The Charlotte News

MONDAY, APRIL 21, 1941

THREE EDITORIALS

Wire Them!

Reynolds Will Be Blocked Only if Public Demands It

It is a pity that the North Carolina Bar Association is not now in session. For we have little doubt that if it were, it would follow the example set by the South Carolina Bar Association and protest the elevation of Robert Rice Reynolds to the post of chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee.

At any rate, the Committee to Defend America By Aiding the Allies should get in touch with its branches all over the country and urge them to follow up the Charlotte chapter's action in voicing vigorous opposition to Reynolds for the Job.

We have already said it but it cannot be too much repeated: to place this man in this key post in the present national crisis will be a tragic error for which the nation will pay in regret and tears. He is grotesquely unfit for the job. He is unfit as an ignorant and wholly superficial and irresponsible man. But he is doubly unfit because of his hatred of Britain and his violent opposition to the policy of defending this country by aiding Britain--the policy adopted by the overwhelming suffrage of the people. And because of his activity in stirring up hate and disunity among us.

Not only organized groups but every individual who feels that his elevation is intolerable should wire both key Senators and the Administration, which is not exerting the energy it ought to exercise to block this.

Else Reynolds is going to get the post. The Senate will not set aside the seniority rule, precious to politicians, unless it feels that the national demand requires it.

High Price

Germans Pay Much for Gains Which Are Not Great

The end seems to be about at hand for Greece. There is a chance that new lines can be formed across the mountains at the head of the Ionian peninsula, in order to hold Athens. But Thermopylae is no longer so easily defended as it was when Leonidas and the Spartans made their famous stand.

Then the pass was about fourteen yards wide. Now river deposits have extended it to three miles of flat sand perfectly adapted for mechanized warfare.

But if Greece falls, will the British have been justified in exposing Libya to send an army into the Balkans?

For one thing, the German propaganda that the British desert their allies has been exploded. For another, it has been clearly demonstrated for all the world to see that, man for man, there is nothing superior in the German soldier, that given the same equipment, other men can stand up to him and whip him. For hand to hand fighting, he has proved again, as in the past, to a have no great stomach. And Turkey and other nations now know well that his success so far is due wholly to weight of equipment and to numbers.

Furthermore, the Nazis have apparently had to pay a dreadful price in blood for a victory which has netted them nothing of value save Salonika--which means so much more territory, full of people who hate them with unexampled hate, to police and hold under by sheer force. The news of these losses will inevitably get around in Germany and will do no good to the morale of a people who had been promised bloodless victory

The British will have lost their foothold on the Continent and Libya. But the first was to be expected, and the second means nothing if the Germans are stopped on the Egyptian border, which now seems probable.

A Complaint

Nye Thinks Slavs Should Have Submitted Quietly

Gerald P. Nye, the great naval expert from North Dakota, was very busy Friday criticizing the Administration for having egged Yugoslavia into standing up to Hitler. Said he:

"One day this country will be held up in the light of having encouraged these little countries to stand up one after another and commit suicide by promising help that we couldn't possibly furnish."

It is plainly Gerald P. Nye's thesis that the little countries ought to have been encouraged to submit quietly to the Nazi yoke. The fact that such submission means the systematic murder of the leaders of these little people, the systematic sterilization of the best elements among them, the systematic enslavement of the remainder does not appear to bother Gerald P. Nye in the least.

But that logic does at least give a sort of consistency to Gerald P.'s general position. The little nations fight, of course, because they hope that, even if they are overwhelmed for the time being, democracy will be given time to arm and eventually destroy Hitler to set them free again.

Gerald P., however, is doing his level best to see that the greatest democracy of them all is paralyzed by a Senate resolution to forbid convoy--equivalent to notice to Adolf Hitler to go right ahead.

Gerald P. not only demands that the little nations give up quietly to the tyrant. He also doesn't seem to mind the fact that his course hurries the day when the United States will have to face Hitlerism, alone.

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