“american Rediscovery Week” Planned to Stress Traditions of Liberty, Equality

A proclamation setting aside the week of Oct. 8 as American Rediscovery Week, to be dedicated to all the peoples who have created America’s traditions of liberty and equality, was issued today by the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom. The proclamation has already received the endorsement of many prominent public officials, churchmen, and educators — including Governor M. Clifford Townsend of Indiana, Governor R. T. Jones of Arizona, Professors Robert A. Millikan and Harold C. Urey, and Rev. Samuel McCrea Cavert, Bishop Alexander Mann of Pittsburgh, and President George Willard Frasier of the Colorado State College of Education.

Declaring that our traditional rights “are once again being challenged by powerful foes of equality and liberty, both at home and abroad,” through attempts to curb freedom of speech and suffrage, through false racial theories, and through attempts to deny to the foreign born and alien the equal protection of the laws, the proclamation states:

“Be it therefore proclaimed that the anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus and the week in which it falls be established as a Week for the Rediscovery of America and of those rights which from the beginning of its history have made its name the symbol of liberty. Let this Week be the occasion for celebrating and reaffirming the principles of American Democracy, in a solemn resolve to secure for all the inhabitants of these United States the necessary conditions for life itself: liberty and equal rights for all, regardless of color, creed, political conviction, or national origin.”