"Let Us Tell the Truth"

British correspondents in the U.S. have not been permitted by U.S. censors to tell their British readers that many U.S. citizens disapproved the Churchill Government's Indian policy.

When the new Liberty ship Booker T. Washington was launched on Sept. 29, the correspondents were not allowed to tell Britons the ship's captain was Hugh Mulzac, a Negro. Out of a British correspondent's story on the WAACs, U.S. censors slashed the phrase: "It has been agreed there will be no discrimination against color, which means Negro units will be formed."

For months British newsmen in the U.S. have simmered with distaste under such restraints. Last week, when they found it almost impossible to transmit to England any dispatch even hinting U.S. civilian distaste for the North African deal with Vichyite Admiral Jean Franc,ois Darlan, they boiled over.

Annoyed most was the London Sunday Dispatch's irascible, Hearst-like Don Iddon. He fired a transatlantic cable: "This is a protest. . . . The American censorship is tough and hard and very stringent. . . . We are all worried. . . . Last week I had seven dispatches either suppressed in their entirety or so badly mauled . . . they were ruined."*

Worst example of the harsh censorship came in mid-week when lanky, hard-working Alistair Cooke, now a U.S. citizen, correspondent for British Broadcasting Corp., London Times, and London Daily Herald, tried to send a dispatch to the Herald naming a few of the things correspondents had not been permitted to transmit. He learned correspondents are even forbidden to report what sort of reports are forbidden. Blue-penciled from his dispatch was, among other things, this: "Most British correspondents agree . . . that it is practically impossible to report any news item about the [U.S. race] problem. . . ."

Many a U.S. newsman, many a U.S. newspaper joined the outcry: said Amazonian Pundit Dorothy Thompson: "To say [that such censorship is necessary] is tantamount to claiming that the most profound issues of this war may not be publicly discussed, or if publicly discussed, must be confined within the United States." Said Columnist-Radio Commentator Cal Tinney: Reasonable censorship of war news to prevent the enemy from receiving advantage is acceptable to everyone. Censorship of opinion is sabotage of the Four Freedoms.

By week's end Washington authorities had been needled enough. They retorted. Reason for the censorship of some opinion, they said, is that Axis propagandists seize upon reports of Allied dissension, racial or otherwise, and feed them to European and South American peoples in exaggerated shapes. Explained U.S. Censor Byron Price: When foreign correspondents undertake to send abroad editorial comments which tend "to emphasize disunity in this country instead of stating the facts as they are," they must be censored.

With these arguments correspondents solidly disagreed. Cogent, farsighted Alistair Cooke argued: Like all newsmen, U.S. and British alike, he understands the need for military censorship and does not blame the thoughtful, usually fair-minded men who do the censoring; he objects only to suppression of interchange of political opinion, for which he blames top-drawer policymakers. Like other newsmen, he considers the problem still in the molehill stage, squawks now to prevent its becoming mountainous.

"Only a drooling idiot," he said in a dispatch the censors passed, ". . . will cite Great Britain or the U.S. as model societies. . . . Let us admit to the eager world that we are an imperfect society trying to do our best. ... Let us cheerfully admit that we are ashamed of some old practices of the British Empire, but are proud of the commonwealth system, that we revere the American Constitution and are only too sorry we never brought it up to date to include poor immigrants and Negroes. . . . We cannot go on pretending to want a better world and yet feed the hungry populations of Europe the sugar without the pill. ... If we don't admit to them, as well as to ourselves, the beam in our own eye, it's unlikely they will allow us the privilege of curing the mote in theirs. Let us tell the truth as we see it and be damned to him who twists it."

Newsmen breathed "Amen!" Not a man of them wanted to give away military or other information capable of Axis use; all of them wanted to tell the people the truth, as far as possible, not as little as possible.

*The rub is mutual. No U.S. correspondent in London is permitted to send, home any British-voiced criticism of American troops in Britain.

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