Hickory, Dickory, Hoax

In the week's fast-stepping piece of partisan dialectic, Harry S. Truman, ex-President of the U.S., gave his successor in the White House an old-fashioned hickory-stick tanning. The speech, delivered in New York to the Roosevelt Day Dinner of the Americans for Democratic Action, turned out a long list of scorching criticisms of the Republican Administration.

Unlike some fellow Democrats, who have been fearing doom and depression, Harry Truman seemed willing to recognize the facts of U.S. prosperity. In fact, he chided the Administration for lacking the courage of its convictions: If the U.S. is more prosperous than ever, Truman said, the Administration should not say "that we are not prosperous enough . . . to increase the minimum wage."

Truman's other complaints included:

P:The cold war is still with us.

P:The budget is not balanced--and won't be.

P:The only tax reductions in effect . . . were enacted by the preceding Democratic Congress," and most of the proposed tax reductions are no good. The "new tax bill . . . is a rich man's relief measure if I ever heard of one . . . I have heard of tax systems before where investment income is taxed at a higher rate than earned income, but this is the first time I have ever heard of that process being reversed.

P: "The farmers have not got 100% of parity yet."

P: "Much time has been lost by the mistake they made" in cutting down the Air Force last year.

P: "In housing, they have written a long report to justify the virtual gutting of the low-rent housing and slum-clearance program.

P:"They can . . . give away the offshore oil, give away Hell's Canyon dam and botch up the St. Lawrence Seaway and pretend like they'd done something great." For the matter of Communists in Government, the soft spot in the Democratic hide this election year, Harry Truman threw his fiercest strokes. By giving the impression that the list of 2,200 discharged security risks included a lot of Communists, Truman charged, "they undertook to perpetrate one of the biggest hoaxes ever attempted in American history . . . This is the Republican Administration I am talking about--not irresponsible members of Congress . . . They announced from the White House, with much fanfare, that they were doing a wonderful job--simply magnificent--of cleaning the Communists out of the Government, and that . . . already they had gotten rid of 1,456 'security risks.' The number had grown to 2,200 by the time of the State of the Union message ... It seems to me that the presidential press conference and the State of the Union message ought not to be used for such deceptive practices as this ... If the number can't be broken down, it should never have been built up." Some Republicans, who implied that the built-up number was loaded with built-in Communists, were vulnerable to Truman's charge. But Harry Truman was hoaxing himself when he pointed an accusing finger directly at Dwight Eisenhower's State of the Union message: in that message, the President did not mention Communists in connection with the 2,200, said only that they were separated "under the standards established for the new employee security program."

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