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For the first time in its life the Post-Dispatch bought space in two eastern newspapers, the Washington Star and the New York Times, reprinted its editorial in territory the Post-Dispatch does not reach. So incensed was one 62-year-old citizen of St. Louis, Lawrence Miller, a onetime sergeant in the A. E. F. with two World War I citations for bravery, that he threw bricks through three Post-Dispatch windows, broke $500 worth of plate glass. Said he: "I broke the windows to get even. . . ."
Appeasement? The Star-Times could not take this Blitzkrieg lying down. Next day, on page 1, the Star-Times struck back at Editor Coghlan. Calling the Post-Dispatch's piece a "fanatical diatribe, bred of mingled hate and fear," an effort "to win the Pulitzer Prize for Appease ment," the Star-Times bought the same space which the Post-Dispatch had taken in the New York Times and Washington Post to meet the attack.
Recalling Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, the Star-Times jibed: "The Post-Dispatch of that day was the Columbian Centinel of Boston, and its conduct is described in five words by Claude Bowers in Jefferson in Power: 'The Columbian Centinel went mad.' . . . [The Centinel declared] that Jefferson had given away 'nearly all the gold and silver in the United States.' And for what? 'Wild land.' Land of which 'we do not want a foot.' Jefferson, it moaned, 'had run in debt for Mississippi moonshine $15,000,000. . . . There were appeasers in 1803. . . ."
Added the Star-Times in a soberer vein: "Unneutral? Of course it is unneutral, in a world where neutrality has become Hitler's jest and Holland's grave. . . . Loud will be the laughter of Göring and Goebbels . . . when they read . . . the Post-Dispatch's editorial, translated, as it will be, in the Völkulcher Beobachter. . . . Roosevelt . . . acted in an hour of danger. . . . It was not an act of war, but an act to keep war away from America, now and forever!"
Embarrassed Tribune. Most editors, although they may have disapproved the secrecy in which Franklin Roosevelt had conducted his negotiations, praised the trade itself as a necessary defense measure. A few (including the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Topeka Capital} condemned the sale, but in milder phrases than the Post-Dispatch.
Apparently embarrassed was Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick's Chicago Tribune. For the last 18 years the Tribune has favored acquisition by the U. S. of naval bases in the Western Hemisphere. Last week the Tribune, in its first edition, ran a 166-line editorial, We Get the Bases, pointing to the President's deal as a triumph for the Tribune. On page 1 the Tribune printed a caustic cartoon titled Nearer and Nearer the Brink, condemning the deal as an act of war (see cut, p. 77). In later editions the cartoon disappeared, was replaced by another kidding Franklin Roosevelt's trip to Tennessee. In its third edition the Tribune slashed its long editorial to a mild, 27-line cackle of pleasure.