The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 22, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We include the Heywood Broun piece from this day's page. It points up the process by which European Fascism carried across the ocean to dilute our own freedoms in media expression, a precursor always to dilution of freedom of expression in the individual in average day to day existence, in turn a precursor to despotism, all occurring in rapid order, to be enforced by the bayonet-ended rifle. The remedy may be complex, as that outlined by Mr. Broun, encouraging the Secretary of State to parlay with the dictator's will. Or it may be simpler, as also posed by Mr. Broun, writing as one damn well pleases, or going to "Horse Feathers" and laughing one's self dungless.

Or it may involve the simple act, aided by free press photographers and darkroom stabilizers, thus flickered around the world, of sticking a daisy into the muzzle of one of those rifles.

Or standing firm in front of the might of a line of tanks threatening to crush the very life out of you.

Or marching across the Pettus Bridge at Montgomery.

Or sitting at the Woolworth's lunch counter.

Or taking the otherwise unoccupied seat behind the driver.

Or a dozen, a hundred, a thousand other such acts of highly symbolic, peaceful, perhaps slightly illegal of the moment, but anti-authoritarian activities which counteract the beast--a beast ultimately in all of us to varying degrees and which must always be maintained in check, the desire to lord over others in our world. That preternatural instinct left from the ever-threatened days in the cave-holes cut in sides of the hills or on the lowland prairies or the open solitude of the savannas, or in the vast wilderness of the desert or even in the gross solitude of the frozen tundra of the North, all of which we are all reminded when as children we are, save for the intervention of our adult patrons, at the mercies of this cruel, unforgiving world around us, both natural and mechanical, that is man-made.

And, of course, unfortunately, we did hit back in 1942, quite in derogation of Due Process and Equal Protection, with the taking of property and internment of thousands of quite naturalized Japanese-American citizens into herded camps out on the tundra, now wind-swept memorials silently to exhort that prejudice born of fear always lurks so close as to displace even the most liberal tendencies of the most educated of our society at times of greatest stress to our freedoms. --The warm sunshine of Halcyon days of fall brushes the cheek with chilly wind as the icy cool of February brings the sand grains to the face in reminder.

Freedom is only as strong as the open criticism which thrives within freedom. It is not something which is allowed or merely tolerated. It simply is, by the very nature of freedom itself, or it is simply not freedom, not even some rough approximation of it. Yes, as often voiced aphoristically, with freedom comes responsibility. But that responsibility is as much or more at the perceiving end of the line, where the word hits the optic nerve or the tympanum and is translated synaptically in the brain, as it is at its origin. For it is there in the receiver where, most usually, the trouble starts, not in the original utterance. Taking the expression too damned literally, becoming thus easier with assuefaction. And it is just as apt and aphoristically true that the proverbial sticks and stones may do harm but words may not.

Words coupled with sticks and stones, as in Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1930's and early 1940's, yes. But words alone, no matter how powerful, cannot do anything unless the perceiver allows them to do it--to the perceiver.

And so, we shall remove our cigar a moment, and give kudos to Groucho, Chico, and Harpo and all their ilk, then and now, no matter how tawdry or filthy or nasty or dirty, controversial, political, impolitic, or mean-spirited they may get or seem to us at times to get, to personal taste. Laughter is the best anodyne to ameliorate the worst instincts in humanity.

Better to laugh at it than to kill it.

Too bad the dictators rarely have much of a sense of humor except when they kill, that is, derisive, demonic laughter then, diminishing humanity to hide from and assuage their crimes against it.

Would it were that Mr. Hussein had taken up instead the violin than the rifle and gone upon his balcony and played a concerto for his people--from the roof.

Or told the one about the traveling salesman from Nantucket...

