'40 Campaign to Be Dirtiest Ever, Says Max Lerner

"The 1940 presidential campaign will be like an ice-berg, nine-tenths underground," Max Lerner, professor of Political Science at Williams College, predicted in a talk last night in the Adams House dining hall after analyzing the "new wave of reaction and intolerance flooding the country."

Lerner asserted that anti-Semitism and anti-alienism had reached a new pitch of intensity that probably could not be calmed by former methods of reason and intelligent appeal.

Dictated Ideas

A dictated number of ideas possess the people of Europe, and the only true interventionist role of America would be to give a new faith and new symbols of that faith to the masses who now know only one ideology and therefore have nothing to revolt for, he stated.

He did not confine the forces of misinformation and lack of information to Europe. "There is a monopoly of the opinion industry in our own country," he stated, emphasizing the fact that truth can only win in a "free and open competition."

"I have traveled through towns with only one newspaper, and towns with two newspapers both owned by the same individual, and towns with two newspapers and a radio station all owned by a single person or corporation."