The Charlotte News
SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 1941
THREE EDITORIALS
Accurate Term
Historical Meaning of This Name Applies to Lindbergh
The American appeasers will undoubtedly raise a great uproar of outraged virtue against the President's designation of Charles A. Lindberg as a Copperhead.
Appeaser is the correct term. What the people who still call themselves isolationists now demand is that we attempt to placate the rage of Adolf Hitler and his murderous barbarians by welshing on the commitment we have made to England, cold-bloodedly abandoning her and turning on the heat to see that she surrenders to Hitler in a so-called negotiated peace.
That is the very essence of appeasement--so much so that it makes Chamberlain's betrayal of Czecho-Slovakia at Munich look like a high an honorable deed.
In the American historical sense, as Mr.Roosevelt made clear, Copperhead is the precise synonym for appeaser. These creatures are nothing new in America, having been all over the place in the War of the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War and World War I.
Herbert Agar has pointed out that in times of the greatest peril it is idle nonsense for a people to stand on ceremony and say that it has no right to question a man's motives. Stanley High, in a recent letter to The New York Herald-Tribune, said clearly that we have no proof at all that the claims of the appeasers--that they really want Britain to win--are not really concessions to the national sentiment and designed to get us into a position where it will no longer be possible to resist complete surrender to Fascism--internal and external--when the appeasers can throw off the mask.
We know also that every country in the world which has gone down has had its Quislings, invariably men in the highest and most respected positions.
About Charles A. Lindbergh there are a number of pieces of evidence.
One is that, while he was in France, he lived for years on a lonely island as the daily companion and pupil of Alexis Carrel, one of the great Fascist "intellectuals," of the world and an ardent admirer of the essential Nazi ideal.
He has a Nazi medal which, despite his claims to repudiating the Nazi murders and crimes, he has never turned back--an obvious act of protest if he really felt that way.
Since his return to this country he has constantly associated with men who are known to have Fascist sympathies.
His wife, whose adoration of' and devotion to him are legendary, has written a book, in which she cooly lays down the proposition that democracy is a justly doomed system and that Nazism, in its essence, is The Wave of the Future, irresistible and certain, and that what we must do is quietly to surrender to it and try to make our terms with it.
Day in and day out he has preached the same doctrine preached by all American appeasers from the beginning, the doctrine of defeatism.
More still, not only the Nazi and Italian Fascist organizations in this country but also virtually every native Fascist organization and journal (such as Coughlin's "Social Justice") have for many weeks now been bawling that Lindbergh is the Man on Horseback who will save the nation (i.e., our predestined Fuehrer).
None of this justifies anybody in assuming that Lindbergh is a Quisling or a Laval. But it does justify the most searching inquiry into his motives. And it does justify the name of Copperhead in the historical sense of defeatist and appeaser.
Sad Show
Nye and Roosevelt Vie at Making America Ineffectual
The lengths to which the appeasers are prepared to go were shown yesterday when, without an iota of proof, Gerald P. Nye cooly said in effect that the President had deliberately lied in suggesting that the Nazis might already be established in Greenland, by calling the whole thing a "scare."
Nye is a professional pacifist, with a vested interest in maintaining that now idiotic position. But he is also the curious kind of radical produced in the Middle West. Not a Communist by profession or even by conviction, nevertheless he has talked the Communist shibboleths all his life. And now he talks and acts precisely as though he were hewing to the Communist Party line, works just as hard to breed distrust and paralyze America--to aid Hitler in the end--as any editor of the Daily Worker.
But if Nye is a disheartening spectacle in these times, the President, who was once supposed to be a bold and dashing leader, is not much better.
If he did not positively know that the Nazis were in Greenland he had no business suggesting it to the public. If he did know it, he ought to have told the public what was being done about it. If the Nazis are there, American opinion demands that they be blasted out, whatever the cost.
Just as vague and ineffectual is the President's announcement that convoy is out, that instead the Navy is to patrol the high seas and inform the British where the Nazis are, so they can destroy them, maybe.
Apparently, it is the President's policy to commit as many acts of war as possible without making a single one of them really effective.
Site ed. note: Senator Robert Rice Reynolds of North Carolina became one of Cash's favorite editorial targets in the spring of 1941 as Reynolds vied for the then critically important Senate post of chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. Cash's instincts that Reynolds was a back-stabber of Administration policy and not to be trusted was demonstrated amply for history when in April, 1940, without anyone's knowledge at the time, he provided to a Nazi agent, Simon Koedel, detailed information regarding the ship handling capabilities of French ports, confidential information entrusted to Reynolds as a member of the committee to which he now, a year later, sought the chairmanship. (Source: Hitler's Undercover War, William Breur, St. Martin's Press, 1989, pp. 138-139; The Game of Foxes, Ladislas Farago, McKay, 1971, p. 496) Although Reynolds was apparently not expressly aware of the agent's Nazi ties, the breach of confidence in wartime speaks volumes for Reynolds' loyalties. And two months after the delivery of this information regarding French ports, Hitler was goose-stepping a jig proudly in ham at Compiegne as the French surrendered. Bob was helpful in the cause. He eventually obtained his chairmanship.
*Pay Off
President's Political Loyalty Saves Job for Reynolds
As disheartening as anything in sight is the appeasement of the Administration about Robert Rice Reynolds.
It is not surprising to find Wheeler & Co.determined to see that he gets the post of chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. They are out to hamstring the policy, backed by the majority of the people and of Congress, of aiding England to the point of victory for her and ourselves. And in that job Robert Rice Reynolds will be admirably calculated to further their purpose.
What is amazing is that we find Administration spokesmen like Senator Byrnes saying that they will vote to advance him to the position.
It may be said with confidence, we believe, that there is no supporter of our present foreign policy in the Senate who does not know that the elevation of Reynolds Reynolds to this job flirts with a national disaster.
Yet we find men in whom the Republic has some confidence going right ahead to seat him.Part of that is undoubtedly due to the professional politician's jealousy for such political devices as seniority.
But in the end the blame rests squarely on the Administration. Reynolds, it appears, has sometimes voted for the domestic New Deal in critical moments, and so the President refuses to turn the heat on his henchmen in order to block him--is going right ahead to have the fellow given the post though he must foresee the consequences.