Not unrelated to this complex is the subject of "Murder by Ignorance". One can travel back to the middle ages when Trial by Ordeal was all the rage to discern the witches of the community and find much the same sort of thing. One can look at many sorts of murders, indeed the crimes of Hitler and Mussolini, and see in them the same sort of machinations at work. That is the notion that there is an impelling external force, some demonic Other placing in motion a set of inexorable events which lead on, quite without admittance of the possibility of attenuating sensibility, in a wave, as surely as the ocean pounds its unrelenting surf, in the mind of the perceiver to the need, to the point of self-convinced necessity, for self-defense or defense of one's home or one's way of life or one's country, to commit murder and mayhem against that Other or to rail instead against the demonic force such that a human instrumentality for its achievement in our midst must perforce be ferreted out and once found, punished and punished with ultimate retribution. The lyncher had ingrained in him much the same idea, knew it from his masters who knew it by divine right of kings. Ignore the idea of self as the actuator of the cause and effect of the crime. Instead, dissociate from the darker side within each of us, deny its very existence at all, assume saintliness in all conduct and passage, and thus assign the prime moving force either to a supernal force which has divinely allowed the act to occur, thus by the designation and desires of the gods, or to some would-be predator who would have if they only could have, had they not been vanquished afore they were able.

Thus, too, with the child without medical intervention, testing the will of something, to allow Nature to take or not, as the gods determine the issue. No consideration to be admitted that Man is a part of that same Nature, and as an actor endowed with sense may use that sense to avoid the worst which Nature may provide, just as with any other living organism within it.

Snakes of the mind--in each of us.

Better to worry of what portends from Hurricane Wilma, ghostly swirling its way from amid the Carib waves toward our shores, than what Fred and Wilma next door in their rubble may be plotting--if they only could.

And...

By Heywood Broun

If anybody needed further proof than the President's so-called purge of fellow Democrats that partisan politics is in one unholy mixup, the alignment in New York state should be sufficient. Mayor LaGuardia told reporters yesterday, after a conference with the President, that he wasn't going to throw his support to Lehman for Governor, unless Lehman came out with a specific declaration for the New Deal.

Now, get that, messires. A Republican municipal official says he isn't going to back the Democratic candidate for the chief State office unless that one wholeheartedly endorses a national Democratic Administration. Next thing we know young Tom Dewey, the Republican candidate for Governor, will be declining to support Wagner for Senator unless that Democratic stalwart publicly affirms his allegiance to Tammany Hall!

Into Swain County from Oklahoma a year ago came the Rev. H. S. Reed, preaching strange doctrine. Among those who came under his influence in that mountain country were Mr. and Mrs. Grover Oliver. Mr. and Mrs. Oliver had a four-year old child. The child fell sick with typhoid fever. But, according to the report of police officers at Bryson City, the father and mother and the preacher would not allow physicians to administer to him because of "their religious beliefs." In natural consequence, the child died. And now Mr. and Mrs. Oliver and Preacher Reed are to face trial for first-degree murder.

It may seem hard. There is no evidence that the father and mother did not love the child, or that the preacher did not mean well. The evidence is all the other way about, indeed? And--ignorance is no crime, is it? And people have a right to "their religious beliefs," haven't they? But ignorance can sometimes be a crime. Ignorance is a crime when it gets in the way of that accumulated knowledge which makes up the basis of man's civilization. Ignorance is a crime when it costs the lives of children, by flatly refusing to allow that accumulated knowledge to be applied to save them. And no man has any right to "a religious belief" which sends children or adults to the grave.

A little while ago Mr. Cordell Hull addressed a note to Benito Mussolini to remind him that a considerable number of the foreign Jews in Italy whom Benito has ordered out of his country are American citizens and calling upon him to treat them with the same consideration with which Italians are treated here. To that Benito has now replied with a brusque declaration that these Jews are subject to the same treatment as all others and must clear out within the time limit already set.

It is a typical Fascist answer. Italy and Germany continually demand extraordinary rights for their nationals living abroad, and continually treat with contempt the requests of other countries for common decency for their nationals living in Italian and German territory. More than that, their policy in regard to the Jews and other minorities makes no end of embarrassment and trouble for other countries, and particularly our own. But do we have to take it lying down? The United States actually holds the whip hand in this situation, and perhaps it is about time we began to reconsider our position and to use it.

