October 31, 1940

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: As to "Blasted Hope", we note that Cash's forlorn disappointment at Robert's inconsequential statements on return from Mexico and other spots south was because in fact, as later revealed by Ambassador Josephus Daniels, former editor of The Raleigh News and Observer and close friend to Mr. Roosevelt, in his memoirs, Daniels had actively sought during the trip to muzzle Reynolds to avoid further pro-Nazi embarrassment, something for which the Senator had an odd penchant for performing publicly and privately.

As to "Strange Gag", we are bemused by the reference to Mr. Dies and his Committee's suggestions in 1940 that Mr. Roosevelt was, to coin a phrase recently over-used in history, wagging the dog to win re-election. We wonder about it because it seems we only hear of such nonsense during Democratic administrations while Republicans are permitted to walk Tall and carry the Big Stick without ever succumbing to much rhetoric about such a charge. We wonder if it doesn't stem from the fact that the phrase is prominently used in a series of puns in the play, Our American Cousin.

And of course, here we go a campin' with Dizzy Miss Lizzie and her companion in slander again. It seems the loudest accusers often are camping out with those most subject to the accusation, as with Mr. Nixon and Mr. Chambers, just to name one other dynamic duo. Frank Porter Graham, incidentally, then popular President of the University of North Carolina, sought unsuccessfully to run for the Senate in 1950 against the race-baiting Raleigh lawyer, Willis Smith. Mr. Smith's campaign was headed, lest we forget, by a then unknown fellow named Jesse Helms.

Frank Graham and Virginia's Governor Added to a List

Mr. Kamp is at it again. Mr. Joseph L. Kamp, rival to Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, is the most gifted imagination and the most gifted sleuth in the country. It was years ago now that Lizzie discovered that the Reds in this country were headed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But Joseph has gone her one better. In "The Fifth Column in Washington" he has disclosed that not only the President but Attorney General Jackson, Secretary of the Interior Ickes, Harry Hopkins, Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins, Sydney Hillman, and many, many more members of the Administration are Fifth Columnists.

And now in "The Fifth Column in the South," he gives us startling news that comes even closer home. Among the leading Fifth Columnist in the South he says are:

Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt

Governor Price of Virginia

John L. Lewis (who made a radio speech recently)

Sydney Hillman

Francis Perkins

Frank Graham

It is, you see, mainly a Yankee invasion.

A Fifth Columnist, if you don't know, is a traitor to the United States actively engaged in spreading Nazi or Fascist or Communist propaganda to the end of getting Lord Hitler's system established in this country.

How Joseph found out all the startling stuff against all these traitors we don't know. But he runs around with Papa Coughlin, the Detroit priest who makes no bones about his admiration for Hitlerism and who stands mighty high in Berlin. Somehow, we suspect that Papa told Joseph.

Stalin Is Confronted With A Terrific Decision

The continued silence and inaction of Turkey are ominous.

That she can hope to gain nothing from it is already clear. Indeed, the Axis, seeing her hesitate, is already beginning to turn on the heat in an effort to get a capitulation without a fight. That, undoubtedly is the meaning of the sudden announcement in Berlin newspapers that Turkey is shortly to be faced with an ultimatum like that which led Greece to fight.

Behind all this, of course, lies the Russian indecision. Turkey is obviously reluctant to fight unless she has the promise of Russian aid or at least Russian benevolence with the prospect of eventual Russian help. But Stalin seems lost in a trance.

He has reason to be, beyond question. The Germans are certainly bringing intense pressure on him to acquiesce to the passage of the Dardanelles under their control and to bring pressure on Turkey to yield without a fight.

If he bows to this pressure, Russia is sold down the river. For centuries the main point of her foreign policy has been that the Balkans should not be under German control and that if she could not herself have the Dardanelles, the strait must be held by a weak power like Turkey. If she yields here, she is a prisoner in the Black Sea, and the wheat in her great Ukraine reservoir can go only to Germany on Germany's terms.

But if she refuses, she stands to fight at once. And the Germans have concentrated 70 divisions of crack troops in the country along her border. That Stalin's army can stand up against these troops is highly doubtful.

Robert Sadly Disappoints Our High Expectations

Yesterday came to town Robert Rice Reynolds, Junior Senator in the Congress of the United States from North Carolina, and the pride and joy of all proper Tar Heels as the travelingest man who ever cooled an itching heel on a Capitol Hill desk. Home from a 20,000 mile jaunt through Latin America.

And we were all tittupy with the thought that now at last what we had been waiting for, restlessly and audibly, ever since his departure southward was to be forthcoming--that now we should hear again great and astounding things, as is usual after Robert's travels.

But all he had to say was that he didn't like the Communists, and that Franklin Roosevelt was going to be re-elected. We knew the first already, and Doc Gallup & Co. had beat him to the draw on the second long ago.

And we had expected something like the time he came back from Germany with the news that Adolf Hitler was a good fellow who had solved unemployment, or the time he came back from the Caribbean with the news that we ought to get ourselves in war with the British by grabbing her possessions in this hemisphere, or the time in August, 1939 when he summed up all the wisdom gleaned in his travels and assured the nation positively that there would be no war in Europe, or the time last May, three days before the invasion of Holland, when he reached the final peak of his career and said conclusively, on the basis of his wide travels and his personal knowledge of Hitler, that Holland would not be invaded.

Before now we have suspected sadly that Robert was growing older. We are left forlornly positive of it now.

About That Suppressed Stuff Mr. Dies Is Said To Have

To set down the fire in the War Department Building in Washington as sabotage would be precipitate. It is quite possible that it happened from perfectly innocent and accidental causes.

But the people, remembering the long series of powder blasts, the everlasting recurrence of sabotage on new warships, the warning of J. Edgar Hoover that the country is honeycombed with saboteurs, will certainly have their suspicions.

For ourselves, it reminds us to wonder why the information Martin Dies is supposed to have isn't made public. The Washington Merry-Go-Round first called attention to the report that the Dies Committee had unearthed startling information linking the German Embassy and the German consular service in this country, as well as such agencies as the German Railroads office in New York, not only with wholesale and subversive propaganda, but also quite possibly, with organized sabotage by Nazi agents. Dies has more or less confirmed that, while refusing, on the State Department's insistence, to reveal the information.

Reason given for the State Department's course is alleged to be the fear that revelation of the facts would force a complete break with Germany. But one may suspect that it is also the fear of Mr. Hull and Mr. Roosevelt that the latter's enemies would use it to "prove" claims that the President invents crises at crucial political times purely to get himself re-elected. Surely it is a strange doctrine that we have to submit to allowing the Nazis to have their way here in order to keep from breaking with them.