The Charlotte News

Saturday, December 7, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

 

A Fact

Here Set Down for Future Use and Reference

The value of a good, reliable sturdy fact is about thirteen times that of an opinion. And so when every now and then we run across a fact which looks as though it might come in handy for editorials or private arguments, we like to write it down to make sure it sticks, and also to pass it on to the little readers for whatever use they may make of it.

Here, then, is the fact, set in bold for emphasis:

Between 1930 and 1940, for the first time in the history of the nation, the number of aliens who departed the United States for other lands exceeded the number who entered as immigrants.

It is true that the excess of emigration over immigration was largely built up in the dark depression years of 1932, 33 and 34. Aliens in droves were leaving this blighted area and going back to the old country. As conditions improved, fewer of them departed, and as Europe boiled over, more of them came across the water, and more and more of them clamored for admittance than quotas would permit.

Nevertheless, the fact remains and is worth noting.

 

The Blind

Six of Them Seek To Lead England to Destruction

It happens next door to them.

Four million Poles, including the most intelligent, are systematically starved to death within a year. Three million more are carried off to Germany to slavery. Those who remain are fed simply because they are useful work-animals for the Nazi war machine. Sterilization is carried out on a constantly expanding scale, with a cool view toward extinguishing the whole Polish people within a generation.

In France, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia essentially the same sort of process goes on, varying only as it suits, for the present, the purposes of the Nazi war and propaganda machine. Everywhere food is stripped from the land and carried off to Germany, the people left to starve.

Everywhere the intellectual leadership is systematically exterminated, the able-bodied masses reduced to slavery, through hours that make the early Nineteenth century conditions in Lancashire look tame. Everywhere the universities and schools are closed, so that the people may be reduced to brutish ignorance and so bear their slavery quietly.

Is the German, then, kind to his most hated enemies? Can England, whose glory has been a special object of the envious hatred of the hog people for a century, hope to escape to slavery, the systematic extinction extinction, if she surrenders?

Yet in the House of Commons six men who call themselves the champions of humanity, who ostensibly have spent their lives laboring to raise the estate of the masses, to increase wages and shorten hours--the six men stand up and cry that war is the worst of all things, squawk for "peace" with the monstrous murderer of their women and babies, the leveller of the fair towns of their native land.

The vote to reject this insane idea is nearly sixty to one. Nevertheless it sends a cold chill of apprehension up one's back, must send it up the backs of all loyal Englishmen, to think that their island harbors six such leaders as these.

 

Rookie, Eh?

A Puzzling Picture Finds Rational Explanation

Somehow we were puzzled by that photograph of Clyde Odell Brown.

Brown is the Georgia farm boy who was being feted and photographed in Atlanta earlier this week as the first draftee from his state to enter the Army. First there was a picture of him in a loving farewell to a mule, duly captioned "Goodbye Maw, Goodbye Paw, Goodbye Mule with your old Hee-haw!" There was only one thing wrong with it. Brown didn't look like the lank farm boy of the legend and that song. Instead he was a straight, well-set-up chap who wears his hat like a city slicker. But we reckoned that the country boys get about more these days and let it go at that.

But we sat up hard when the Atlanta festivities were over and here came a picture of Brown and his new uniform saluting the commanding officer at Fort Oglethorpe. What struck us at once was that Brown looked like anything else on earth but a rookie. Indeed, he looked quite as much the soldier as the officer, a veteran of the regulars. He stood up trim and straight, his feet were placed right, his salute was as accurate and correct as the officer's. But maybe, we figured, the Army boys and the photographers had taken a lot of trouble to get him set right, and maybe he was just a born soldier.

But now the dispatches resolve our puzzlement. Brown, it develops, had already served a two-year enlistment in the regulars. And had been discharged to get back to the farm because they needed him there. No wonder he looked faintly peeved when he was posing for all those "rookie" pictures.

 

Same Old Rex

Always the Spender, Never Worrying About Paying Back

Mr. Rexford Tugwell, the former Braintruster, is up to his old tricks. A long-time college professor of economics, Mr. Tugwell perceived back in 1933 that he was wasting his time in keeping company with pittances. If there is one thing Mr. Tugwell isn't, it is a piker.

He found it impossible to experiment with grandiose ideas running into the billions on the limited budgets which most colleges afford. So Mr. Tugwell went where the money was. He got into the New Deal.

There he splurged with other people's money, almost to his heart's content. But somehow he became in the public mind the personification of the impractical side of the New Deal, and so he was eased out. "Dear Rex..."

He tried the molasses business, but for so short a spell that he doesn't bother to even list it in his Who's Who statistics. Here again, as when he was on college faculties, he found himself restricted by an irksome inaccess to money in unlimited amounts. So he got back into government.

He was taken on by the "liberal" which is to say high-spending, administration of Mayor LaGuardia in New York City as a member of the Planning Commission. And in that capacity he has planned the brand-new type of budget--new to municipal governments, at least--the genius of which is that expenditures are sharply divided between ordinary running expenditures and capital outlays.

And the catch in the Tugwell budget is a typically Tugwell trick. You raise the money, you see, for ordinary expenditures. But for capital expenditures you just borrow it.

 

Snide Claim

Benito Mussolini and His Party Made That Blunder

Fascism is nothing if not a poor sport. It has to be, for its primary moral assumption is that only victory counts and the only evil is failure to achieve it.

Hence it is natural enough to find a mouthpiece of the Fascist Party in Italy, Regime Fascista, saying that the defeat of the attempt to invade Greece is due to "some improvidence and untimeliness on the part of the head of the general staff."

But the proposition that Marshal Badoglio is responsible for the improvidence and untimeliness is highly dubious. The Marshal has been a soldier all his life and has proved himself Italy's best--knows fully the hazard that always inheres in war. More than that, all decisions in Italy are made by one man alone, Benito Mussolini, dealer in brag and not in deeds who distinguished himself as a coward in the last war.

Benito was restless over his defeats at seas and the stall in Egypt, wanted a victory to show his people. And the Fascist Party, precisely, was yelling its head off for "action and still more action."

And so it is as nearly certain as anything can be that the decision to attack Greece in Winter was taken directly out of the Fascist psychology which is always drunk of visions of sweeping irresistibly forward to easy and certain victory. Marshal Badoglio is too good a soldier, too poor a Fascist, to believe in any such nonsense.


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