The Charlotte News

Wednesday, August 12, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports more bad news from the Russian front, as the Nazis moved further south into the Caucasus and edged closer to Stalingrad in the east. Despite the oilfields of the Caucasus still not falling within the Nazi sphere, with at least another two months before the winter snows would begin to fall, somewhat longer in the south, the end-game appeared now quite plausibly obtainable this year for the Nazi.

Yet more bad news comes from India as rioting continued with more killing of demonstrators by the police and British military units assigned to support them. The first mention is made of the Sunday arrest of Gandhi and the rest of the central committee of the All-India National Congress, the arrests giving fuel to the riots--as any fool would have foreseen.

In the Mediterranean, the British lost a carrier, the Eagle, to U-boats.

On Guadalcanal, the one bright spot of news appeared, as Marines were reported to be making progress in securing the island. Even there, however, the news sounded better than it actually was: the Marines were not in possession of tanks as reported, were confined to ground operations without air or naval cover, and were gradually being hemmed in by landing Japanese troops, landing at will.

A report had surfaced that somewhere in the vicinity of Mitchel Field on Long Island, the figure "9", formed by sacks of grain, had been spotted in a farmer’s field, the tail of the "9" pointing toward an aircraft plant, while supposedly other clearings had been cut from forest land to form arrows pointing to airfields and defense plants. Lieutenant-General Hugh Drum discounted reports that these apparent patterns were the work of spies bent on revealing to enemy bombers the locations of strategic targets.

Whether, however, the designs were the result of aliens from outer space, that being Lebensraum, was not told.

Whether it was all involved in a government cover-up, was also maintained as secret.

Whether some of these designs were discovered on a farm in Bethel, N.Y., was likewise not revealed.

In any event, let’s welcome Mr. Richie Havens.

Never mind.

William Dudley Pelley was reported to have been sentenced to 15 years in prison for having been convicted of printing seditious statements in his various publications in association with his organization, founded in 1932 in Asheville, the Silver Shirts. His associate received five years; his secretary, a two year suspended sentence. The ultimate statements for which he was successfully prosecuted were regarding the claim that losses at Pearl Harbor were greater than revealed by the Government.

None of the Nazi spies captured June 28-29, 1941, after a two-year FBI undercover investigation, received sentences of more than 20 years.

Justice? Twenty years for clear acts of spying on military facilities and communicating the resulting information directly to the Abwehr in Hamburg by actual Nazi agents, compared to 15 years for some idiot like Pelley who was merely publishing statements which no one in their right mind could have believed in the first place.

Clearly, something was amiss in the country by this point.

We disagree with Dorothy Thompson’s take on the matter set forth on the editorial page. She writes of the correctness of these harsh sentences: the death penalty in Federal court in Detroit for Max Stephan, German naturalized citizen convicted of aiding and abetting the Nazi Luftwaffe pilot escaped from Canada, merely by wining and dining him and failing to report his presence in the country to authorities; execution of six of the eight saboteurs convicted by the military tribunal in Washington, another receiving life and the other 30 years as lenience for their cooperation in the investigation; now 15 years for Pelley. She believed that it was high time that the Allies got tough with spies and saboteurs.

Yet, she presents no real argument for the proposition, for the need of getting tough in the ways these particular cases demonstrated at least. Her platform is one based primarily on emotion, understandable emotion, but nevertheless only emotion, her vaulted statements regarding a "social contract" basis for citizenship in the democracies compared to blood lines as the basis for its attributes in Nazi Germany, notwithstanding. So what? How does that resolve itself into getting tough, to the point of suspension of the Constitution?

There was no basis for that suspension or of the substitution of basic fairness and objectivity in the law with purely emotive retribution run amok. And, effectively, as to Pelley, that was the result. Pelley had every right to publish what he published, even if bordering on seditious libel at times, even if, in the case of his anti-Semitic material, communicating hatred. People do have the right to hate, to be prejudiced, to write it out, to verbalize it. Indeed, repressing such speech will only tend to violence, to acting out the hatred rather than merely expressing it.

"Sedition" is a term so misused in the tradition of the law since the founding as to have no objective meaning whatsoever. Where is the line between criticism, active criticism, of government policy in a democracy and sedition? During the early 1970’s, it was Richard Nixon who sought mightily to squelch all forms of criticism of his policies through various means, the I.R.S., the I.N.S., following people, infiltrating groups, obtaining through criminal conduct information about people, etc. Was he justified? If one assumes these people and groups so targeted were cooperative in seditious libel against the Administration, but that no such conviction any longer could be had in a more tolerant society than in the World War II years, then wasn’t Nixon justified, if "sedition" is the limit of free speech?

The truth is that the line for "sedition" going beyond mere criticism is drawn willy-nilly, subjectively, whenever emotion takes hold of those in power to the point where they abuse their power and thereby forfeit their right to hold office.

William Dudley Pelley in printing an opinion that figures from the Government on the losses attributable to the attack at Pearl Harbor were grossly understated was clearly within his rights. Even if someone other than a complete idiot believed it, the belief might cut to the contrary, fueling the sense of patriotic duty, not inhibiting it.

