Canard

In the last Congress many legislators criticized the New Deal privately and a few openly, but none flung coarser vituperation at the White House than Senator Thomas D. Schall of Minnesota. His favorite accusation was that the New Deal was trying to muzzle the Press. Last week the blind Senator, egged on by Tory publishers, produced a new and startling charge: The Administration not only planned to censor the Associated Press, United Press and Hearst news services, but to start its own official press service to supplant them, after the fashion of Soviet Russia's Tass.

To President Roosevelt, who knows how to get favorable publicity without resorting to an official press, this large accusation was too much. Deciding to make the vociferous Senator "put up or shut up." he wired him: "I request that you give me the benefit of such facts as you have in support of the charges. Once these facts are in my hands they will receive immediate attention in order to make impossible the things you say will be done, because I am just as much opposed to them as you are."

Senator Schall wrote an insolent public reply which dodged the President's point: "Your telegram to me bears out the suggestion of the constant effort to mislead and fool the public. ... If it were not for the fact that I see in your request for 'information' an attempt on your part to appear as a victim of your own bureaucracy instead of its chief organizer. I would be inclined to ignore your telegram. . . . You ask me for information concerning what you yourself have done. Are you attempting to secure facts so that you may be in a position to refute yourself?"

The President's patience was exhausted. He came down hard: "Today I received from you a vituperative two-page letter which gives no facts and does not answer my simple request. The incident is closed."

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