The Charlotte News

Tuesday, April 14, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the continuing French game of musical chairs, with Laval coming back into the Cabinet in as yet an undefined role.

Larger variants of the amphibious landing craft which the caption beneath the photograph labels "crocodile boats" would ultimately become quite commonplace to the public, especially after D-Day. For now, they were confined to use for training on Lake Pontchartrain.

John Lardner, who, at last report, was waiting for a bus in Darwin, while speaking with a soldier about the things different between the Antipodes and America, now reports of the reddened hair obtained, at least transitorily, from the flying red dust abounding down under.

We can empathize. When we were but only five, we were ripped from the sands of our youth and transported into the North Carolina Piedmont wherein the soil is as red as Rudolph’s nose; being around same, we may therefore attest from experience, will likewise turn your hair and most of the rest of you red.

The editorial column provides no solace to Robert Rice Reynolds, who, at last report, was fishing around in Alaskan waters looking for walrus, finds that he voted an isolationist line on every important issue, the draft, the extension of the draft term to 30 months, Lend-Lease, lifting of the arms embargo to belligerents, etc., his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

His seeming prescience in suggesting fortification of outlying Aleutian islands, valuable at the time for potentially providing a staging area from which to attack Japan, was offset by the fact that the impetus for his proposal was his fear of the Reds, not the Japanese.

He brags of having proposed in September, 1938, and afterward, that, in exchange for war debts of Britain, the United States should acquire Bermuda, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Newfoundland and Labrador, plus a strip of land in Canada between Washington State and Alaska. The News opines that the plan was not very diplomatic or dignified, only betraying Bob’s recurring Anglophobia.

Bob, in other other words, as far as The News was concerned, could go back to hunting walrus in Alaska.

Dorothy Thompson, as had Paul Mallon a few days earlier, suggests that the new patriotic phrase ought be "Remember Bataan" rather than remembrance of the failure at Pearl Harbor.

After the war ended victoriously, of course, it was Pearl Harbor which everyone remembered, not the loss of Bataan, even if the death march certainly is still within the memory of those who study the war.

Paul Mallon tells of the probable hard times ahead for Russia after the spring thaw, but offers that Russia, having regained during its winter counter-offensive only 15% of the territory lost in the summer and fall, had nevertheless worn down the Nazi juggernaut sufficiently that German equipment might yet become difficult of replacement, finds that Russia will probably survive the summer onslaught, but even if not, that the British could now successfully resist invasion by the Nazis across the Channel.

Incidentally, since there was no mention of it on the editorial page or the front page, but since the First Amendment is a topic on which the editorial page often remarks, and since a particular case, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 US 568, decided March 9, 1942, is one well known to most law students, we thought we would at least reference it, as it relates to cases referenced on the page previously when Cash was aboard as associate editor.

Candidly, we have never come in contact with a Jehovah's Witness who used the sort of language that the gentleman did on the street in New Hampshire to the marshal, whether employing the name of the deity or just the stripped-down version. But, we nevertheless disagree with the Court's decision on this one, perhaps by dent of the time in which we came of age; it was a decision which would be modified in its application and arguably overruled, even if still cited with approval, by the late 1960's and early 1970's, such as in the 5 to 2 decision in Gooding v. Wilson, 405 US 518 (1972), holding that a Georgia statute, not properly construed by state decisions to be limited in its proscription of speech to "fighting words", as measured by whether it is likely that the hearer of the words would make an immediate violent response to them, was therefore unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, and, similarly, the 5 to 4 decision in Cohen v. California, 403 US 15 (1971), and, especially, the 6 to 3 decision in Lewis v. City of New Orleans, 415 US 130 (1974). One can today, in a public place, with impunity, utter words like unto those uttered by Mr. Chaplinsky, ascribed or as he claimed, without having them considered to be "fighting words", at least as long as there is no physical gesture communicative of an intent to assault going along with the words, in which case it might give rise to the right of the other party to employ self-defense, and qualify thereby simply as an assault, apart from the speech incidentally accompanying it.