Pelley, as we have suggested many times, was a despicable character, indeed, may well have had an active role in bringing about the death of W. J. Cash. But, if so, he should have been prosecuted for that crime, not seditious libel against the Government. The last thing W. J. Cash would have wanted was to have someone’s First Amendment rights violated, even those of a conspirator in his own murder. For his slogan on the Cleveland Press back in fall, 1928 was that ascribed to Voltaire: that though he might disagree with what one said, he would defend to the death the right to say it. And so he would have.

The way to combat a Pelley was not through despicable means of assuring his bankruptcy, demeaning him personally, or charging him with ridiculous crimes signifying nothing, making this nut into a glorified martyr to the causes held near and dear to many closet-Nazis in the United States--such as Charles Lindbergh and his following, quite vocal in their support of the Third Reich and quite openly anti-Semitic before Pearl Harbor and the ensuing declarations of war on the Axis nations. The way to combat a Pelley was to argue openly against his positions to the point where their absurdity was demonstrated, frustrating as that at times might be. There are people who remain Nazis despite being shown the illogic of their positions and the absence of their own self-interest in them, indeed, despite being shown that such positions are contrary to their self-interest. Such individuals will always insist that the government is wrong because it is the government, all evidence to the contrary being damned without a hearing--their premises being reliant solely on emotion.

So, though we usually find Ms. Thompson cogent and instructive, on this one, we assert, she was wrong. If at any time in history the country needed to bend over backwards to protect constitutional liberties, this time of war against totalitarian regimes bent on world domination was the time.

Our recent retreat as a society to just such a time, in the dark aftermath of September 11, 2001, stands as a ready example of what happens to the country when people go to extremes of emotional reaction to a single event, enabling it to give excuse for venting all manner of repressed petty hatreds in concerted fashion on one group or one ideal, or even against individuals they dislike, allowing their hatreds to so coalesce to the point where all fairness, all objectivity, all righteous conduct in any democratic sense, go out the window--just as occurred in Germany in the wake of Versailles in the twenties, leading to the rise of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s Germany of the thirties.

Mr. Pelley, incidentally, remained in prison only until 1950 when he was awarded parole. He lived until 1965.

Elsewhere on the editorial page, both the column and Raymond Clapper address the need for large transport planes, woefully inadequate compared to the 3,500 available through Lufthansa to the Reich. By contrast, when America entered the war in December, it had 19 such large transport planes, and fully half their cargo carrying capability of about nine tons was consumed in the fuel necessary to make the long jumps required of them in these days--from Brazil to West Africa, to Cairo, New Delhi, Chungking, Murmansk, or, on the Pacific side, from the West Coast to Hawaii to Sydney.

Mr. Clapper urges Henry Kaiser to stress the manufacture of large land planes rather than large flying boats, as the former were capable of penetrating spots on the globe which the latter, limited to landing in protected waters, could not, even if there was some, albeit minimal, increased safety for the flying boats in these long trans-oceanic voyages enabled by their ability to float.

Thus, whereas the production stress had been on bombers and fighters heretofore, in order to meet the exiguity in adequate transportation of troops and materiel to the various fronts, and to do so efficiently and more safely and quickly than was possible via ships, the stress now had to shift to large transport planes capable of dry landings. As had been pointed out in editorials many times in recent months, production itself was proceeding far ahead of even optimistic projections. Yet, because of inadequate means of shipment, transportation of the product was lagging far behind.

And, despite some encouraging news during the previous three months from the Pacific front, the war appeared very close to being lost. For once Russia was lost, once Japan saw India as ripe with strife for the picking, the Allies might indeed suddenly find the hole too deep to enable extrication.

From The New York Herald-Tribune comes a reprinted essay from a ten-year old from London’s East End re cows. Didn’t we see that very same essay, or one very similar to it, a few months ago out of one of the London newspapers? Once may have been cute; twice becomes downright silly. Try it a third time and we shall doubt its provenance entirely.

From Morganton, a former patient provided The News with the hospital’s daily menu. Hmmm-mmm, goo-ood. We don’t know about you, but that fried sow bosom for breakfast sure does get our taste buds tingling. Boy, and those two slices of bread and molasses, butter, grits poured over with some gloriously thick cooking grease, and even a cup of coffee, for supper--hard to beat. Man, that’s living, huh? Who would ever want to leave and return home?

At least, out of the controversy came the elimination of the White Horse gravy. That, in itself, made the whole venture worthwhile, we suspect.

"Hey, you, how about another helping of that sow bosom, with a little extra grease on the side to pour over it and steady the palate?

"No, now, keep your hands off that sore when you serve it. If we’ve told you once, told you twice--won’t get fooled again."

All of which raises the question ultimately whether it might have been Lily, friend to Dorothy, who actually formed those arrows from the clearing in the wood, intending them as markers to point the way down the Yellow Brick Road to Sow’s Bosom, that is, Westliche Wand. But the answer to that, also, was not told.

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