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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 22, 1972)
o ... n doiu friday, September 22, 1972 lincoln, nebraska vol. 96, no. 1 2 Registration drive ends Saturday Friday and Saturday are the last days for Lincoln residents to take advantage of 13 special voter registration locations throughout the city. Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled residency requirements similiar to those in Nebraska unconstitutional, an individual may register to vote in the Nov. 7 general election by telling election officials he has lived in the state for one day and considers it his legal residence. However, by registering in Lincoln, a person could be forced to take on added responsibilities as a citizen of the city, including jury duty and the payment of city wheel tax when registering a motor vehicle in Lancaster County. To vote in the November election, one must register by Oct. 27. The Election Commissioner's off;ce is open Monday - Friday from 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. On Oct. 27, the office will stay open until 6 p.m. Additional voter registration hours will be provided during October at Gateway Shopping Center, according to an official in the commissioner's office. Dates and times will be announced. The thirteen locations open Friday and Saturday from 4-8 - are Belmont Jack & Jill, 11th and Belmont; Kichmon Gordman Store, 4600 Vine; Mr. B W REfilSTER'AND W F "X V lJ tl.-Ml Sift. - I pllitisi. J O jlo m lygmp mm J IGA, 48th and Van Dorn and So. 27th and Highway 2; Hinky Dinky, 17th and South; Safeway, 48th and Pioneer, 6235 Have lock, 1535 No. 27th and 23rd and O; Recreation Center No. 1, 1225 F; Easterday Center, 6200 Adams; Leon's Food Mart, Winthrop Road and Ryons; and Gen. Arnold School, 5300 W. Knight Dr. Noting that the youth vote has a ways to go in Nebraska, Secretary of State Allen Beerman said he doubts if even 40 percent of the state's 18- and 19-year-olds have registered yet. Beerman said most young voter registration drives have been confined to college campuses. More than half of the young eligible voters are working, in military service or in technical schools, he said. Beerman said he doubts whether half of the newly enfranchised voters will register in time for the November election. A person must be 18 years old on or before Nov. 7 to vote in the election. ivnn continues lifelong campaign McGovern skirmish started in 1948 by Michael (O.J.) Nelson In 1946 Richard Milhaus Nixon, a California lawyer, was asked to run for office. The request came from a local GOP official, who first asked if Nixon was Republican. "I guess so," he replied, "I voted for Dewey last time." The answer apparently satisfied the party official, because a few months later Nixon was campaigning for Congress. He denounced Democrats, social reformers and communists a combination he eventually parleyed into a U.S. Senate seat, two terms as Vice President and eventually. Chief of State. He was a hard campaigner. He molded his first opponent, Rep. Jerry Voorhis, into a symbol of big government meddlesomeness. The 33-year-old attorney's campaign literature said Voohis "stayed safely behind the front in Washington" while Nixon "fought in defense of his country in the stinking mud and jungles of the Solomon (Islands)." The Democrat's past proved an easy target for Nixon. Voorhis was first elected to Congress in 1936 as a "New Dealer." He had supported social welfare legislation and, in his youth, had mixed with socialists and populists. The two met in a series of five debates. Throughout them Nixon put his opponent on the defensive. He attacked his association with "liberal-radical labor unions" and the Truman administration, which the Republicans said was "leading the nation down the road to socialism." Nixon won the election and spent his first two years in the House as a relentless foe of communists, subversives and Democrats. He served on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and was one of the people responsible for the conviction of Alger Hiss, former aide to President Franklin Roosevelt, on charges of subversion. It was the only major conviction to come out of the post World War 1 1 McCarthy hearings. His anticommunist activities resulted in passage of the Mundt-Nixon Bill, which required the registration of "communist front organizations." The bill, plus the Hiss conviction, made green political hay for the young representative. He won re-election in 1948, and in 1950 decided to run for the U.S. Senate. The Senate race was modeled on his two congressional campaigns. He tagged his oppoent, Helen Douglas, 'The Pink Lady." He hammered at his perennial theme: "reds in government." Douglas tried to play-up her anticommunist Turn to page 8 by Chris Harper The lonely graduate student watched as the ancient mimeograph machine churned out literature for a variety of anti-Cold War causes, including the defeat of the Nixon-Mundt bill to register "Communist front organizations." The student, George S. McGovern, was a 26-year-old graduate assistant in the history department at Northwestern University. The battle between McGovern and President Nixon began at that mimeograph machine more than 24 years ago in 1948. McGovern'i first serious political involvement began with his support cf Hsnry Wallace, former vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt and presidential nominee of the leftist Progressive Party. He supported Wallace because "U.S. foreign policy was needlessly exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union and we were wrong in our support of Chiang, the French in Indochina, and Bao Dai. I was unhappy with the direction that the Democratic Party was taking at that time. I likrd what Wallace had to say about foreign policy." However, disillusionment engulfed McGovern, at the Progressive Party convention in Philadelphia. He was chosen as an Illinois delegate, but became disappointed with the "fanaticism" of some of Wallace's cohorts and finally did not vote in the 1948 presidential election. McGovern completed his gradudate work at Northwestern and returned home to Mitchell, S.D., to teach at Dakota Wesleyan University. He taught history and American government until 1953 when he became a full-time organizer for the South Dakota Democratic Party. When he bec'ame Coordinator, no Democrat held a state office and only two of 110 state legislators were Democrats. Republicans had won more than 90 per cent of all South Dakota elections since 1889. In 1972 both the South Dakota governor and lieutenant governor are Democrats. Both congressmen, a senator and 41 of 110 state legislators are Democratic Party members. McGovern warned South Dakotans of the jeopardy of the one-party rule. A combination of McGovern'i organization, speaking engagements and note cards aided the election of 25 Democrats to the state legislature in 1954, according to McGovern, a biography by Robert Sam Anson (copyright 1972, Holt, Rinehart, Winston). For all practical purposes, George Stanley McGovern should not be the Democratic presidential nominee. Furthermore, he should never have been a senator or a congressmen the book contends. McGovern always has been the underdog. In 1956 he decided to run for the House of Representatives against Rep. Harold Lovre, a four-time incumbent and South Dakota's top vote-getter in 1954. A spring poll showed that McGovern trailed Lovre by a margin of 56 per cent. He turned the poll's predictions into a 12,000 vote victory in the November election. The South Dakotan faced Gov. Joe Foss in 1956 for the same congressional seat. Many of McGovern'i friends bid him farewell in Washington as the election drew closer. They said he could never win. He swamped Foss by nearly 15,000 votes in the November balloting. In 1960 McGovern eyed the U.S. Senate seat held by Karl Mundt, a congressman of 14 years. The election was a closely contested battle until an endorsement of Mundt by the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the unpopularity of John F. Kennedy in South Dakota combined to destroy McGovern. After Kennedy's election, he started a new program, Food for Peace, and selected McGovern as its first director in 1961. The program served the hungry people of America and foreign nations. The American farmer also benefited from the i urn to page 3