Now–editorial Notes

The Dr. Wirt face is not merely comical. The fact that his childish charges and revelations have been taken seriously enough to be officially investigated makes Americans appear ludicrous abroad. Dr. Wirt’s “informants,” as named by him at the investigation, are identified with the Roosevelt Administration in a minor capacity. The so-called “braintrust” is involved in his testimony but indirectly. The reference to President Roosevelt as the Kerensky who would pave the way for a Stalin, according to Dr. Wirt, was made by Laurence Todd, a Washington correspondent, now representative of the Soviet news agency, Tass.

The strange thing about Dr. William A. Wirt, the Gary educator, is that while he seems to take this “conspiracy” against the American Government seriously now, he apparently did not take it so seriously at the time he discovered the “plot,” last September. There is no evidence that he hastened to divulge his startling information either to the President or to the American people in an effort to warm them against the machinations of the mysterious American Stalin. Dr. Wirt does not appear to be so naive as to believe all he heard at that interesting dinner in Washington, last September. But if he really believed all that Laurence told him about the American Kerensky and Stalin plot, he failed in his patriotic duty to familiarize the country with what was in store for it.

But if intelligent Americans regard the Wirt affair as a farce, the Silver shirts and the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan seem to attach great importance to the Wirt revelations. It is reported that William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirt organization, has sent a confidential letter to members of the Silver Legion regarding the Wirt charges, naming Professor Felix Frankfurter as the key man and other Jews as “plotters” against the American Government. The York, Pa., Klan No. 304, of the Ku Klux Klan, rallying to Dr. Wirt’s support, adopted a resolution directing the Klan officials to write to Dr. Wirt “commending him for his fearlessness in causing an investigation into the activitives of certain members of the ‘brain trust.'”

We have no evidence that Dr. Wirt is in any way identified with either the Silver Shirts or the Ku Klux Klan.

The entire idea of styling President Roosevelt a Kerensky paving the way for a Stalin is absurd. It is a phrase that could be coined only by one who knows little about either Kerensky or Stalin, or the early phases of the Russian revolution.

Kerensky, as a member of the Duma, displayed extraordinary courage when he denounced the Tsarist Government during the war. As the first revolutionary Minister of Justice and afterward Premier of the Provisional Government, Kerensky was the idol of the Russian masses. He was hailed as the symbol of the New Russia. Because of his devotion to the cause of the Allies and because of his excessive idealism, unfortified by political and administrative experience, Kerensky was easily overthrown by Lenin, Trotzky and Stalin.

If Kerensky had had the political and administrative experience of President Roosevelt, Stalin would not have held his present post of authority in Russia today.