The Charlotte News

Saturday, May 23, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page announces the declaration of war at long last by Mexico against the Axis. After currying Nazi favor, they received repayment for their many kindnesses: the Nazis sank two of their merchant ships. Such are Nazis. No good deed goes unpunished.

Public opinion quickly shifted and all the usual suspects were now going to be maintained under close scrutiny, German assets seized to pay for the ships and recompense the families of the victims. The first merchant ship sunk, on May 13, was a tanker, Potrero del Llano. It had been seized from the Axis April 1, 1941, originally an Italian ship, Lucifero. Not El Diablo, but il Lucifero.

By the way, we have discovered that for the past eight years we have misspelled the surname of one of the suspects in the death of W. J. Cash, the three Nazi spies whom Ambassador Daniels sought without success to have arrested on July 12, 1941, eleven days after the death of W. J. Cash. This particular individual’s name was not spelled "Schleebrugge", but rather Schlebrugge, Friedrich Karl von Schlebrugge, a Nazi agent, not a "Baron". At least no more barren than William Rhodes Davis, his Bund operator.

Schlebrugge was significant enough to be one of only three Nazi agents whom Ambassador Daniels in eight years of service ever sought to have arrested.

Interestingly, Schlebrugge's daughter, born in Mexico City in 1941, married Timothy Leary in 1964 and divorced him the following year. In 1966, G. Gordon Liddy, then an assistant district attorney in New Jersey, personally arrested Dr. Leary on drug charges.

On the editorial page, "Cul de Sac" indicates sympathy this time for Senators Walsh, Nye, Wheeler, and Clark in demanding an investigation into whether the New York Post had targeted Senator Walsh because of his isolationist stance, in revealing allegations of his having frequented a "house of degradation" in Brooklyn, one which also served as a Nazi spy headquarters, presumably for the gang of 32 spies arrested June 28-29, 1941 in New York and New Jersey (plus one subsequently arrested in August in the State of Washington).

Another letter to the editor arrives in response to the self-defense printed earlier from Senator Reynolds, (which we do not have at present, but, for entertainment value, shall try to obtain for you). This letter is unfavorable to the Senator’s position, flatly declaring him to be a Quisling.

One may criticize the government’s position during war, even as a representative of the government, obviously. But one may not aid and abet the enemy, as Reynolds did, and quite consciously so. For all his Herrenvolksy buffoonery, at the end of the day, he was little more than a Nazi agent.

Since he has been in The News a good bit in the previous few days, we thought we would look ahead a little to his end-days in politics, The News having had an obviously active hand in bringing that about. It came just two years later in the spring primary of 1944, after he simply dropped out of the Democratic race when the Democrats put forward Shelby native, former Governor Clyde R. Hoey—who, of course, is buried 13 feet from W. J. Cash in Sunset Cemetery in Shelby. As we have previously mentioned, upon Senator Hoey’s death in 1954, North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Sam J. Ervin was appointed to his vacant seat.

Yet, Reynolds was not done with running. In 1950, he ran in the Democratic primary for the other seat, against incumbent Senator Frank Porter Graham who had been appointed to succeed former Governor J. Melville Broughton, who had died in 1949. The other Democrat in the race was Willis Smith, a Raleigh lawyer. Smith ran second to Graham by 49,000 votes, but the 62,000 votes polled as a third place entry by Reynolds deprived Graham of a majority. With Jesse Helms as Smith’s campaign manager, Willis ran a vicious race-baiting campaign in the run-off, utilizing, as his springboard into the minds of the Neanderthallic, the recent 1950 Supreme Court decision in Sweatt v. Painter, 339 US 629, ordering the desegregation of the University of Texas law school for the State's law schools being violative of the separate-but-equal doctrine. Slick Willis won the run-off, apparently with the trickle-down vote running in his favor.

For all his folksy buffoonery, at the end of the day, Jesse Helms...

Unfortunately, he was not defeated after two terms, as was Reynolds. At least the local Volksbund of North Carolina which had elected him had the good sense in 1945 not to build a "library" to Robert Rice Reynolds. Most of them couldn’t have read anything in it anyway, at least anything they could properly understand.

Here incidentally is a postcard image we ran across today, showing Hotel Reforma in Mexico City in 1940, the location where Cash was discovered dead. We also found a painting by Diego Rivera which had hung in the Reforma from 1936 and was therefore present when Cash entered the hotel, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, on the early evening of July 1, 1941. It is called "The Bandit Hero".

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