A prize of $1,000 offered three weeks ago by the American Israelite, local Anglo-Jewish weekly, to the Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph-Register if the latter publication could prove its allegations that refugees were dodging the draft, is still unclaimed, it is revealed in an editorial which will appear in the Israelite on Thursday. “Neither proof nor retraction and apology have been forthcoming to date,” the editorial says.
The Telegraph-Register, official weekly publication of the Cincinnati Archdiocese and one of a chain of Catholic weeklies with headquarters in Denver, charged that refugees who have come to America on visitors’ visas and who have been allowed to stay here because of the war conditions, “are unwilling to fight to preserve that haven of refuge to which they have fled.”The American Israelite, in its issue immediately following (April 2nd), in an editorial entitled; “In Which The Telegraph Register Is Offered A Prize for Facts,” challenged the Telegraph-Register to come forward with proof of accusations contained in its March 27th editorial –or to publish a retraction and apology. The Telegraph-Register has maintained silence on the matter.
Figures secured from the Cincinnati Committee for Refugees explode the Register’s allegation that “draft boards here as in other cities have been experiencing unwillingness on the part of some of the refugees to fight in the United States army.” The refugee committee reveals that in all of Cincinnati there are only eight refugees who hold visitors’ visas, the category referred to in the Catholic weekly’s editorial. Of these, four are women, and the men were all over draft age at the time of the first selective service registration. Two of these four came under the enlarged draft registration and have heard nothing from their boards as yet. Cincinnati’s local selective service boards Numbers 14 and 15, which the bulk of the refugees are registered, reports that there has been no case of an attempt at draft evasion by any refugee.
The Telegraph-Register, it is pointed out here, has indulged in a snide form of “Jew-baiting” over a long period and has been consistently anti-Roosevelt anti-British, pro-isolationist and anti-war. Msgr. Edward A. Freking is editor for of The Telegraph-Register.
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