The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 26, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: To tell you the truth, not much of the front page makes very good sense right now, in light of subsequently known events during this time, notably on the Russian front where the Russians were now taking the last of a firm beating in the face of Kharkov and preparing to retreat. That inaccuracy of reporting occurs through no fault of the purveyors of the news. Some periods are simply like that in war waged in remote battle zones and in fields where no man would venture merely to obtain first-hand a news story. Things will straighten out again in a few days.

And, John Barrymore was not getting better.

That Reich woman killing case out of New York sounds similar to the average fodder for today’s tv network parade of liars and murderers daily assaulting our quietude and distracting from the real issues threatening our very existence, such as global warming and increased cancer rates, the real murderers among us.

And we were hoping to read some more on that Roorback on Senator Walsh of Massachusetts, who, incidentally, lost his seat next election to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., who had already served in the Senate for seven years but gave up his seat to join the Army in 1944. Congressman John Kennedy defeated Lodge in 1952, thus serving in the same seat as Walsh. Remember the Roorback; it is important.

Dr. John R. Brinkley, we learn from the front page, died of a heart attack, broke, in San Antonio, Texas this date. Having grown up in North Carolina, he was a charlatan with a medical degree from the Eclectic Medical School of Kansas City, obtaining that after having been run from Greenville, S.C. where he and a partner had set up shop providing miracle cure patents, consisting of colored water which they labeled "electric medicine" from Germany.

Nevertheless, his Eclectic credentials enabled him to practice medicine in eight states. His goat gland remedy, to which the report gives mention, refers to the implantation of goat glands into human testicles to promote fertility. We might understand how someone studying the butting goat for awhile could conjure a vision of the Devil as a goatee-wearing horned figure, but fertility? We always heard that rabbits were the most likely candidate. Perhaps farm life in North Carolina had a specially emphatic impact on him, eclectically that is.

In any event, some in Los Angeles claimed that the goat gland worked in the 1920’s to increase potency, and, as a result, Dr. Brinkley became known far and wide. Yet, many of his patients died as a result of his miracle goat gonad fad.

Eventually, he was barred from practicing medicine in the United States and went to Mexico to practice his goat goody headache remedy. There, he also set up a cross-border radio station, which, after the war began, he utilized on occasion to broadcast the likes of Gerald Winrod, Fritz Kuhn, head of the German-American Bund, and William Dudley Pelley of Asheville Silver Shirts notoriety. His signal was strong enough to reach the Soviet Union. This activity led the U. S. Government formally to complain to Mexico which, finally in April, 1941, shut off his transmitter. (The Mexican Government did not, remarkably, however, shut off the ham radio operations of the Nazi spies in Mexico which continued transmitting to Hamburg messages through the first few days of July, 1941, when the spies themselves finally dismantled their equipment in the wake of the weekend arrests of spies in New York and New Jersey. These ham radio operators could now take their exeunt via Veracruz back to Germany, having made their statement loudly. It would take the sinking of two Mexican merchant ships in May, 1942 to get Mexico roused against the Axis; and those ships had been taken from Italy a year earlier.)

Doc Brinkley’s middle name was Romulus. His practice, however, was more in the neck of the woods of the brother of Romulus.

Speaking of being raised by wolves, here is one more factum on Friederich Karl von Schlebrugge: He died in Telleborg, Sweden in March, 1935. That is a bit problematic when his wife gave birth to a daughter in Mexico City in 1941 and he was under suspicion to the extent that Josephus Daniels wanted him arrested as a Nazi agent on July 12, 1941, along with the two others, Weber and Nicolaus.

Obviously, Schlebrugge had a doppelganger of some sort.

Oh what a tangled web gets weft when Nazis are of morals bereft.

On the editorial page, General Joseph Stilwell, Allied Commander for the forces fighting in China and Burma, speaks bluntly about the rout of the Allies in Burma: "I claim that we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell."

Vinegar Joe, says the editorial, had it right, not only with respect to Burma, but also as to Hong Kong, Malaya, the East Indies, and the Phillippines. It counsels that the war would be over when the Allies ceased getting the hell beat out of them.

Dorothy Thompson writes of a Goebbels radio address to the German people, giving praise to Der Fuehrer, painting him as being "loving" of them, that he had endured the hardship of the Russian front more painfully than they.

