"Quacks, Parlor Pinks" For Plan E, Lyons Says; Dean Landis Finds Cambridge Near-Bankrupt

With a fair sprinkling of mud, the Plan E campaign reached its peak of verbosity yesterday when Mayor Lyons asserted in a radio speech that only "quacks and parlor pinks" were sponsoring the proposed charter for Cambridge while Dean Landis charged that the last two years here are examples of how a city should not be managed.

As chairman of the Plan E Committee, Dean Landis spent a hectic Sunday, debating with Daniel Lynch, leader of the anti-City Manager forces, in the afternoon and addressing volunteer Plan E workers in the evening.

Charging that "political patronage has entered deeply into the civil service of this city," Dean Landis said to the 200-odd citizens who attended his debate with Lynch yesterday afternoon. "We think that bankruptcy threatens the city."

He pointed to the tax rate, which has increased $10 in the last ten years and which will be raised from $43 to $47 next year to support his contention that Cambridge is at the end of its financial rope.

"I don't mind paying taxes if we got our money's worth," Dean Landis said, adding that the public services have steadily gone down hill while the tax rate has gone up since 1938, when Plan E was defeated by a slight margin at the polls.

Plan E provides for a nine man council selected on a city wide basis by the single transferable vote system of proportional representation. The council selects a city manager responsible to it and chooses one of its members as mayer, who presides at council meetings and is ceremonial head of the government.

Opposition to the proposed charter has been directed at its proportional representation features, which, according to Lynch, have "a manifest tendency towards racial, religious, and professional groups."

"If you want a united America you'll vote against this plan for proportional representation," Lynch said in his debate with Landis. "It's a foreign importation. It hasn't worked out well anywhere."

At the debate he read a letter from Professor Albert B. Hart attacking the "artificial confusion of the plan itself." Lynch added that P. R. is a "complicated system of voting which leads to a drastic increase in the number of candidates."