News Brief

The French decrees outlawing racial propaganda in the press constitute a blow to democracy, Heywood Broun said today in his nationally syndicated column, “It Seems to Me,” published by the New York World Telegram. The N.Y. Post also editorially condemned the action, terming it “inordinately dangerous.”

Declaring the French were “doing the cause of democracy little good by clamping down a strict censorship upon their press,” the columnist, who is also president of the American Newspaper Guild, continued: “Tolerance is a superb ideal, but there is no surer way of encouraging bigots than to tell them that they may not be heard. In America the Klan was dangerous when it was cloaked, and fell to pieces when the saps within its ranks unmasked. And the same thing is true of anti-Semitism in this country. Those who promote it should be encouraged to stand up and show themselves. It is much easier to defeat a trumpeting campaign than one which whispers.”

The Post’s objection to the anti-propaganda decree was based on the argument that “some official must decide what constitutes ‘foreign propaganda’,” thus giving “power of life and death over the press.” The paper, declaring the “Jew-defamers” and the “breeders of disunity” were active in America, offered a five-point program to combat them without impinging on civil liberties. The program includes a ban on political uniforms and drilling by political groups; punishment of racial incitation as an incitation to violence, with trial by jury; punishment of racial boycotts as a conspiracy to restraint of trade and compulsory registration of representatives of foreign instrumentalities including declaration of any foreign subsidies.