By BENJAMIN DeCASSERES
THE YALE NEWS, student organ of the great university in New Haven, prints a long editorial urging our colleges to institute courses in Communism and Fascism.
This ought to be electrifying news to the shoals of Stracheys and Mosleys in Europe who are hoping to run the blockade of our loose and good-natured immigration laws to pick up an honest capitalistic-tainted penny.
These Communist and Fascist highbrows lie in the offing like the ships of old Rum Row in order to bootleg their reactionary and mediaeval Old World doctrines in our colleges and schools.
They will also, no doubt, demonstrate to the plastic generation how poisonous, out-moded and oppressive is our own home-grown brand of government labeled INDIVIDUALISTIC DEMOCRACY.
The Yale News suavely asserts with the flamboyant omniscience of ignorance that “one of these two extremes will prevail in this country.”
This is what is known as a wish-thought. Back of it, in the shadow, stands another wish-thought—democracy is dead.
The editorial then blandly says, “Education should open its eyes.”
What it means to say is:
“LET’S THROW SAND IN THE EYES OF AMERICA—MAYBE WE CAN MIX IN A DROP OR TWO OF VITRIOL.”
“Fascism and Communism are realities,” slickly pursues the NEWS.
Then why not institute traveling scholarships for the study at first hand of these systems in the countries with which they are blessed? Both diseases and Utopias should be studied on the home grounds.
“It is essential that courses be instituted at Yale to deal specifically with these problems,” pursues, with its innocent, china-blue eyes, the editorial.
We already know how “specifically” these problems are dealt with at Teachers’ College, Columbia University. That is, ALL AMERICANS WHO ARE NOT RED ARE STAMPED YELLOW.
But, the YALE NEWS condescendingly admits, as a kind of after-thought, a little sop to conscience or what you will:
“Needless to say, the study of our own government . . . . must be in no way sacrificed.”
This ought to hearten the rapidly disappearing American cells and cadres in some of our colleges.
This concession ought, further, to stiffen the spines of the declining American colonies in Columbia and Yale.
The Wheeler-Rayburn bill, pending in Congress, is one of the most disturbing pieces of legislation ever suggested in this country.
By destroying holding companies it would wreck a twelve-thousand-million-dollar industry.
In so doing it would destroy the value of investments held by tens of millions of people, including the life-savings of families, by as ruthless a method of confiscation as could be devised.
Abuses and bad practices in the holding company field must and shall be corrected and prevented from recurring.
But why kill a patient in order to cure his malady?
There is just one thing for Congress to do with the Wheeler-Rayburn bill—REJECT IT!
Original publication
Benjamin DeCasseres, “America Last!,” Syracuse Journal, April 1, 1935, editorial page (number unresolved).