"Ye Gods"

Pondering next April Fool's Day, when 120,000 U. S. Census takers will check up on 132,000,000 U. S. inhabitants, Columnist Mark Sullivan decided that the Government's curiosity about divorce, income, toilet facilities was an invasion of man's "responsibility to God alone." Mr. Sullivan was echoing the squeals of protest raised last week in a place with good acoustics: Congress.

New Hampshire's Republican Senator Charles W. Tobey had introduced a resolution against such inquisition. Cried he, borrowing an expletive from Willie Baxter:* "Ye gods! Stalin and Hitler may play the game that way, but not in free America. Shame on our country/- for suggesting such a thing."

Before a Senate sub-committee appeared Cathrine Curtis, national director of Women Investors in America Inc., to declare that millions of women would go to jail rather than disclose "their wages or income, their matrimonial adventures, or whether they use their bathroom or privy alone or share it with someone else."

In the House, where the national acoustics are not so good and the shouts are even louder, Representative Dewey Short of Missouri cried that his Ozark constituents would tell the Census takers "It is none of their damned business."

Old stuff were Congressional squawks to Mississippi-reared William Lane Austin, 69, still bland-browed, still placid of disposition after 40 years of brooding on Government statistics. He pointed out that much more inquisitive financial questions had been asked in the 1850, 1860 and 1870 censuses (TIME, March 4), that some of the new questions had been inserted this year at the earnest request of business and sociological institutions; that no one had ever been jailed for refusing to answer a census question.

A census of the U. S. population every ten years is mandatory, is the basis of representation in Congress. Bystanders wondered whether the Congressional hullabaloo might have been caused by this possibility: that new census figures would result, in some States, in a reapportionment of Representatives.

* Hero of Booth Tarkington's Seventeen.

/- Said German-born Cinemactress Marlene Dietrich: "I'm so proud of my new American citizenship that I'm going to comply with all the laws in this most reasonable of all nations."

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