Smart Trick

Some people thought William Allen White spoke out of turn last week. His Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies had, as he often pointed out, merely undertaken the job of crystallizing a popular opinion already in favor of giving Britain all aid short of war. The favorable reaction to the President's destroyer-bases deal was something for which Editor White rightly took much credit. Rightly, last week, the National Association of Accredited Publicity Directors, Inc. made Mr. White the recipient of their annual award for "outstanding service in publicity." Mr. White succumbed to the temptation to strut in public.

Said he: ". . . The really smart trick we pulled was that after Lindbergh made his speech we put his mother-in-law [Mrs. Dwight Morrow] on the air--and was that a face card? It was! She said, 'Telegraph the White House and your Congressmen.' . . . 15,000 telegrams came tumbling down on Washington, saying 'Give the destroyers to Great Britain.' They never knew what hit them."

This seemed to reduce the efforts of the White Committee to mere high-pressure propaganda. Lectured the New York Times next day: "Mr. White's remarks in this instance are unfortunate. ... A committee similar to Mr. White's could have pulled any number of smart tricks to get us to send the fifty destroyers to Germany or Italy, and their efforts would have been worse than vain." After the last war, the Times pointed out, a myth grew up that the U. S. went to war, not out of "the clear-sighted recognition of the need of defeating Germany at that time," but because it had been tricked by propaganda, et al. Said the Times reprovingly: "We should not permit now the creation of the myth that we have to be tricked into taking actions to insure Hitler's defeat."

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