Life — October 24, 1918 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

586 Why Kitchin is House Leader ET rid of Kitchin! says tie Sun, and devotes more than a column of space to expounding why he ought to go. Kitchin is Chairman of the Ways snd Means Committee, and Democratic leader of the House. He hails from Scotland Neck, North Carolina, and has fifty-nine years, for sixteen of which he has been a member of Con- gress. The Sun considers him the last man in Congress who ever ought to have been Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. It objects to his limited intelligence, his economic ig- norance, his lack of knowledge of the elemental pginciples of taxation. — It finds him destitute of business sense, and dangerously blinded by prejudices and by a sinister, sectional aspiration to make “the industrial fields north of Mason and Dixon's line tax-objects of pillage.” On general grounds and for the reason that he is liable to devise and put through taxes that are very dangerous to the industrial life of the country, the Sun would have Kitchin fired. And the way it would go about it is to elect a Republican Congress. There will be sympathy with this de- sire of the Sun. No one is likely to be as bad as described by an opposition newspaper that wants him to be de prived of his job. Probably Kitchin is not so bad as the Sun paints him. The Tribune complimented him the other day on his presentation of the cight-billion-dollar revenue bill, which the Tribune said was “ fair and large POULTRY NOTE WILY HENS STOP LAYING L “TELL HIM ME AND RAGS $ and sound.” It calls for the utmost possible payment of war expenses by taxation, leaving no more than it must to be defrayed by borrowing, and the Tribune thinks that is right, and if properly done, it is right. But Kitchin has bad faults, He is a small-minded, active-minded, clever man, raised North Carolina village, and not wid- ened to full size, even by sixteen years in Congress. And he has great power He was able to keep in the last income- tax law the provision that earned money should pay double (or there- abouts) the tax paid by money drawn from investments. He tried his best to keep the country out of the war, and there is much to support the Sun's as- sertion that when we got in he swore the North should pay the costs of it. D OUR LOVE, MOTHER” If Kitchin is not “sectional,” he is an abused man But to elect a Republican Congress in order to get rid of him would be to kill the dog to be quit of the fleas Why is he chairman of that. vitally important committee? Because the Democrats in Congress want him there? Probably not. Most of them would probably prefer some more acceptable man. He is chairman and leader be- cause he has been sixteen years” in Congress, and was the senior Democrat onthe committee. He got promotion by seniority, and Congress can't get rid of him, except by a convulsion that wil break precedents. Seniority made Stone Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate, a most unfit and unseemly as- ers Mit jee tic the ro sin in, be ma joy ers