Pouring It On

"What's the word for this trip?" asked newsmen of Harry Truman as he for three days of whistle-stopping in New England and New York. Answered the President: "Just wait and see."

What the people saw, from Hartford to Brooklyn, was Truman out-Trumaning himself. Upon Dwight Eisenhower he poured his most reckless abuse. Samples:

P: "[Eisenhower] in Illinois . . . talked a straight-out isolationist line ..."

P: "He stated that he knows a panacea to cure the situation in Korea ... If he knows a remedy, it's his duty to come and tell me what it is and save lives right now . . . This is simply playing a cheap and cruel hoax on the mothers and wives of our men in Korea . . . just what the Communists want . . ."

P: "He has compromised every principle of personal loyalty by abetting the scurrilous, big-lie attack on General George C. Marshall... I never heard of anything so awful as that in my life ..."

P: "He has endorsed ... a reign of terror by slander . . . the indiscriminate slaughter of the good name of one's opponents as a method of political warfare . . . His great crusade . . . like Cromwell's crusade, is ending up in the butchery of the reputations of innocent men & women . . ."

P: "[He] has . . .uttered crass equivocations designed to win the votes--and the contributions--of the Dixiecrat millionaires ..."

P: "[He] is spreading false and slanderous charges that the Democratic Party is soft on Communism . . . Fantastic . . . smear technique ..." II "The Republican Party and the Republican candidate have waged . . . one of the lowest street-gutter campaigns that I have ever seen ..."

Most savage denunciation of all was a message which the President of the U.S. sent on to be read at a Washington meeting of the Jewish Welfare Board. In it, Truman denounced the McCarran Immigration Act for discriminating against south and east Europeans in favor of north Europeans. This act was drafted by a Senate Committee headed by a Democrat, Pat McCarran. It was officially approved by Harry Truman's State and Justice Departments. After Truman vetoed it, an overwhelming majority of Republicans and Democrats passed it over his veto. The day before Truman's message,' Eisenhower had forcefully attacked the McCarran Act.* He said: "We must strike from our statute books any legislation concerning immigration that implies the blasphemy against democracy that only certain groups of Europeans are welcome on American shores." Yet Truman said: "The Republican candidate . . . cannot escape responsibility ... He has had an attack of moral blindness . . . He is willing to accept the very practices that identify the so-called 'master race.' "

* For another protest against McCarran Act, SEE SCIENCE.

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