He was of course so loving and full of vicariously experienced pain as to have had two million of their sons sent to a slaughterhouse in Russia in a period of some eight months, and to have started another campaign to send as many to their graves again. The German people, no doubt, could stand little more of Der Fuehrer’s love and personal sacrifice for them. The time was coming closer to Walpurgis Night, 1945, when Der Fuehrer would claim his words of sacrifice and love for himself, in one sweepingly grandiose gesture of his chivalric hand brought to his head, closing then his index finger for the last cowardly time.

Ms. Thompson indicates that Goebbels’s speech was so ambivalent toward Hitler that it rang of Mark Antony’s oration after the death of Caesar. And for good reason: Nearly ‘twas three o’clock.

Time to round up the wife and kids and prepare the old strichnine, ‘ey Dok?

Here is another picture by Frank Medworth, entitled "Woolf!", from 1931, interesting for its preceding Virginia Woolf’s drowning suicide in the River Ooze by a decade, that taking place in March, 1941.

While we are on the subject again of Cash’s death, we thought we would impart another portion of that novel by our friend in the Caribbean, this section, he tells us, having been taken down onto paper in September, 1991, in one of the early writing sessions on the novel. These sessions, he informs, were energized by much coffee, endless cups in fact, and started usually at 7:00 a.m. and continued until midnight, with an occasional half hour off for good behavior in the interim, and went on like that for twelve weeks.

"That’s the only way to write a sucker like that, sonny boy," he exclaimed to us over the trunk call last week. "You’ll do well to mark it, you puling, pusillanimous, inane practitioner of the trite and usual."

Well, as always, our friend is in wholesome and sociable truck when we contact him there in his little shack by the sea, the whereabouts of which all the natives keep tightly secret, much to our dismay. So, anyway, here it is. It is set, he informs, on July 1, 1940 in Charlotte. Not a single word has been changed since our friend took it down in 1991. We don’t dare. He would liable as not take out the large knife, which the natives say he keeps handy in its scabbard strapped to his side at all times, and use it to carve some appreciation of fine art into us.

2.

"Have you any last words before sentence?"

Tu puta! ¡En la corrida!"

Wilbur awoke with a start, unable to remember the last of the dream, the third or fourth such sequence regarding Jim and the Confederate since originally meeting Jim, almost a year earlier. As the fuzzy echoes cleared from his head to realization of his surroundings, he heard the short-wave radio still holding forth, fading in and out in periodic wavy voices and electronic sound intermissions. Wilbur strained to listen for he heard a word which he had heard on several other occasions in the previous weeks.

There appeared to be ham radio interference at times. The hammy voices were sometimes British, sometimes German, sometimes Spanish, sometimes clearly Southern.

The latter could be distinguished by the native Southerner, with a discerning ear, to be the softer colonial vowel sounds from the Carolinas or Virginia or the heavier molasses and gravy taste of the Deep South or the twangy, melodious prairie prayers of Texas-Oklahoma. Sometimes he heard Texas-Oklahoma; other times, pure Carolinas.

The word which was being reiterated, always in English, was "pearl". The Southern voices never spoke of it. The Southerners spoke of "deadly shifts in the sand" and "white pine cones marching for their rectitude" and "empathy with our red-band brothers in arms".

At this particular time, the radio was blaring some bastardized, nightly routinized, sanguinolent sermonette.

"There are needs to be putting behind us the things which count no more and employ the means long needed for the purpose of securing the trumpets of dignity and righteousness."

The transmission seemed to emanate from some kind of hall full of people as there was background noise and indications of group affirmation. The whole nature of the broadcast was surreal. The voice echoed off barren plaster walls. The speaker was apparently almost chewing the disc on the microphone as Wilbur's Bendix radio speaker was clipping under the strain of the booming bombast.

It was not the Southern fundamentalist pomposity which piqued Wilbur. But for the parson's curiously petrous patois, he would have had none of it. But from a sociological perspective, it enchanted Wilbur. From a journalistic perspective, the short-wave often afforded fertile ground for nice little personal aside insertions for the editorials he regularly wrote on the South and the Nazi threat.

He could not go to Nazi Germany or see the Reichstag convention on the fledgling networked and scarcely marketed dissector-scan. He would gather his sum of intuitions from local observation in combination with newspapers, magazines and that radio--gods' own radio and, short of finding a way to infiltrate the very hate organizations he despised, the nearest extant source of primary research available to him.

