‘UNBELIEVABLE BIGOTRY’

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 831, 27 November 1929, Page 13

‘UNBELIEVABLE BIGOTRY’

AN AMERICAN CONSIDERS AMERICA

THEN GOES TO EUROPE Much comment is being caused in America by the action of Frank Ward O'Malley, the journalist and author, who has announced that he is through with living in the L'nited States and intends to live the rest of his days with his wife and two children in Europe. Mr. O’Malley declares; “I say in all sincerity that I am afraid to bring my two children through their coming ’teens in a so-called Prohibition land.” He has given up his United States domicile, and is now living on the Continent. Just before returning to Europe, the “New York World” asked him to be explicit and he wrote: “To give all the reasons would, 1 fear, fill a newspaper page. No redblooded American wants to hear them anyway; we have given so may years to convincing ourselves and to teaching our children that intolerance is a positive and patriotic virtue that we resent all adverse criticism.” But Mr. O’Malley, nevertheless, let liis indignation go, and described events in his New Jersey home town as follows: “I wanted to see my good and efficient friend, George Legge, our local chief of police, but at the moment he was raiding a residence half a mile down the hill. He haled before Justice of the Peace Stan Nichols 18 youths and girls after the raid, one of them a nurse in a Trenton hospital, and all of them drunk —another thrill we miss in Europe. “Let me hasten to tell prospective buyers of our house, however, that they and their boys and girls can still find many excellent speak-easies up and down the coast. With my house also goes the whispered address of a beautifully equipped gambling place and two swagger ginmiils, each boasting of busy mahogany bars. A woman who lives near me, a ‘cultured’ woman, expressed surprise the other day when I told her the Duke of Wellington was an Irishman. “It was difficult for her to believe, she added, that there was such a thing as an Irish aristocrat; she thought all Irishmen were barmen, I believe, and their daughters all servant girls. “In brief, our community, you see, is just a good, old-fashioned, semirural, typically 100 per cent. American community. “It is no better and no worse than thousands of similar towns and villages which abound in America as the result of a depraved philosophy of crass materialism, the political grip of the Methodist Board of Prohibition, Temperance and Public Blah, hypocrisy, crooked thinking, ignorant scoundrels in high office, unbelievable bigotry, appalling provincialism, national swell-headedness, rainbow-chas-ing ‘progress,’ lax criminal procedure, insane legislation, a fanatical philosophy of Puritanism that stifles all gentle living and beauty—all that always bapp’ens when a highly organised, intolerant Church rules the State.”