The Charlotte News
Tuesday, June 11, 1940
FOUR EDITORIALS
In
Our Midst
Registering Aliens Won't Do
Innocent Any Harm
Judge Hoyle Sink's order to police officers of the County to have all
aliens register with the clerk of court turns up a North Carolina statute that
most people, including ourselves, did not know existed.
However, there can be no rational objection to the measure or its
enforcement. Aliens who have nothing to hide will have nothing to fear. And the
procedure is mild enough. The alien merely has to register once, does not have
to report at intervals thereafter as he would have had to do in any European country--including
England--at any time since the last war. Moreover, if the law is strictly
enforced, it should turn up any aliens illegally in this country, some of them
perhaps of an undesirable type.
None of this is to suggest that Charlotte and Mecklenburg are in any
appreciable danger from aliens. There are not many of them to begin with. Most
of them are beyond question glad enough to be away from their native countries,
particularly if they are Germans or Italians. There are a few Hitler
sympathizers in town of course. But there are at least as many natives as
aliens among these. And when they are aliens they are usually naturalized, and
so cannot be got at by such laws as the one we now have. And so long as they
only talk they are within their rights and constitute nothing worse than a
nuisance.
Nor is it likely that they can--even if they wanted to--do much besides
talk. Charlotte, after all, is hardly a great military objective.
Which Seems a Little Odd in View
of Past
We are still straining our ears, but that roar has not come. We mean the
roar against the removal of the bodies in the old burying ground on Queens Road
where the new Little Theater is to be built.
Not that we favor any such roar. The dead, we are persuaded, will not
sleep any less soundly for having their bones removed from one spot in God's
earth to another. True, it is not wholly as though these dead were nameless and
forgotten. The father of one living woman is known to lie in the old graveyard.
And others must be of known identity. But the Little Theater is handling the
matter with full regard to all the decencies and to the rights of everybody.
And there is no rational ground to object.
What sets us to expecting a roar was that we remembered the terrible
outcries which have invariably arisen when somebody proposed, not to remove the
bodies from the old churchyard behind the First Presbyterian Church but simply
to put some paths in the plot, set benches on the paths, let people use the
place as a park. It has always seemed to us that if the dead who lie there were
sentient they probably would not be averse to the company of human creatures
still in the flesh. And that if they weren't sentient, it couldn't possibly
matter to them.
But invariably the project has excited protests that it would be "to
desecrate the tombs of the dead."
No, to be candid, we didn't really expect that roar. We knew beforehand
that circumstances alter cases.
Vigilantism Comes To Its Normal
Flower in Maine
How the undiscriminating hysteria over Fifth Columnists, the vigilante
spirit which has sprung up in many places, works out is now evident. At
Kennebunk, Maine, it has led to tragedy.
In that town there was a congregation of the sect which calls itself
Jehovah's Witnesses. This sect, so far as we know, is neither Nazi nor
Communist. It is simply odd and fanatical--and rigorously refuses to salute
flags and banners on the ground that they come under the Biblical prohibition
against idols.
At Kennebunk the local patrioteers, hiding their sadism and brutality
under the guise of zeal for our institutions, got worked up about it, went to
force the non-conformists to salute the flag--on the idiotic theory that you
convert a man to patriotism by breaking his hand and making him make a gesture
to a piece of bunting. Several of the Witnesses were beat up. The rest fled to
sanctuary from the mob to the frame building which they used as a place of
worship and as headquarters for distributing their literature, barricaded
themselves.
An automobile drew up to the vicinity of the building. The Witnesses
thought it was the mob, blazed away with a shotgun, wounded two men--who may or
may not have been mobsters. The news flew over town, the mob swelled to 2,000
persons, swept down upon the headquarters, burned it. But so thoroughly was the
vigilante spirit established in the town that no member of the mob has been
arrested. Only the leader of the sect.
It is an admirable demonstration of the fact that dealing with the Fifth
Column danger had better be left to the constituted authorities specially
trained for the job--if we care to avoid mob rule.
Mussolini Lets Fall An Interesting
Remark
President Roosevelt last night pulverized the cynical claim of Benito
Mussolini that Italy had sought peace. Far from having sought peace, he had
even refused to submit his demands.
Of course nobody in his senses has ever believed that Mussolini wanted
peace. He is and has been a party to a cold-blooded conspiracy to overrun and
destroy Western civilization and carry off the loot for the Nazi and Fascist
scoundrels.
All this is done in the name of propositions which have greatly fooled
the unwary. In the case of Germany, it has been lebensraum and the
righting of "wrongs of Versailles." And now with Mussolini,
"this gigantic struggle is not only a phase of our revolution, but is a
struggle against starvers. They are holding all the riches and gold on
earth."
But lebensraum and "righting Versailles" we now know to
mean the systematic extermination and enslavement of other highly civilized
peoples in order to give their possessions to Nazi swine. The only people who
starved either Germans or Italians are Hitler and Mussolini--in order to build
their war machine for conquest and loot.
But these pious snufflings serve one good purpose; very often the men who
vent them forget themselves and give away their true purpose. You observe that
Mussolini makes the appointed victims those who "are holding all the
riches and gold on earth."
It happens that more than two-thirds of the gold is being held by the
United States.
Framed Edition
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