It was that on which his curiosity must, perforce, be nourished, for his sensitive disposition and intellectual aura would not easily accommodate a vizard for the wizards, sufficient to gain admission to the purlieus of the swalloworts and swell-butted swallowtails of Swartkranz, those working each other from susurration into swivets of folie a deux to ride on the wrapped surcingle and stab the switchknives to their suppositive enemy chosen in swoopstake fashion. Nor did he wish to attempt, as some did, any such dangerously undertaken participant-observer status for fear of psychological revulsion, devastation and, ultimately, foozling of the role to the point of a fool's cap plummet, as did the tambourine ring of the harried, stowed and storied stowaway, Tom, blown by the harmattan, oft fell down the Dorian to the footrest in earlier times. Those objects of his analysis would have to remain tucked safely in the realm of sweven.

Indeed, even in the informal context of contacting men and women of reactionary leanings, first in Shelby and later in Charlotte, he could scarcely desist, of his own will, from vituperatively lashing out at them when his sensibilities to democratic principles felt the stings of zealous mockery in the presence of remarks residing in the realm of elimination of ideas and their champions rather than mere disagreement.

When on occasion he would pick up the divisive rhetoric of Father Charles Coughlin on the radio, he would listen, despite his knowing that it would give him over to an inner shouting match with himself, trying to explain any form of rational basis for the incessant vitriol and insipid haranguing and embarrassing emotional fits of an obviously unstable personage within the parsonage. He listened as if, quite consciously, to draw further fire for his task consistently to light and relight the ignescent discontent within his mind, to render coruscation upon the pages, done despite its tomal monumentality and its wrenching of his subconscious into the realm of unpleasant self-examination, both on a level of individual personality reference and on the broader societal scale--that same self-immersed, myth-ensconced society of Charlotte and Shelby and elsewhere in the State and region which he still called, conclusively and interminably, "home".

Wilbur was not listening to someone this night with even the pretension of erudition with which Father Coughlin managed to wield toward his supplicant, proselytized parishioners.

This July 1 evening had him under the devil's advocate, understand-thine-enemy-to-defeat-it, spell of someone of cloying tongue, imbuing his audience with Deep South tones of roily, recondite subtlety. It was as if there had been a recrudescent devil beginning his Revelations-forecasted recoil of a thousand years.

It had not escaped Wilbur's Biblical discernment and Freudian-Nietzsche overlayment that Hitler had come to autocratic power with the promise of a thousand-year Reich, deliberately casting himself as the satanic-superego-superman to intimidate his enemies and to further enhance his self-image of resistless destiny in simple, understandable metaphor which could reach all classes and each, equally at once, of lower intellectual device and those of high.

But the voice was not the shouting denunciations of Hitler. It was soft and patient and by its tenor and loving reception, all the more fear-instilling to the listener at hand, now completing the final bit of manuscript on the true Southern zeitgeist.

The listener, in contrast to the crass sales pitch of the pharisaic percussionist, had been inspired in the writing of the final draft to form a virtual poesy in polemic. The view of the South had been constructed so as to form for the reader an extended epochal essay giving the same effect as a pointillistic rendition of Rembrandt's "Nightwatch" or, more to the point, one of Bruegel's sixteenth century views of Flemish peasant existence.

But for now, there was that nut on the radio interfering with the pace of the projection of the words from the extended fingers. So he smoked a Lark and listened.

"Gooneybirds' Jesus, we must be left to our own by Washington's scribing interests in the heart of our disseminated destruction down here. Jesus, Lord, forgive them in their bleating, boldastery, anti-deluminum skulldiggeredness. They are, friends, of the skulldiggers, themselves. They will dig your skulls and rim your mulls and sit on your wings and draw your blood and suck your crops dry to the bone and then send your little poor children down there to their schools full of anti-Christ's hypnotism to send your little boys and girls home at night no better than the poor little helpless pickaninnies. Is that what you want, friends? Poor little pickaninny children?"

That voice, in its cajoling irrationality, reached Wilbur in indescribable terror, producing first feelings of calm and complacency but, by that inducement to calm, fear. He could not be brought to the passion which the inciting words of the Nazis or the Ku Kluckers instilled.

