The Daily Alaska empire., 1941-04-14

favored building the armorleS and voted the. needed appropriations Five out of eight in the Senate c- Walker. Roden. Brownell, Nordale, LaBoyteaux. and ten out of 16 in the House Jenne. Mccormick, Egan McCutcheon. Lander, Her bert, Gordon, Lyng. Leonard Smith and Stangroom. By the treachery and deception of several House members one of whom. James V. Davis, used the Trojan horse de- vice of sponsoring the bill in order to defeat 1.-the measure was deliberately stalled, so that it could not reach the Senate until after the Both day, when. under the rules, a two-thirds vote was required and three votes out of eight sufficed to kill it.
 Aimcry Misrepresentation A good deal of misrepresentation about these arnories was propa- gated by the Lobby. As far as the public had an opportunity to- ex- press itself, it registered the atti- tude of patriotic Americans. The people of Nome. in a mass meeting. enthusiastically endorsed the ar mories and when Representative .Shattuck in an endeavor to bolster { up his opposition to them sent a ! wire to the Nome Chamber of
 Commerce asking it to follow the position taken by the Juneau i Chamber in disappearing the ar
 mories bill, he received meriteSi ! rubuke in message which said
 the Nome Chamber of Commerce did not care to oppose the "un- <, animous expression of the people of Nome, and added we realize
 with them the necessity and urgen- cy of cooperation with the Federal ! Government which is spending mil
 lions. Shall we be blinded by sell { fish interest and offer no sacrifice
 toward preparation to defend our
 homes?'
 Yet Cochran and Sullivan who
 owed their election chiefly to the
 people of Nome, did everything in l their power to delay, obstruct and [ finally to kill this national defense ' and civic measure
 l Chambers of Commerce are mo- tably conservative; they object to !, expenditures, often, in Alaska, it !, would seem, unwisely, when cer- tain expenditures are really com I munity investments which will : bring better living conditions, more
 business activity and more revenue to their towns But the fact is that a number of our Chambers of Com ,, merce are controlled by resident
 lobbyists, men whose one and only loyalty is to their absentee ein-
 ployers, whose patriotism is. only to their pocket book. Yet the
 Chambers of Ketchikan, Fairbanks and Nome all endorsed the armor- ies bill. Anchorage and Juneau did not, Juneau witnessed the depress-
 ing spectacle of one or two of it's leading citizens employing every
 means to defeat motion before the Chamber to support the only bill before the Legislature to build the afnories required Of course patriotism that consists merely in breast-beating and flag waving on holidays, but balks at single cent of expenditure, especially of his absentee clients, is the type which has made the rise of totalitarian- ism possible in the world. When Adolf Hitler, in one of his fre- quent sneers at. the free institu- tions of our world, declared, De mocracties are impotent while they talk, act; they value their I ease and wealth above all else he could have found here in Alaska recently confirmation of that caustic condemnation of democra- cies. Time Will Tell
 Time will prove him wrong. Neither Alaska nor any part of our beloved United States will be controlled by the penny -pinching pretended patriots, by. the lobby ists whose flag is the dollar sign and who at all times in their meth ods and morals are the enemies of the democratic process.
 Here in Alaska at the Fifteenth Session the Lobby told the people of Alaska. s..3
 You shall not have. additional funds for Vocational Education, :" And so no funds were voted
 The Lobby declared:
 You shall not have additional facilities for the University for the boys and girls who want to go there. You shall have no new struc- lures, and you must cut your funds for operation" And so the Univer- sity's budget was drastically re- dIIcad