The Charlotte News

Thursday, November 19, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page offers little not reported in the last few days and not already summarized previously. We thus leave it to you to read on your own.

The editorial page attacks again Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi for his filibustering activity, set to last a month, against the anti-poll tax legislation pending before the Senate. He was stark example of the lengths to which the Neanderthalic would go to silence the most precious right any citizen has besides speech, the exercise of the franchise. The same Neanderthals always attempt to silence speech of course. For speech threatens them--any speech, even quoting Shakespeare to them. It is bred within their social framework, in their clubs, such as the Ku Klux Klan.

You will know them by their colors--haughty, arrogant, rude, and always pointing the finger at those who desire only justice and fairness, claiming that it is they who are the obstructionists, disfavoring states' rights, those rights which seek to deny the rights of individuals disfavored by the local social clubs.

"PET" and "SWEETIES" as acronyms for female military units, 'ey? Not on your life today; probably not on your life, then.

"Bonanza" finds fault with the proposed bill to extend the government employee work week to 44-hours with time and a half for the extra four rounds of the clock. That, in the face of the reports of idle workers aplenty in the government service, such as that reported by the column a couple of weeks earlier involving the boyfriend calling and movie magazine perusing secretaries and the Navy captain who spent a half hour teaching a young female employee the difference between "affect" and "effect". The proposed bill appeared as an example of trickle-down economics in the offing.

Paul Mallon, for the second time in as many months, cites the new Pentagon building, this time by its more familiar name than the "War Department Building" which he first labeled it, as the prime example of government waste, costing 70 million dollars when 35 million had been budgeted for it. He wishes Senator Byrd well in fighting such waste but warrants it to be an uphill battle unlikely of success.

Not a word is offered on the editorial page regarding the Gettysburg Address on this its first anniversary since the beginning of American involvement formally in World War II, its 79th anniversary. The omission is especially glaring with future Civil War historiographer, Burke Davis, now guiding the column. Perhaps, the following year. It would have been especially apropos amid the print on Senator Bilbo's retrograde demonstration hearkening back to a time more accommodating to the Senator's views, 1863.

In any event, it was all increasingly somewhere oulter-le-mer, as Pierre Laval, possessed of newly broadened dictatorial powers over France afforded by his German masters, considered whether the French fleet at Toulon would be turned over to the Nazis.

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