MONEY: Battle Lines

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But the most telling shot fired from the anti-inflationist ranks last week was touched off from Manhattan's lofty Empire State Building. Alfred Emanuel Smith, who had broken his first bread in the White House with his onetime crony Franklin Roosevelt only the week before, released to the Press excerpts from an open letter to the New York State Chamber of Commerce in the December New Outlook. "I do not believe,'' blazed the Happy Warrior, "that the Democratic Party is fated to be always the party of greenbackers, paper money printers, free silverites, currency managers, rubber dollar manufacturers arid crackpots. I am too old now to be regular just for the sake of regularity. . . . We are told that there is a new theory of government abroad. It is the theory that the executives are quarterbacks on a football team who do not know a minute in advance what signal they will call next. They determine the plays on the basis of 'hunches.' Of course, this is just another name for opportunism. There is nothing new in it. It never pulled a great industrial nation out of a depression. ... In the absence of anything definitely known to be better, I am for a return to the gold standard. I am for gold dollars as against baloney dollars. I am for experience against experiment."