RADIO

The Third United States Congress Against War and Fascism opens its sessions with a public mass meeting tonight at 8 o'clock in Cleveland's Public Auditorium. This Congress is bringing together more than 4000 delegates from all over America representing peace organizations, labor and of unions, fraternal groups, societies of young people, Negro, Jewish, and other racial minority groups. Tonight these assembled delegates and those people of Cleveland and vicinity who accept the invitation of the Congress to attend the mass meeting, will listen to a number of distinguished speakers including General Smedley Butler, Rabbi Brickner, and Bishop Edgar F. King Blake. These speakers will comment upon the trying conditions of the world today and upon the need in America for a strong people's movement against War and Fascism.

All of us know the meaning of the word War, although perhaps many of us do not understand grasp the full extent of its undertones of pain and death, brutalization and savagery. And perhaps many of us do not clearly visualize what modern warfare with its bombing planes and its poison gases can mean. People now won't have to go out to the fields of battle with flags flying and bands playing to die gloriously (if it ever was gloriously for the sake of posterity of their country. They won't even have to put on uniforms. They won't even have to be men---they can be women and children. And you can stay at home and let the bombs fall on you, as they did on London during the Great War; or you can sense the poison gas creeping under you doorsills as it creeps through the cracks of houses in Eastern Africa today. Then you'll be dead, right at home, killed or wounded with bits of bomb shells in your body, or your lungs burned with poison gas, or your nerve cells rotting away. More than likely, you won't have to march anywhere to die in the next war---if war is what we want. And the privilege of dying will be extended to civilians as well as to members of the armed

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forces.

But the possibilities of a war to come, dangerously real as they
they may be, can only develope into reality if the present military and
by indifferent public sentiment
Fascist trends now current in America are permitted to gain momentum and
power. One of the purposes of the Congress Against War and Fascism in
meeting this requirement, is to point out clearly to the American people what
these trends are. Here on the air, I can only mention various of these
trends which will be gone into in detail at the Congress, for instance
the ever increasing expenditures being made in this country for war purposes,
in the face of schools that close for lack of funds and people who still go
hungry for lack of food.

War Budgets

C.C.C. Camps

Jingo Press

Military training

Markets abroad

Colonies

Munitdons lobbies

These militaristic tendencies which are most evident in American life
today are furthered and encouraged by methods and tactics which can best
be described by borrowing a once-European word and applying it here, namely
Fascist. Fascism means the attempt to impose the wishes of one
group of people in a country upon all the inhabitants of the country. And
aiding in this attempt one always finds a subsidized and controlled press
printing propaganda and not truth. That we have in America a large number
of newspapers that use every means in their power to propagate jingoistic
military ideas, and at the same time to stir up and encourage force and
violence against persons or organizations who do not agree with them, no-
body can deny. These same newspapers in their new treatments and edito-
rials, openly condone the use of mob violence and military violence against
American workmen who strike or organize to protect the rights of labor.

That violence and intimidation has been used against American laborers
on strike in this country no one can deny who has read of the Alabama coal
miners strike, the Ohio onion pickers strike, the West Coast Steevendor

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attempts to better their living conditions. The methods used in opposing these American workers, and used oftimes with official state and governmental sanction, can only be described by the use of that-once European word which Mussolini brought into vogue, Fascism.

The treatment of Negroes in America, and particularly in our Southern states where lynchings and mob violence have long been allowed to rage uncontrolled, and where due process of law has often been denied Negro prisoners, and where all over America/economic barriers has been placed before the Negro workingman solely on account of race, such treatment, although of long standing---but in recent years increasing prevalent and spreading over Northern areas where it was not known before, such treatment can also be classed as a kind of Fascist outcropping in American that works harm not only to the Negro but to the whole fabric of American democracy.

The alarming rate at which the tendencies toward force and violence and the propagation of such tendencies by reactionary newspapers in America, is growing clearly indicates the need of orderly and steady action against these things. The Congress Against War and Fascism seeks to find a way of opposing all those forces in American life which tend toward a pattern of conduct and of living entirely at variance with the broad ideals of American democracy.

Then speakers tonight in the Public Auditorium, will attempt to bring out much more fully than I have here been able to do, the many varying phases of the aspects of War and Fascism which today face the people of these United States. General Smiley Butler is. They represent many branches of social life in America, religion, education, culture, and even the military. Among the outstanding names on the program are those of Dr. Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary in New York. Dr. Ward is well known as an author and thinker, and is a leader of modern religious thought.

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Another name on the program, Bishop Edgar F. Blake, resident bishop of the Detroit area has a long liberal tradition in the Methodist Church. During the world war he was Resident Bishop in Paris where he was actively opposed to that titanic slaughter, and KILL has since continued in his opposition to war in this country. He is one of the great churchmen of America.

From the Cleveland, we have Rabbi Barnett R. Brickner, foremost liberal and important leader in the fight against Fascism; Max Hayes, editor of the organ of the American Federation of Labor in Cleveland, whose voice is one of the most influential in labor circles.

Another speaker whose arrival in Cleveland has greatly attracted the attention of press and public and whose voice will be heard tonight is Major General Smedley D. Butler, formerly of the United States Marines, who since his retirement has devoted his time and energies to awakening the American people to the fact that, as to use his own words, "war is a racket."

The Congress will be greeted by Mayor Harold H. Burton, new head of the city of Cleveland. The time is 8 p.m. this evening. The place, the Public Auditorium. The subject of vital importance to every American citizen.

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War budgets increase at an alarming rate every year, until today we annually a far greater expenditure of funds for war-purposes than we ever had before, even in times of war. One third of every dollar you pay for taxes goes for the building of a larger navy, and this is only a part of America's vast out-put for militarization.

Throughout the nation in the schools and colleges of this country, more than a hundred and forty thousand youth are being taught to kill and be killed in the R.O.T.C. units. Add to this the number of youth who are in the C.C.C. camps which according to Harry Woodring, Assistant Secretary of War, *in ximnour* are camps where jobless young men are being trained in the use of instruments of slaughter and are to be used as reserves in time of war and crisis at home--add to this, I say, the number of youth who are in these camps and you have some idea of the rapid pace with which the militarization of the young people of this country is being carried on.

What is the purpose of this intense militarization? Has America any real fear of invasion from abroad? Is not the answer rather that we have colonies and world markets to maintain which supply profits to a select?

And how are these select few able to work their will? Through highly financed munitions lobbies, that is one way. These powerful munitions lobbies are able to disrupt peace conferences, to abort dis-armament conferences, and to secure the action of favorable legislation. Of no less importance in encouraging war and in exploiting the emotions of the people, is the jingo press--those yellow sheets which are constantly calling for bigger navies, bigger armies, bigger air forces, and which raise the war scare at every turn, while at the same time they denounce every effort of the American working man to raise his standard of living for honest labor.

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This same press has become one of the most powerful instruments possible in
favour of the destruction of civil liberties and democratic rights. It
stops at nothing, and hesitates not even at invading the privacy of the
home, though lives be wrecked and happiness be lost. Militarism in
this country has no more powerful ally than the yellow jingo press.
The many militaristic tendencies evident in American life