Whipping the Doom Criers

Since the nation was not doomed to economic collapse last week, Republicans decided that it was time to challenge Democrats who cried that it was. The voices of the doom criers heard in the land warned that 1) the Republicans were courting a depression, and 2) if it came, they wouldn't know how to cope with it.

Four Horsemen. Republican Chairman Leonard W. Hall hurled the first gauntlet in the presence of his national committee, which assembled in Washington in honor of Abraham Lincoln, the G.O.P.'s centennial and the opening of the 1954 election campaign. "I sometimes wonder," said Hall, warming to his assignment, "whose interests these left-wingers think they are serving by their incessant talk of slump, recession and depression." Hall said that they were silent in 1950, when unemployment was double what it is now.

Then he got down to cases: "What motivates Walter Reuther? What prompted Adlai Stevenson's 'fear' speech? Could Senator Paul Douglas be worried about election year? . . . Just what is Wayne Morse and his one-man party contributing to the welfare of the country? Yet, this quartet rides like the Four Horsemen, spreading gloom and doom across the land . . . The left wing in America regards a depression as its one-way ticket into power."

Fear Deal or Fumble. The President of the U.S. entered the fray in a vigorous political speech at a G.O.P. rally in Washington's Uline Arena, took his cue from the heritage of Lincoln: "Let us not be afraid to be humble as he was humble when it was necessary . . . When it comes down to [preserving] this nation . . . let us be just as courageous as Lincoln was courageous."

Dwight Eisenhower exhorted his party to be liberal in dealing with people, but in dealing with the people's money, to be conservative. "And don't be afraid to use the word," he advised sternly.

The Republican Party, he went on, "is the best political instrument available in this country" for making certain that every individual American has the opportunity to make of himself what he can, with the Federal Government acting as a sympathetic big brother. By following President Lincoln's example, the President said, We "don't have to listen to the prophets of gloom who say that we are going to go into a kind of stumble or fumble or fall."

The assault was sustained the next day by White House Chief of Staff Sherman Adams, who told the Republican National Committee: "The attempt by these political sadists . . . to talk this country into a depression [is a] perniciously evil device [for] attempting to destroy the confidence of the people in our Government . . . It should be recognized . . . [as] the 'fear deal.' "

This week House Democratic Leader Sam Rayburn, stung by the G.O.P. attack, lashed back. Said Mister Sam: The attacks on Democrats by men in high administration circles were "mean, untrue and dastardly."

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