Any statute which attempts to prohibit such speech per se, utilizing such terms as "profanity" or "obscenity" or "words of opprobrium" would in all likelihood be held unduly vague or overbroad and thus unconstitutional. Changing times and customs in society with regard to speech ought broaden the scope of it; it should never narrow it, lest we wind up somewhere in Salem in the 1690's all over again, have then to endure retributive attempts to make examples of celebrities by ruining their lives, leading to their suicides, and eventually have to fight the Civil War again and have the Civil Rights Movement all over again.

Reno v. A.C.L.U., 521 US 844 (1997), provides a good example, from a Conservative Supreme Court, emblematic of such changing customs and times, an opinion which was unanimous, except for a partial dissent of Justice O'Connor and Chief Justice Rehnquist. (Incidentally, to those who become so upset about things they see or hear as adults and consider unduly lurid or "offensive" for children to see and hear, whether on tv, in movies, over the internet, or just in everyday life, do you remember what you saw and heard as a child, really? We do, much of it, indeed, from other children our own age or younger at the time, and it far outweighed anything much imaginable under the sun which might be deemed by you "offensive" in this day and age, where most everything is so incredibly limited and repressed as to be offensively milquetoasted mediocrity in itself. If you want to focus on the offensive, start with the damned Zapruder film, if you have forgotten your youth, and go from there. Yet, we have never heard any of these moralists seek to limit its showing, the most obscene film ever made in the history of mankind. What about war footage? Oh, they are historical in nature. Point proven.)

It is surprising to find Frank Murphy delivering the Chaplinsky opinion, the same Frank Murphy who in 1944 deplored the 1942 internment of the Japanese, who openly criticized the trial of General Homma after the war as a farce constitutionally, that despite the plain evidence that General Homma was a war criminal who, during the Bataan death march, with at least deliberate indifference to his responsibilities to insure adherence to the Geneva Convention, did nothing but concentrate, by his own contentions, on the taking of Corregidor, an insensitive beast who claimed to enjoy poetry, betrayed by his love of a very unpoetic novel, in our opinion, sentimental though it is. (If you think it's poetic, then all well and good. Just make sure its poetry does not thereby induce you to romanticize your tendency to look away, look away, to tomorrow, as another day, when thousands are being slaughtered, thousands over whom you, Little Prince or Princess, have responsibility to oversee and for whom to order humane treatment to your understrapper overseers.) But, here, Frank Murphy, together with the rest of the Court, one of the more Liberal Courts ever assembled, could not accept and defend the rights of a Jehovah's Witness in uttering, in plain frustration upon his arrest for merely handing out leaflets, a cussword at a marshal who ought to have been cussed even more roundly. It is no wonder that there had to be fought a world war in that day and age. Suppression of words leads to violence. It is the very reason our Founders provided us the First Amendment.

The test to determine whether words are "fighting words" ought be a clear and objective one, one similar to that articulated by Justice Douglas in his concurrence in Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969): that is, did the words, in addition to being considered by the ordinary person to be hostile and likely to induce violence, lead to actual violence under the circumstances?

We find that, most usually, though not always, those who want to limit the speech of others are the worst and most frequent offenders of any proscriptions against vile speech during their most private moments, and, moreover, usually think nothing of committing perjury or defamation quite publicly, as they deplore someone else's ordinary speech. Apparently, trying to limit the speech of others is just one among many such artifices which such persons employ to attempt to control and manipulate the behavior of others in order to gain power, personal and political, the hallmark of any true fascist. Perjury, defamation, claims of moral superiority with regard to ideas and speech of others deemed inimical to their special purpose, plus, often, private habitual profanity of the worst stripe--all the marks of the fascist manipulator.

Those who use the increasingly familiar fallback position that something is "unfit for children" are really merely using children as a fence for their abnormal sensitivities to language and pictures which they themselves cannot control in their own minds--probably, even usually, resultant from either alcohol or drug abuse, prescription or otherwise, occasioned through time. That's our opinion, anyway. If you don't like it, we have a map for you, to Argentina.

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