The Charlotte News
Thursday, May 2, 1940
THREE EDITORIALS
Appeal
Little Matters Like These Don't Bother the Reds
The annual May Day appeal of the Communist International, issued in Moscow, is interesting this year. According to the Associated Press:
The lengthy appeal, which occupied nearly four columns of the front page of the Communist Party Newspaper, Pravda, urged workers of all countries to unite under the banner of Communism against capitalism and against war.
War, you understand, under the Marxian dialectic, is always the work of capitalism.
There is, to be sure, a little matter of the fact that it was Nazi Germany, a professedly anti-capitalistic state, which made the present war in Europe. But the Comrades wave that away by explaining that Germany is really only fighting against aggression by Britain and France.
There is also the even more pointed matter that the signing of a pact between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia is a thing which probably nerved Hitler to try to go through with the rape of Poland--a rape in which Communist Russia eagerly participated. But that, you understand, was really only a move for peace, which England and France were too brutal to recognize.
And then there is the final matter of the attack on Finland by Communist Russia. No doubt, you will think that that was certainly war. But if so, then it only shows that you have a bourgeois mind. Actually, it was only a defensive move to keep Finland, with 3,000,000 people, from overrunning Russia, with 180,000,000.
"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your wits!"
Measure of Congressional Zeal for Political Purity
Another foregone conclusion was the shelving of the revised Hatch Act. The original Hatch Act, you remember, was passed by a nice margin--in the Senate without a record vote, in the House by 241 to 134--to the too loud declamations by the assembled statesmen concerning their vast devotion to purity in politics, their determination to safeguard that purity by every means in their power.
The original Hatch Act which produced all the fervor for virtue barred Federal employees from participating actively in political campaigns or contributing to candidates, served to emasculate power which the New Deal in Washington had been exercising in state campaigns such as those in which Senators George of Georgia and Happy Chandler of Kentucky were involved.
The revised Hatch Bill, however, proposed to bar also those employees of state agencies who draw part of their pay from the Federal Government from politicking in Federal elections. But that meant that the state highway departments and other agencies which make up the backbone of the state machines in practically all the states would be barred. And this, masters, is an election year, when the boys need to have those machines in the best running order.
In short, the cynical boys turn out to have been right: Congressmen and Senators generally are in favor of purity in politics when it serves to aggrandize their own power or at least when it doesn't damage that power: are dead against it when it threatens that power. Which was what was to have been expected in the first place.
The Pittsburgh Boys Set Some Impossible Terms
Samuel Harden Church, president of the Carnegie Institute, says he and the Pittsburgh group backing him are in good faith when they offer a million smackers to anybody who, during the month of May, will capture Adolf Hitler, alive and unhurt, and hand him over to the League of Nations to stand trial for his crimes. And it may be so. But if it isn't, the millionaires can sleep in peace just the same, for there is no chance that their action will do more than direct attention to their opinion of Adolf.
If the offer was to have any chance of success, it had to be for proof that somebody had succeeded in executing Der Furious.
It is quite within the range of possibility that a million might inspire some genius to work out a feasible plan for getting at Adolf despite the elaborate watch kept over him. But there aren't enough cunning brains on earth to take up a scheme for successfully kidnaping and carrying him from Berlin to France.
And it is understandable why Mr. Church and his friends flinched from the killing offer. Not because it would be a crime to execute Adolf. This man's life is undoubtedly forfeit under the law of all nations, and he is as open game as any other maniac killer.
Nevertheless, the United States is not at war. And such an offer coming from a citizen of a "neutral" country would of course have had all sorts of repercussions. So we suppose Mr. Church and his friends will just have to put up with keeping their million.
Framed Edition
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