get picnickers and strollers to sign it. By dusk, after approaching 112 people, he had only one signer.

The stunt made a fine headline in the determinedly liberal Capital Times. But that was not the end of it. A fortnight ago in Detroit, President Harry Truman stretched the Madison incident to make his own point: "The doubters and defeatists . . . are trying to stir up trouble and suspicion between the people and their Government," he said. "This malicious propaganda has gone so far that on the Fourth of July . . . people were afraid to say they believed in the Declaration of Independence. . ."

This was too wonderful for Pravda to ignore. Attracted by the propaganda value of the President's words, Pravda ran a Madison Fourth of July story too. With a gloomy air of Slavic triumph, it implied that the whole thing proved that the U.S. --just as it had been predicting--is cooked. "What," it asked, "is left of the notorious American democracy after 175 years?"

Actually, whatever else the Madison incident proved, it showed that in citizens had simply exercised their American right to tell unidentified petition packers and lapel grabbers in general to go jump in the lake. The Declaration of Independence, after all, had already been signed.

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