DEMOCRATS: Burp in Church

“I feel like the fellow who burped in church and created a lot of attention, all of it bad,” said White House Jester George Allen mournfully. Allen’s faux pas was a letter which he had co-sponsored with another fervent Truman Democrat, New Mexico’s Senator Clinton Anderson, and mailed to selected businessmen around the country. It began by suggesting that a special archives building should be constructed on Harry Truman’s farm at Grandview, Mo., to keep the papers of the Truman Administration, much as Franklin Roosevelt’s are kept at Hyde Park, N.Y. The President, said the letter, has already agreed to donate the land for the “Harry S. Truman Library.”

The first eruption of political bad manners came in the fifth paragraph. “A new tax bill is under consideration . . .” wrote Anderson-Allen. “Whatever finally happens, about half of … a [corporation’s] contribution would be money that otherwise would go to the Government in tax.” It has the familiar give-it-to-us-instead-of-to-the-Government theme which hospitals, universities and charities have been drumming since the big excess profits tax of World War II. But it was a strange argument to advance in the name of an Administration that was clamoring for more taxes.

The windup was stranger still for an Administration still raw from accusations of influence-peddling. Wrote Anderson-Allen: “I know that the President would be happy to have George Allen, as treasurer [of the archives campaign], drop in at the White House and show him your contribution.”

When a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter dug up a copy of the letter, he dropped in at the White House for a comment. From Harry Truman’s office came the rare authorization for a direct presidential quotation: “I didn’t know anything about the letter, and if I had known about it, I would have stopped it from being sent.”