A statement issued this week-end by Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower condemning the injection of anti-Semitism into the presidential election campaign is strongly supported in the press here today. The Republican nominee emphasized in his statement that “appeals to prejudice and bigotry have no place in America.”
The New York Herald Tribume lauding Gen. Eisenhower’s move says that appeals to prejudice and bigotry “should be vigorously fought not only by the political leadership of both major parties but by every citizen who encounters them, whether in little printed sheets which are their chief vehicle of distribution or in word-of-mouth rumor.”
The New York Daily Mirror says in an editorial: “Religious bigotry, racial hatred, are always anti-American. The religious bigot will use anything, true or false, to make a point against the object of his hate. Generally he is a distorter and a liar.” The article emphasizes that “the bigots are as subversive as Communists and should be shunned.”
Gen. Eisenhower made his statement after it was brought to his attention that the mail was being flooded with anti-Semitic attacks by Gerald L. K. Smith and other bigots, aimed at both the Truman administration and General Eisenhower himself. He declared: “Appeals to prejudice and bigotry have no place in America. Those were the tactics of the Nazis and Fascists. That was why the freedom-loving people of the world destroyed them. Those are the tactics of the Communists today.”
The Republican nominee was presented with a resolution adopted by the Minnesota Republican State Executive Committee calling upon all Republican candidates for public office to “reject political argument and appeals based on religious or racial prejudices, ” and “to publicly rebuke and censure attempts to subvert the American tradition by appeals to prejudice, intolerance and bigotry.”
General Eisenhower said that the principles of that resolution “have been a part of my belief throughout my life” and constituted the things for which he always had fought.
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