There are living in the United States about 4,000,000 persons born in Italy and Germany, and of these a great many are unnaturalized. They were admitted, though, in accordance with the country's laws, and to deport them wholesale now would be something like an ex post facto action defining a crime after the deed had been committed. We can demand that they become citizens, to be sure, or get out; but what would the assumption of citizenship be worth under such duress?

We can deny them relief--yes, we could deny them relief, and perhaps we should. But the rules we would have to draw up would be bound to catch the sheep with the goats, and there is every reason to doubt that we should get any pleasure at all from watching people starve.

No, we are helpless. We cannot, much as we may be tempted to, resort to oppression to counteract oppression.

Mr. Elmer Andrews, administrator of the Wage-Hour Law which goes into effect between retiring Sunday night and arising Monday morning, has a sweet job on his hands. Yesterday on this page we reported the statements of a couple of bagging firms in Charleston which said they had to close on account of the law. Western Union is warning that it cannot pay messenger boys 25 cents an hour and may have to make other arrangements. Some 30,000 tobacco-stemmers in North Carolina face the loss of jobs because their employers, independent tobacco men, assert positively that the work is strictly seasonal and cannot be done within the 44-hour weekly limit imposed by the act. They also claim that it is agricultural, though clearly it is not any more than a cheese plant is agricultural because milk comes from cows.

Well, all this sounds bad, and by no means should be minimized. The Wage-Hour Law could bring about a dislocation in certain industries which would grow the nation's whole economy out of joint. But we don't think it will.

Take the tobacco stemmers, for example, who mostly are Negro women. North Carolina labor law specifically prohibits the employment of women, except in agriculture and domestic service, for more than 48 hours in any one week.* The difference between the State's 48 hours and the Federal Government's 44 hours isn't going to dislocate any occupation so badly that employers can't, with a little effort and co-operation, accommodate themselves to it.

*[North Carolina law makes a further exception in the case of females: that those engaged in the operation of "seasonal industries in the process of conditioning and preserving perishables or semi-perishable commodities may be employed for not more than" 55 hours in any one week. Cured tobacco, far from being perishable or semi-perishable, improves with age.]

Among all the heads of departments and agencies who appeared before the State Budget Bureau to put in their requests for appropriations, the only one who asked for no more than he got last year--and who left the budgeteers gasping when he coolly announced that he might even get along on less--was Chairman Dudley Bagley of the Rural Electrification Authority.

This is all the more astounding when there is taken into account the fact that electrification of farms increased 39 per cent in North Carolina last year against the national average of 19 per cent. North Carolina now leads the South in number of rural customers served. Since July, 1935, when the state REA was created, more than 7,000 miles of rural lines have been strung. And still Mr. Bagley said he can get along on the measly $13,240 he received last year.

The explanation? It is simple really. North Carolina has gone in for rural electrification independent of, sometimes in direct competition with, the Federal Rural Electrification Authority. It has induced the power companies themselves to take hold and spend their own money and they have complied, and they have complied willingly. And that, boys and girls, explains the modesty of the State agency's budget request. It is letting rural electrification proceed as a private, not a political, enterprise.

Paul List, German anti-Nazi who has served in the Spanish Loyalist Army, has yet some chance to escape the Nazi headsman's axe or the concentration camp torture-squad. He has been ordered to report to Ellis Island for deportation within 30 days as an alien illegally in this country. But he has an appeal pending before the circuit court in New York, and Immigration Commissioner Houghteling has promised Congressman Kelly of Rochester, where List has been living, further consideration of the case if the circuit court should refuse to intervene.

And between the two a way out for List should be found. Certainly, it was not the intention of the act that men should be sent back home to be murdered or slowly beaten into shivering ruin in the new barbarism of Europe. And certainly, if the thing is done, the United States will stand as an accessory to the murder or the torture. And if the court is too rigidly bound to find a way out, maybe the Immigration Commissioner can.

In any case whatever, and whether List escapes or not, the case is conclusive evidence that the law ought to be changed to give the Immigration Commission and the courts greater discretion in disposing of the fate of such men.