Wilbur, completely awash in the wordy, miscreant babble, attempted to tune the frequency more clearly. The voice wavered in and out but then suddenly came back booming loudly in broad, flat, Texas-sounding tones, laying the lex, decrying the sex, "spiccing" the Mex, from the pluperfect prefect's jelly-faced jelutong-jequirity.

"The tables will turn, friends. And on them lies the sacrifices of our grandfathers. And they shall not be in vain. They died for your sins and mine. And we shall see ourselves in hellfire before we let the opportunity pass to conquer Satan and his disciples from hell to the south of us and to the north of us and right here among us. We are the chosen few. And we shall win! Do not allow the Satan books to enter your houses or your schools. Chuckles Darlose and Sickmood Fraud will not win your children's minds and hearts. Let it be done. Let not in vain your grandfathers' brains and limbs be sawed. Now burn, I say, burn, Satan, burn! The crosses of the church of the Almighty shall be not forgotten as long as we shall be the comforters of our God's chosen few. Those on the other side in their halls of heathen history shall be heart-struck to find that they have run afoul of us. Heart-struck, I say to you..."

Wilbur now heard rampant, tory-rory, genuflected pounding on the floor of that room--a tornadic, menacing mental vision of which was sent to the imagination via the radio waves. People moaned in honor of the morose ridicule of all which was sane and rational and regarded as virtuous by those within Wilbur's milieu. The latter included those adhering to the systemic process of inquiry by philosophical and analytically intuited postulates tested against commonly held or acquired experience. To those theoretical positions, sometimes, were added more empirically verifiable objects subject to further analysis and replication. The roistering railers needed it the most, but would have none of it.

It was really to them that Wilbur was striving to put forward a non-reductionist, impressionistic view, abstracted from the whole of it, with more balled for the steel wire basket than bound for New York. He would content himself with the field of theory and poetic inquiry to drive out the demonic possession of emotional ellipsis and leaps beyond the rational. It was that which for centuries had been set forth to defend the tradition of the indefensible institutions which belay the South from bottom to top in its white socio-economic strata, variously palled with canescent, hoary pallor in parlors of palaver and polkas and waltzes and square dances and circumambulation in lathers and, together, yet apart, gathered on the Fourth for the circumvolution and circumlocution--all suggesting a nimble, nisi nexus to the Nether--nowhere near Tara.

He was to poke holes in their dreams of riding in pictures of Walpurgis Night streams and their strangling such saturnalian fashions off with Sunday mornin' self-sustaining belief in their being Baptist-Methodist wallahs performing perfect penance for perfect imperfection, known and to be repeated, but yet forever forgiven for each repetition.

In more flavorful terms of the actual reference point between reality and the fantasy in which many there lived, the query poised on the lips of the self-deceivers resembled this: Whether it would be good to be putrefied spittle or rarefied riddle?

Hamlet, perhaps, had spoken the same, simpler and truer to the understanding of those still steeped in Elizabethan English in parts of that culturally misfitted area within the Appalachians and along the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Wilbur's world stood as much against this backdrop as Pelagius did his own.

As he listened to what became more and more, to his ears, doggerel doggery, he began to feel his own usual zealous tendency to reluct now finally surfacing. Characteristically, he furiously rubbed his forehead and began feverishly to hit the keys of the Underwood. It was satisfying to be once again redivivus and in his element of accustomed mordacity-rebound to the mordent flow--between lower bass notes and higher muck-a-muck, utilizing muses from Mnemosyne's scenes.

He had momentarily lapsed into a fit of inaction which made him fear that in his anxiety over writing critically of his own land, he had finally succumbed to being part of its ruined nature and was hopelessly sucked into the maelstrom of latent acquiescence and omission to act in accord with known human principle and justice.

He had to query himself: Had he exchanged integrity for that fleeting bit of fame which Wolfe and Faulkner and Mitchell and others of the moderate school of Southern writers had achieved? He knew that it was possible, after all, to be at once steeped in neoteric approaches but cordoned off, deliberately or otherwise, from the acuity necessary to discern and communicate the heart, mind, soul, sanity and insanity, and nicotine-stained fingers and lint-webbed hairs of true Southernness; cordoned off by the need to pander to the mass traits of disbelief and sell books of myth--those books appealing to the supercilious Outsider, the one yet curious of the strange Southern career seen in dissolving Daguerres on myopic stereopticons, while placating Insider nativism with continuing sustenance of that tendency to dissemble which allowed in the first place the creation of the semi-royal existence by those favored and endowed by the English Crown or King Louis.

