Sunday, October 6, 1940

EDITORIAL AND LETTER

Site Ed. Note: The crusty humor?--or dead seriousness?--displayed in the piece below appeared on the editorial page of this date, plainly written by Cash, as the concluding sentence's "In fine" is a dead give away. So we include an image of it, not only because it stands out as a unique piece for The News and for Cash, but also for...

Once we read a novel written in 1991-92, an unpublished one, about the death of W.J. Cash, and the two years of his life before it. In the novel there was a character, first appearing in October, 1939. "Mr. X, the mystery man", was the way he was initially identified by Cash in the novel, yclept in October, 1991, (prior to the release of "J.F.K.", incidentally), a noisome fellow who insisted on sending Cash anonymous notes with various pointed Biblical references and other references to literature as well as to pearls, articulate but mysterious, generally suggestive of some sort of code being employed in the notes--very annoying to Cash--in the novel. Cash couldn't tell, in the novel, whether this mysterious letter writer might be a Nazi agent, a reader of The News merely bent on being mysterious, or perhaps even one of the G-Men or some similar organization trying to get him to work for them--to figure out some things--that is, in the novel. The funny thing about that, as well as many things like it in the novel, is that when that novel was written, as we have it on pretty good authority, the author had never read or seen this day's editorial page of The News or heard from anyone that such an article as that below ever existed or anything else about a "Mr. X" associated with Cash or his writing.

It's just sort of what one might style "strange stuff".

But now, really, Mr. Cash, if you refuse to sign your editorials, why do you insist that your readers follow any the less anonymity?

(Click article to enlarge)

We Trust That G-Men Are Busy on This Job

The Hon. Joe Starnes of Alabama is the man who once set Washington to laughing up its sleeve (and out the other end) by threatening to have "Kit" Marlowe up before the Dies Committee and to call him to account for some pretty subversive sentiments he had expressed.

And so it is, now that he appears to have turned up something truly menacing to the safety of the country, that we don't know whether to take his version of it straight or with a plentiful sprinkling of salt.

But it remains disquieting. After two days of public and private questioning of "visitors" to the Nazi Bund camp at Andover, N.J., the Hon. Joe announced that "without exception every witness was employed in defense work"--munitions plants, shipyards and the like.

Here is the perfect set-up for sabotage on a thorough scale, for more, "Black Tom" explosions, for a repetition of the Count von Bernstoff episodes. It scares us even to think of it.

But there's one consolation. The hunting out of possible saboteurs is no longer the sole responsibility of the Dies Committee and its alarmist members. The G-Men, with an augmented force, have been given this assignment, and doubtless are well ahead of any Congressional committee in their investigation. We hope so, at any rate.

"Cam ye o'er frae France, cam ye doon by Lunnon…"

Revenge and counter-revenge is a sad, sad tale. Yet, one which still haunts us. How to defang the defanger of the fanger who fanged the poisoner? in the Garden--which, some say, was situated in what is present day...