The Wilmington morning star., 1947-12-02
Time To Relax

| The American people seem to be devel-
oping a rather bad case Of the jitters. AS
sample of what we mean here is the
gist of four stories taken from one days
news-not an exceptional day for this kind
of news, either.
Rep Tom Jenkins of Ohio introduced a
bill to ban immigration and visitors per-
mits to citizens of Russia and Russian
dominated countries. 1t would also keep
out officials of countries that won't let
|lAmerican officials in.
\ Another Ohio legislator, Cliff Clevinger,
said that our occupation troops should be
| Withdrawn from exposed positions in Eu-
| rope. He said that soldiers, whom he met
| there last summer, told him they didn't
expect to get out alive, and that high
ranking officer predicted open warfare by
November.
i A former United States Chamber of
Commerce economist wrote that Russia
has secret gold hoard which she may use
to fight the Marshall Plan and which-if
she doesn't spend it, apparently-might be
bigger than our cache at Fort Knox in
another 20 years.
America is in a state of undeclared
emergency, said Maj.-Gen Manton Eddy,
the Armys information chief On the one
hand, our peoples minds are being poi
soned against our own institutions and gov
ernment he declared On the other, there
is a threat of future armed conflict
Such jittery talk makes us wonder if we
shouldn't all try to relax. Not relax our
vigilance, our intelligent efforts to
strengthen our country, our attempt to
meet our real problems realistically. But
declare moratorium on the present prac-
tice of seeing burglars under every bed.
After all, we're a big, strong country.
Maybe we're not as strong as we ought
to be. But we still haven't had a good
share of our best farm land turned into
a battlefield. We haven't had any industrial
cities leveled by bombs. We aren't plagued
by dangerously low living standard. We
don't have a dictatorship so unsure of its
perfection that it has to advertise it
constantly. In short, we aren't Russia.
This is not discounting the man-sized job
cut out for the American people and their
government. There is a real crisis in Eu-
rope which is up to us to silve. There is
small but potentially dangerous Com
munist menace here at home. There is the
grave problem of keeping the United Ma
tlons alive and working in spite of Soviet
obstruction.
But hysteria won't help us do the job,
and hysterla seems to be the state that
our national thinking is approaching That
state is particularly apparent in our Con.
gress. Its members squan 9r their time
chasing small red butterflies, to the neg
lect of bigger game.
Our armed forces are below their des-
|lgnated peacetime strength. Nothing has
been done about universal military train
ing, though the President and the Chief
lof Staff have urged it, and all polls show
1.-THE public strongly in favor of it. Our con-
gressmen are too busy cunning for Red
scrip-writers on the Hollywood lots, OF
drafting bills to repel Hungarian immi-
grants from our shores.
All this doesn't add up to a firm atti-
tude toward Russia. Frmness implies
strength and self-control We are beginning
to advocate some rather dictatorial means
of safeguarding our democracy.
Let us remember that the Russian gov
eminent, with all it's problems must be
scared-scared of our strength and of a
cooling world opinion, and worried about
the failure of its big push in France and
Italy to come off. That fear is very likely
at the root of the ranting attacks on Amer
ican policy.