We were feeling pretty good the other day when we opened a letter from one of our advertisers who has used SURPLUS RECORD for more than twenty years. He had some mighty fine things to say about its value as an advertising medium and of the contribution he felt this publication has made to the industry as a whole. For three or four paragraphs he made our world seem rosier and rosier and rosier.
But in Paragraph Five, he lowered the boom!
“In the past few years,” he wrote, “we have noticed a definite trend in presenting articles concerning labor and management problems, government and political economy and other subjects not always pertinent to the sale of surplus equipment. In this respect, we do not share some of the admiration and sentiments of your other readers, since the tone of most of these articles seems to be rather one-sided; viz., anti-labor and antigovernment. The writer feels this is not constructive, and is too much like the trend of other magazines in the field today who have certain axes to grind and do not care who knows it.”
Our friend obviously feels that we are getting rather far afield in our editorial policy—that utilizing our pages for matters other than industrial machinery problems is out of our bailiwick. But we don’t think so. The biggest axe which anyone has to grind today is the preservation of our American system of free enterprise. And that includes us.
We have published editorials and articles criticizing governmental policies wherever they deserve criticism because we know that if the advocates of a controlled economy are successful in their efforts to put their ideas across, we are going to lose everything that our Constitution and Bill of Rights were created to preserve.
Every time a new regulation is put into effect which in the least iota infringes on those rights, it represents one more step toward complete government control of our lives.
We have never published a statement in SURPLUS RECORD which is anti-labor or anti-government, but we have criticized and will continue to criticize any action by groups or individuals who are using their power over labor or government to tamper with the things the Constitution stands for.
To quote another of our correspondents, who expressed it rather dramatically, “. . . the Press of the Nation has a sacred duty to the people of the Country to awaken them to the full realization of what they have allowed themselves to be lulled into thinking—or rather, not thinking. If the Press fails us in that duty—God help us.”