He strove to fight off the push toward getting that kind of quick audience and resultant, effective monetary reward. He believed it to be often rationalized by his contemporary peers on the tantalizing belief that, through a Fabian process, one could gradually bring the readers onto a bridge with reality, if not to the other side completely.

That, he felt, was not enough in the too-fast moving twentieth century. The bridge must be crossed; and from the mirrored riverbank, the leaders must beckon the others to follow and see the verdant, campestral embrace which accompanies true freedom of thought and speech and religion and practice, without artful soothing of the old past guilts. There must instead be gentle nudging to forgive grandfathers' past wrongs and move on to a new way of thinking and living which was pointed toward as a predicate for economic advantage as well as to accommodate egalitarian ideals and moral rectitude, both in a de jure and de facto sense. Thus, would be brought to creation finally a truly integrated collective character and personality.

Indeed, it was that very motivational complex to which Churchill had spoken on May 13 at the outset of the Battle of Britain when he issued to his own people the admonition that the fight ahead would not be undertaken without the necessary sacrifice of "blood, tears, toil and sweat". So, too, was it true, here.

But the battle of the New South must be fought on a plane of thought without guns, ropes and chains, or concubinal mercies delivered when bought.

Thinking these thoughts again, he quickly wrote an editorial ripping into the subliminal racism lying just beneath the velvety smooth delivery of this rebel from hell, rolling smooth syllables of hatred out the cloth piece covering his radio speaker.

The voice went on in upward and downward modulation, favoring the louder, guttural tones from deep in the lungs, as most of these evangelists did, most of the time. But this one used it to far better effect by resorting to the tactic only sporadically when the orgasmic climax of religious epiphany seemed incipient, at least, as Wilbur judged it by the frequency of the "praise God"'s coming from his listeners in the live audience.

Wilbur's description came effortlessly, now. "He now spewed the words as the sound of a lion's roar being issued from a sweet little pussycat's sticky, peewit-like mouth. And the flies caught thereby were the raves and thoughts of his captives lured off dustbowl farms and windswept houses, yet without indoor plumbing, electricity or scarcely any semblance to New Deal ideals--ideals not yet realized for the Twentieth century magic was not yet performed in their midst.

"Any visitor to the back roads of North Carolina, Tennessee and South Carolina could readily begin to imagine that which was likened in the images of the deeper South and Texas and Oklahoma dustbowl blight, blitzed by sneaks of nature through the lines of plenty."

Wilbur had just read Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and finished it in compassion, yet without tears, for what he knew were too often misbegotten characters when posed in reality. What the California writer had penned was heart-felt but was essentially a misunderstood chronicle and an overly romanticized view of the sharecropper.

That person, Wilbur knew all too well, sometimes was but the victim of his own pride and lassitude. Some had let their once fertile soil turn infertile by the prideful refusal, post-Civil War, to work the land over which their grandfathers and earlier generations had presided, not always, but too often, with the lash and the chain.

And far too many of that sum had decided that the lash must again be twisted in tight-weave and the chain forged in Vulcan fire as the Master Implement Tools to regain that of which they were told they had been burgled--that which, in fact, they never had.

But Wilbur found it yet hard to condemn these hard-bitten biters for these feelings; for he knew, by being around the sum of that which they viewed in parts from afar and by which they learned to feel and emote, that they acted only because they ached. And they ached because they could not see the other parts. And they could not see because no one encouraged, nay, no one permitted them to look.

And so they listened to Rodomonte in Rotary echoing what had been said by the Roland of the Radio and they Believed the Belial imagery thus communicated of the Other, the Outsider, the Foreign matter, and its urging to think about It when It, they knew before Rodo-Roland even said it, was the font of all evil--all which prevented prosper, all which rotted crops, killed youth with influenza, polio and tuberculosis, all which plotted to rip away their leisure, which supplanted their children's ability and desire to own stock in textiles with mind-copse from the test-tube Yankee books, all that designed to steal even that most precious thing of being able to bequeath the taste of those bitters to those with greatest propinquity to them--all, in sum, which had stolen that which they once had in glorious array. So, rapt, they listened. So, in stealth, they felt justified to combine and act to get it back.

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