The Charlotte News

Monday, May 11, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Returning a moment to Saturday's front page, we question whether Mr. Ward had it in for Mr. Bledsoe (the Bleeding Heart)--assuming the correctness of Dr. Watkins's attribution of intended revenge--not because of any hallucination Mr. Ward possessed (or which had possessed him to become his warder), but because, obviously, no sane person would wish to have been released into the general run-of-muck rubberless, sugarless, gasless, inflation-prone society of 1942 with all its attendant threats of imminent death either by direct attack or being drafted into the service of the country to be sent to the various theaters of death to die at the hands of the enemy. Was it not by far the saner position to stick with the tried and true environment of Morganton, even with the attendant risk of dying from malaria or typhus or the Plague from eating the White Horse gravy with rat on the side? Perhaps Mr. Ward had only discovered Corollary 51 to Catch-22, and was attempting, quite sanely, to prove his unfitness for release into society. In which case, Mr. Bledsoe could have shrewdly so argued and thereby obtained his release, based on the inherent sanity of not wishing to be released.

In that event, Mr. Ward would have, quite rationally, killed Mr. Bledsoe, pleading insanity for his defense, that he was clearly not sane because he wished to stay in Morganton, even if the alternative was release into the general society which had gone quite demonstrably insane.

Or, conversely, perhaps Mr. Ward was trying to show that he was generally sane enough to be in society by affecting the nuances of insanity, a desire to kill the lawyer helping him, thereby demonstrating his fitness for release into society, just as with much of the run of the mill clientele one encounters as an attorney. In that case, too, Mr. Bledsoe might have so argued, and, in winning the argument, naturally would likely have wound up being killed by his client dissatisfied with the result.

These thoughts, no doubt, and the strategy to pursue in the best interests of Mr. Ward, weighed heavily upon Mr. Bledsoe's mind after the colloquy with Dr. Watkins, and presented the reason for his having sought the recess to confer with his client before continuing the hearing, to see which of these positions Mr. Ward rationally favored. Was the family whose affections Mr. Ward believed Mr. Bledsoe was trying to alienate not his actual family but his adopted family at Morganton?

The front page presents some follow-up news on the Battle of the Coral Sea, concluded Friday.

A report comes of the first War Department communique on the Doolittle raid three weeks earlier, indicating that the planes which bombed Tokyo were from the Army.

The British reported that Hitler appeared to be moving trainloads of gas to the Russian front in the Crimea, based on reports out of Switzerland. The editorial column, as well, remarks on the topic in "Masks Come Out".

A letter to the editor chafes under the weight of the announcement of the decision of the Democratic Party in South Carolina to bar African-Americans from party membership, with the goal of preventing exercise of the right of franchise—a right, after all, conferred by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution and applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, even if, historically, the Constitution had never much motivated the hottest headed South Carolinians to conform to any particular standard of conduct not recognized by the Palmetto State gentry and lesser lights in common as acceptable politesse, that is to say that which was part of the miasmic, hubristic hubbuboo assembled into some vaguely discernible form of articulated judgment.

Asks rhetorically the letter writer: why then should the black man fight for his country when his country would treat him no better than Hitler without fighting?

It was a good question to address to the South Carolina Democratic Party, even if stated with considerable hyperbole. For, in truth, with Hitler at the helm, any non-Aryan would have been consigned to a concentration camp and eventually exterminated, not merely deprived of economic and political rights. But that is to quibble with the letter writer’s simply stated premise, one which in fact acted as a conscientious backdrop in the 1950’s and 1960’s to provide additional foundation for the notion of equal rights and opportunity. Fit enough to fight for the country, fit enough to vote and attend the same schools as the white population.

But in fact, of course, no one need earn those rights, whether by fighting for the country or demonstrating in the streets to attain them, lest the country be as Germany with its tradition of "duly acquired rights". In America, one is entitled by dint of birth to those rights. Nothing less will suffice. Yet, for a century after the Civil War, a large part of the South stood in contrariance to that simple principle which formed the basis for democratic government in the country from the founding. They were obviously too dumb to understand it, too dumb to understand that those very notions had given inspiration to Hitler in the first place.

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