The Charlotte News

Thursday, July 16, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Evil Encore" reports on the guilty verdict against one of the original Scottsboro Boys of Alabama, Willie Roberson, this time convicted in New York and sentenced to 90 days for assault on a woman. The editorial takes first an unsympathetic, hard line turn toward the matter, but then retreats in the face of the reminder that the putative Texas lynching mentioned as being under investigation in the letter to The News from Tuskegee a couple of days earlier had turned out in fact to be the real thing: the charge brought by the hooded posse, assault on a white woman.

"Old, Old Story" carps at the month-old news still trickling in anent the Battle of Midway, while other fronts, notably in the Aleutians, appeared still shrouded in unnecessary mystery. The truth was that not much was happening in the Aleutians and statements that large contingents of Japanese having positioned themselves there in recent weeks were the product of imaginations drawing on inferences stimulated from news of other theaters.

"There Was A Lady Marine" relates the story of Lucy Brewster, 20 years old, of Boston, who left home and, needing to find work, hitched a ride into wartime adventure in July, 1812, aboard the U.S.S. Constitution. Thereafter, she maintained her gender secret from all her shipmates, albeit on occasion at some substantial risk of discovery. She had enlisted in the Marines and fought in each battle of the War of 1812 in which Old Ironsides participated.

Somehow, the story reminds of some intersection between The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Love's Labour's Lost, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice, to name but a handful of plays of the Bard in which there is a gynander, or at least a cross-dressing lady masquerading as same.

Ms. Brewster was discharged from the Marines at the end of the war in 1815 and went home to Boston, moved to New York, married and subsequently related her tale of early women's liberation on the high seas. At least, we presume, she received equal pay for equal work. Whether she was able on her severance pension from the Marines to afford a Cartier is not to the groundlings told.

Somehow this raconteuse's odyssey dovetails with the piece on the circuitous journey taken by the government to acquire the Norconian Hotel near Los Angeles to be retrofitted as a hospital for survivors of Pearl Harbor. The two million dollar price first offered by the government was sought, "just on principle", said the Navy man sent to do the bargaining, to be "jewed"down to 1.8 million, the story informs in language only a fair Portia in masque might use with sufficient bearing to bypass scrutiny and avoid surfeit--at least in 1600, but not in 1942 with millions having been dispossessed of home and family in Europe and displaced to concentration camps for extermination for the crime of being a Jew.

In any event, the government, contending the property to be worth substantially more than even two million, was ready to purchase same for that amount when the funding suddenly dried up, the owner left stranded, while a condemnation suit was initiated to obtain the property by eminent domain based on its "fair market value". The moral of the story seems to be summed up in the quote from one of the brokers volunteering to the owner to come to his rescue: "You can't do business with the Government."

Just how the story turned out, we don't know.

We have a story that perfectly fits here, not about the Government, but rather of a few scoundrels and cheats of the lowest order of magnitude on the human scale--not quite as low as Nazis and Fascists, but close. For the nonce, we shall refrain--for the nonce.

They who bargain with forked tongue often wind up bit by the serpent when they might least expect the fang's intrusion.

"For Government, though high, and low, and lower,
Put into parts, doth keepe in one consent,
Congreeing in a full and natural close,
Like Musicke
."

--Henry V, Act I, scene ii.

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