Chance to Heckle

Woman: "Couldn't we have peace in the family?"

Secretary Ickes: "If the lady wants peace, I wonder why she came here?"

Peace is mainly something to argue about at America's Town Meeting of the Air. For the last four years this program, Radio's No. 1 public forum, has provided weekly October-to-May battles on all manner of current topics, with headliners (Ickes, Eleanor Roosevelt, Earl Browder, Wendell Willkie, etc.) in the main bouts, and audiences winding up each week's card with a free-for-all.

There are only two fundamental rules--hit fairly; stick to the issue. Down at Atlanta Penitentiary the boys can hardly wait for the program to go on Thursday nights. Just as ardent are some 5,000,000 U. S. radio listeners, including members of some 1,400 groups which gather weekly to hear the debates, fight them out locally later. Most eager of all are the thousands who vie weekly by mail for the 1,600 seats in Manhattan's Town Hall and a chance to heckle the speakers in person. Anxious, too, for a chance at the program are at least two hefty radio sponsors (Chrysler, Metropolitan Life), but NBC's Town Meeting of the Air is not for sale.

Last week the Town Meeting got off to its fifth season.

The subject, How Can We Defend Democracy in America Now? and the debaters (Harold Ickes and Hugh Johnson) developed an odd sort of sparring match, with both Administration-Baiter Johnson and New-Dealer Ickes poking at the solar plexus of the Administration's war policy--its Morgan-du Pont loaded War Resources Board (soon to be disbanded). What they finally shook hands on was that the U. S. should stay out of war; what they were still making faces over at the finish was how. Sample audience heckling:

>Woman, to General Johnson: "Don't you think you could better defend democracy by upholding President Roosevelt, who was elected by the great majority of the American people?"

Johnson: ". . . It has been my policy and my practice ever since he started to run for office to defend him when I thought he was right (and I submit that nobody ever defended him better), and to criticize him when I think he is wrong. ... I will continue to do that until they put me in Alcatraz!"

> Man: "Hasn't the President the right to choose his advisers from among businessmen as well as Left Wing liberals?"

Ickes: "... I will answer any frank and honest question, but not a loaded one."

>Man: "Will not our national unity be augmented by a statement from our President that for a third term he will not choose to run?"

Ickes: "I am not discussing politics tonight."

But if Franklin Roosevelt had not said no, politics was just what Secretary Ickes would have discussed. Topic originally scheduled for debate was the third term.

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