"Fast One"

Within a week after the Citizens' Reconstruction Organization sent out anti-hoarding advertisements (TIME, Feb. 29) some 300 newspapers had published (or agreed to publish) them free of charge-- first among them the Chicago Daily News whose publisher, Col. William Franklin Knox, is chairman of the C. R. 0. First to refuse publicly was the Manhattan tabloid Daily News whose publisher, Joseph Medill Patterson, is of the great family that publishes the potent Chicago Tribune. His editorial retort to his Chicago rival: "Col. Knox and his committee have now undertaken to pull what is best described as a fast one on the newspapers of the nation. . . . We understand that some papers are consenting to give their advertising space away in this fashion. This newspaper is not. . . . We don't think much of the anti-hoarding drive, anyway. It is too vague, too generalized . . . and its primary object is to make business for the banks. We don't see why we should GIVE space to the banks and SELL space to the automobile and radio and coal and department store people. . . . "[However] we will agree to publish Mr. Hoover's views on hoarding as free advertisements IF Col. Knox will agree to give us an equal amount of advertising space in his paper ... in which to express our views on prohibition and Mr. Hoover. That's fair, isn't it, Colonel?" If Col. Knox thought the offer fair, he did not say so.

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