The Augusta Courier

McCarran Act Is Unjustly Criticized

(From The Savannah Morning News)

One of the most shopworn and despicable in the professional politician's lexicon of tricks is the smear based on racial and religious prejudice. When one mentions their religion or their race most people—and certainly most Americans—are inclined to be somewhat shortsighted. Thus the politician who can brand an opponent with or without cause with even a suspicion of being a hater of some particular race or religion, has gained a considerable advantage.

This is the sort of underhanded, snide tactics which is now flagrantly being employed by the Truman administration in an effort thoroughly to discredit the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. This bill which a courageous Congress passed and repassed over Truman's veto, was written primarily as an anti-Communist measure. It deals, in no uncertain terms, with the entry of alien Communists or fellow-travelers into this country.

A glance over the roster of unsavory and subversive aliens who easily succeeded, under previous immigration laws, in slipping into the United States for the purpose of spying, infiltrating our labor unions and other organizations and generally doing everything possible to promote their Communism in this country, is all that is needed to convince the sincere American that the McCarran Act or its prototype was badly needed.

Certainly the U. S. Congress, whose sole right it is to pass on such matters, thought so. The vote by which the measure became law is ample proof of the convictions of the congressmen of both parties who gave it such able support.

Now that the enforcement of the law is beginning to pinch tight on the toes of Communists and other ultra-liberals, we are witnessing a fresh and even more wantonly abusive assault on the bill and its authors.

The latest diatribe against Senator Pat McCarran and his bill emanates from the President's Commission on Immigration and Naturalization. It is a release, sent out under franked mail, from Philip B. Perlman, Chairman of the Commission and a former Solicitor-General of the United States.

From a commission, allegedly formed to study the act fairly and objectively, one would logically expect a fair and objective report. What do we get? It is such language as this:

"The Senator (McCarran) cannot make a reasoned defense of an act which embodies so much discrimination and prejudice. So he ignores the facts and makes unfounded insinuations and smears against those who disagree with him."

Or the following gem:

"Senator McCarran will also learn that he cannot intimidate millions of American citizens who are unwilling to let the McCarran monstrosity remain on the statute books."

The most damnable part of the alleged "report" does not lie in this personal villification however. It is to be found in the fact that Perlman and the commission, with an utter lack of foundation, lists the names of a number of prominent Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergymen as having been "wantonly smeared" by McCarran. The part these clergymen have played in all this shrewish name-calling consists simply of having answered a commission questionaire in which they expressed themselves as opposed to the measure mostly on ideological grounds! Nowhere in the release is there any explanation of why the commission disapproves the act. Neither is there anywhere in Perlman's odious document even a mention of the Communism against which the act was primarily directed.

This then we must conclude is the Truman Administration's idea of a fair and objective examination of a national problem. If so it bears the same unmistakable stamp of Pendergast Machiavellianism as have so many other of the Truman ideas.