Douglas Daily Dispatch

DOUGLAS DAILY DISPATCH, TUESDAY MORNING, JUNE 22, 1926

ATTRACTING THE ATTENTION OF CONGRESS WITH EDITORS HIRED CHARACTER ASSASSINS
(Miami Silver Belt)

Will Irwin, nationally known journalist, has written a series of articles which pretend to reveal the activities of Senator Ralph H. Cameron over a long period of years.

They are about the most unfair and biased articles that we have ever seen published. Their entire fabric is composed of innuendoes, insinuations, slurs, false interpretations of events and untruthful deductions.

Their preparation, publication, and advertising has cost somebody many thousands of dollars. Irwin is a high priced writer. The full page advertisement in several newspapers of the state calling public attention to the articles cost a lot of money. The advertisements are unsigned. They should excite suspicion. The public is not let in on the secret of who furnished the money for all the work and publicity.

It is highly significant, however, that up to date, the series has appeared only in the Los Angeles Times and the Prescott Courier.

The Times belongs to Harry Chandler, who with his associates, owns several hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Mexico which are irrigated from the waters of the Colorado river. The Swing-Johnson bill providing for the construction of a dam at Boulder canyon, if passed by congress, would have guaranteed waters for another million acres of land in Mexico controlled by the Chandler syndicate, to the exclusion of lands in Arizona.

Senator Cameron early expressed absolute opposition to the Swing-Johnson bill in the United States senate. He threatened to conduct a filibuster against it on the floor of the senate, if such a course were necessary to obtain its defeat.

That is very probably the rub with the Times. The Times owner seeks the consummation of a scheme which would mean economic ruin to Arizona. Senator Cameron was prompt and vigorous in his defense of the state which he represents.

The Times' motive in attacking Senator Cameron is easily discernible to thoughtful persons.

Nor is it hard to find the reason why the Courier would welcome an opportunity to publish the anti-Cameron articles. The Courier has always been an eager champion of the actions of the forest service, Indian department and park service, when controversies have arisen between them and the state of Arizona. Senator Cameron was largely instrumental in clipping the claws of some of these Washington exponents of bureaucracy, and in re-establishing the principle of state rights and state sovereignty as against their encroachments.

Hence the Courier's animosity is easily accounted for. The editor of that journal and the junior senator from Arizona possess radically different political philosophies. One stands for the rule of oligarchies of the select; the other stands for the principle of the rules of the majority in the interests of the majority.

It is well for the public to investigate the identity of those who launch such movements; to review their records, and to conjecture their probable motives-as we have remarked before.

Only a foolish people will desert their tried and proven friends in exchange and guidance from their enemies.