The Charlotte News

Tuesday, January 14, 1941

THREE EDITORIALS

 

Mulish Trick

President Needlessly Ignores And Antagonizes GOP

The failure of the President to consult with Republicans on either his lease-lend plan or his request for power to meet the Hitler menace, is a peculiarly mulish and inexcusable sort of thing.

If the Republicans were all of the stripe of Ham Fish, Arthur Vandenberg, Hiram Johnson and so on, one could understand it. It obviously would be of no use to call these men in, since they are all against aiding Britain or are such hot-eyed partisans that there is no reasoning with them.

But there was Senator Austin, the Republican leader in the upper house, a man who has shown that he knows how to rise above mere partisanship and has given full support and has loyally given the Administration his full support. And there were others in both houses who were certainly open to reason.

Now all of them are naturally sore, and the opponents of aid to Britain and the bitter-end partisans have just the kind of talking point they want and are already busily yelling, "Dictator!"

But what makes the blunder doubly inexcusable is that the President had before his eyes the example of Woodrow Wilson. The latter's failure to consult the Republicans about the Versailles Treaty was the thing which turned the League of Nations into a partisan issue and which insured its defeat, not on the ground of its merit or lack of merit, but purely because of the passions associated with party loyalties and the outraged egoes of the Republican leaders. That blunder changed the history of the world--and it is hard to believe now that it changed it for the best.

This blunder conceivably may do the same thing. At best, it leaves the nation further divided and promises to delay aid for Britain when time is the most important of all factors.

 

Gallogly and Harsh

Two Succeed Where Leopold And Loeb Once Failed

Richard J. Gallogly and George Harsh, we suppose, have reason to congratulate themselves. In Atlanta they have at length got away with what Nathan Leopold and Dickey Loeb could not get away with in Chicago, despite the millions of their fathers. But the public and Georgia in the nation has no reason to congratulate itself.

Yesterday Governor E. D. (Little Ed) Rivers pardoned the pair. They were convicted in 1928 of the "thrill murder" of an Atlanta drug clerk, named Willard Smith, in a hold-up. Evidence introduced at the trial indicated that the crime was simply the climax of a series of crimes committed because the two craved more excitement than the ordinary activities of college boys afforded them.

Both were sentenced to life imprisonment instead of the electric chair and Gallogly boasted at the time that he would never serve his sentence. He made anything but a model prisoner. Year before last he escaped and announced that he would never be taken alive, at length surrendered when the police pressed hard on his trail.

But his family in Atlanta was rich and powerful, and so was Harsh's in Milwaukee. And both families have constantly exercised all their influence, have spent a great deal of money, in the effort to spring them. And yesterday they succeeded, with the aid of a Governor who had already hung up a thoroughly discreditable record.

It is a body blow to justice and to respect for American impartiality--a stain on the name of Georgia. For it says, as plainly as may be, that if you are sufficiently rich and powerful you may commit an atrocious crime with confidence that the ordinary penalties won't apply to you--in Georgia at least.

 

A Marvel

Perhaps They Train Those RAF Pilots on Hospitals

The marvel of the Royal Air Force grows. All along we had been a little amazed at the unvarying way in which the Berlin official communiques always reported of its activities, "no military objectives were hit. Five hospitals were struck and two patients were killed."

Naturally, we were not inclined to doubt Dr. Goebbels, that great apostle of truth. Still, we suppose we did assume subconsciously that the British had now and then succeeded in dropping a bomb on something besides a hospital. And so we were a little shocked when we picked up the paper Sunday and found Marshall Hermann Goering, head of the Nazi air force, reporting simply and directly that not a single German factory had been put out of commission even temporarily by British bombs since the war began on Sept. 3, 1939.

Think of it, mates. Great flocks of RAF bombers have been in Hamburg literally dozens of times since the war started--to Hamburg, a great manufacturing city of two million people. And to Cologne, another great manufacturing city of one million people and into a dozen other huge manufacturing and mining towns scattered up and down the Rhine Valley. Sometimes so many as 50 heavy bombers have bombed these towns for so long as 12 hours at a stretch, loosing hundreds of tons of explosives.

Yet we have it on the word of Hermann Goering himself. Hermann who, if a little thievish, is really the man Parson Weems had in mind when he thought up that story about George Washington and the Cherry Tree. Out of all those visits the British have not vitally hit a single factory. Only hospitals, which seem to be the most numerous thing in Nazi Germany, save of course aspirin.

 


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