Traveling Heirlooms

PROPAGANDA s

In Philadelphia this week the U.S. would see a new kind of propaganda machine. It was streamlined, diesel-powered and air-conditioned. It rolled on rails, was painted red, white & blue, and was guarded by 27 marines. It was the seven-car "Freedom Train," a traveling museum carrying the original Bill of Rights, George Washington's copy of the Constitution and 126 other historic U.S. documents (all under bulletproof glass). After three days in Philadelphia, it would be off on a yearlong, 33,000-mile tour through all the 48 states. It would stop in 300 communities, to show U.S. citizens the heirlooms of their democratic ideals.

The Freedom Train was Attorney General Tom Clark's idea. He and a group of advertising men thought the U.S. needed an antidote for what they diagnosed as a rash of postwar cynicism, lawlessness and ideological confusion.

Although the Freedom Train has the Department of Justice as its official sponsor, it is being run and paid for by the American Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization backed by such diverse groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the C.I.O., the A.F.L., the Loyal Order of Moose and the Girl Scouts. Estimated cost of the Freedom Train's tour: $900,000 (of which only $300,000 has yet been raised).

The train's backers might well have assumed that their project would be as free of criticism as the Barnum & Bailey Circus. But no; the attacks had already begun. Michigan's Congressman Clare E. Hoffman, a hard-shelled, far-right Republican, at once denounced it as a Democratic "buildup for 1948." Illinois' 81-year-old Adolph Sabath, a Democrat, complained because no copy of the Wagner Labor Act was included in the exhibits. In Henry Wallace's New Republic, Langston Hughes, Red-winged Negro poet, heaved a shrewdly aimed rock:

Who's the engineer on the Freedom Train?

Can a coal black man drive the Freedom Train?

Or am I still a porter on the Freedom Train?

Is there ballot boxes on the Freedom Train?

Do colored folks vote on the Freedom Train?

When it stops in Mississippi will it be made plain

Everybody's got a right to board the Freedom Train?

Last week the U.S. Communist Party itself threw boulders across the track. It cooked up a ludicrous counter-propaganda scheme. The Commies could hardly come out and say they were against the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Nor could they attack such backers of the train as Phil Murray, Bill Green or the Girl Scouts. So, in a memo from the party's educational headquarters, district leaders were instructed to tell whoever would listen that the "key backers" of the Freedom Train are "reactionary big businessmen" with a "demagogic purpose." Leaders were told to organize tours through the train only under "prominent progressives."

Said the New York Daily News: "Only one thing surprises us about the Reds' bleats. That is that anybody should be surprised."

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