World Press Digest

Arthur Krock commenting in the New York Times on Father Coughlin’s attack on Baruch shows that the priest is completely in error on his “facts” about Baruch:

To accept Baruch as Father Coughlin and Senator Long have painted him is to classify him as a foe of high taxes for the rich and an enemy of the depressed economic classes in their struggle for higher price-levels. Yet only a few months ago, before the Senate Finance Committee, “the acting President” urged the imposition of taxes sufficient to pay relief bills as they were contracted. Tax the people, he said, for taking hungry men off the street and putting smiles on their faces. Under such a plan a man as rich as he would have paid far more than he will pay the government on March 15.

BOUGHT RELIEF BONDS

When North Dakota offered a farm-relief bond issue some years ago which Wall Street would not take Baruch took a great deal of it himself and sold the rest to other wealthy men. He provided in Secretary McAdoo’s time the final underwriting for the cotton crop, and once offered the South Carolina cotton cooperatives two and a half millions as an underwriting for the total crop of his native State. Such sentimental antics as these have run through his career and sometimes made his rich friends fear he was losing that acquisitive sense so highly prized in Wall Street.

“The master of Hugh Johnson” is a charge with a foundation as slight as that of being “acting President.” Baruch did not know of Johnson’s appointment until it was announced. He was constantly admonishing his unmanageable protege that American business could not be coerced or regimented. He has always been bearish about NRA.

Baruch has volunteered nothing of advice to any President since Wilson, and what he has given on request rates him a pitching average of about .075. When he heard of the five billions for work relief—without a compensating tax — he almost had a convulsion in the House gallery. Also his middle name is “Mannes,” not “Manasses,” and was the surname of a friend of his father.

COMMENTS ON DRIVE IN ALGERIA

The London Daily Herald, writing on the anti-French Arab movement in Algeria, says:

The Arab movement is directed against Jews as well as against the French administration, and Hitler is a symbol of the fight against France as well as against Jewry.

But it is also alleged in French newspapers that Nazi propaganda is being spread throughout North Africa.

AUSTRIAN FILMS UNDER NAZI HEEL

The Cinema, a London publication, comments as follows on the Austrian films which are forbidden to include Jewish actors:

So the Austrian producers are still under the Nazi heel. With the beginning of the new quota year it was hoped to get some amelioration of the “Aryan Paragraph,” under which Austrian films imported into Germany must not include any non-Aryan personnel; but Berlin seems to have squashed these hopes effectively.

Not merely will Germany not lighten the paragraph in any respect, but during the next year she will accept fewer films from Austria. And when you consider that Germany is far and away Austria’s biggest market and that the normally pretty big non-Aryan film contingent in Vienna has been greatly increased by the numbers of political emigres from Germany, you can realize in what an almost hopeless position the Austrian producers are.

The bitterness with which the Nazis are pursuing their fanatical “race politics” is shown by the fact that the Ufa cinema in the Vienna Taborstrassea, having rented “The Stage Is the World,” in which the Jewish comic Szoke Szakall appears, has (on instructions from Berlin?) preferred to pay a penalty rather than screen the film.

VENIZELOS THINKS HIGHLY OF HITLER

The New Republic, commenting editorially on the rebellion in Greece, says:

The revolt is a struggle for supremacy between Fascist and constitutional forces. Eleutherios Venizelosa, the outstanding figure in this uprising, was easily the most influential man in post-war Greece. He served several terms as Premier of the Greek Republic and went into voluntary exile on the island of Crete last October when he lost the election to President Zaimis. During the last few years Venizelos has become rabidly Fascist and anti-Semitic in his political views. In a letter to Hitler he called the German Chancellor the “greatest statesman of our times,” the man whose “political, social and economic ideals will rule the world for centuries to come.”