Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all. [well, almost all. I have found that his views on homosexuality were those common to his time. Would he have been able to change again? Maybe...]
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
October 31, 1963
A TIME OF TESTING
The cry of geese in the frosty air and stars winking at the beat of their wings. Feathery skeletons of ticklegrass, the Illinois tumbleweed, rising from ditches and ghosting along the path in the cool wind. That humble cornucopia, the corn-wagon, rattling with slatted bumpboards, spilling out its golden wealth into the hungry maw of the corn dump.
Fall has come, after an extended visit by a reluctant summer. The earth once more has proven its goodness, and its time has come to rest.
Winter tests us all. While the earth sleeps, we must survive to enjoy another new cycle of life. Every crocus and tulip bulb, people and cows and sparrows in the trees must be tested in the fierce blasts of another winter.
Challenge and testing make us strong. The geese riding the wind, the fox who must hunt longer for his dinner, the pheasant who moves faster to escape him. The heart pounds faster, the lungs burn with the wintry air, eyes must strain over the glitter of snowy ground.
Those who answer the challenge, laugh at the bitterest season. Children who are tempered to cold by playing in the snow, do not catch colds from the slightest draft. The farmer who daily scoops grain and feed by the ton finds it play to scoop snow from his walks.
Check your insulation and your furnace; buy that anti-freeze now; sharpen your ice-skates too, and perhaps we will find with the kids, that winter can be fun!
A WEIRD INSULT
LIFE magazine has for years been a showpiece of Americana with its bold pictorial presentations. When not too long ago, it began printing editorials as well, many of its readers were shocked at the warped and inadequate thinking expressed in them.
The owner of TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE, one Clare Booth Luce, is a strange person. Much given to showy and extreme styles of dress, the angular Mrs. Luce was once described by Senator Everett Dirksen (through some slip of that oily tongue, we assume) as “an old bag of bones”.
Under a previous administration, she wangled an appointment as Ambassador to Italy, where she astonished the Italians with her eccentric behavior. She returned home suffering from a “nervous disorder”. In a long, rambling article in her own publications, she explained how her illness was caused by living in a Sixteenth Century Italian Palazzo (palace). The ceiling of her bedroom was heavily painted, and in the night tiny flakes of this paint drifted down and poisoned her with the arsenic in the paint! Obviously she slept with her mouth open.
One of the great influences shoving American thinking toward greater and greater reliance on costly armaments and less and less trust of the rest of the world has been the powerful magazines which rest within the claws of this egocentric old woman, who paces her office in huge feathered hats, raging and lusting for war.
The October 25 issue of LIFE magazine carries a remarkable thing entitled, “A Weird Insult From Norway.” In it, Mrs. Luce spills out the acid of her hatred on the committee of Norwegians who recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1962 to the distinguished American scientist, Dr. Linus Carl Pauling.
Dr. Pauling has been a leader in mobilizing world thinking to a realization of the horrors of nuclear war. He knew something about it, because few men's contributions to the development of the first atomic bomb were greater than his own. Like Alfred Nobel himself, who invented dynamite, he has felt compelled to work ceaselessly in trying to awaken human beings to the mature thinking necessary if they are not to be destroyed by the demon he helped to turn loose upon them.
LIFE magazine tries very hard to make the “Communist” smear stick to Dr. Pauling, although they admit, “Pauling has denied under oath that he is a Communist and has occasionally criticized some aspects of Soviet tyranny.” Pauling was recently cleared by our government of any shadow of doubt concerning his loyalty and his reputation.
The assaults against him are easy to trace. There is rooted in the flesh of this America we love, a cancerous growth of munitions industries which have a giant stake in war, and will not rest until they see another war spill open the treasury into their hands in return for their missiles and ships and planes and artillery pieces. This is what President Eisenhower called, in his last official speech to the nation, “The growing and unwarranted power of the military-industrial complex in this country...” a force which may already be out of all control.
As Jim Patton, that Happy Warrior out of the West, has stated, “Peace is now the central issue.” As President of the National Farmers Union, he declared at the 48th Annual Convention of the Montana Farmers Union that the time had come for “a twenty percent reduction in our gigantic military establishment” with these funds to be used on needed welfare, education and medical programs.
The generals are still calling on us to bleed ourselves white arming against the Russians; it is common knowledge that the rate of increase in the Russian military budget was cut in half last year, while the growth in production of consumer goods in the Soviet Union was tripled. Forced to ease off because his people were learning about Western standards of living, Mr. Krushchev is setting out to try to prove that his system can give people as good a life as we can. Here is the real Peace Race, a race we cannot lose if we but put our minds to it, for no culture on earth has yet offered its people a life at the same time so wholesome and so free as America's, so rich with potential for the development of very individual!
Meanwhile, Clare Booth Luce is still fuming at the Norse. The weird insult is her attempt to tell that noble, and generous, and peaceable nation to whom they shall award the Nobel Peace Prize. We assure the Norwegians that this Luce woman does not represent America.