The Charlotte News

Monday, November 28, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Cash was way ahead of his time with his suggestion for the Catawba water ad. Well, maybe not Catawba but, with full fluoridation in play, they would have probably thought us slightly nuts in 1938 had they known we would be, some years hence, paying a buck or two or three for "pure mountain spring water"--some of which, by the label's claim anyway, comes from France--(though, for all we know, could very well be from Catawba or Yadkin). For many people a buck or two or three was a day's pay back then. So drink your water slowly.

Of course, we wouldn't wish to drink all that spigot water, it being recycled mash from the fluoridation plant, anyway. Didn't you hear about all of that in 1964? The Reds spike that water.

Come to think on it some, why not let's us go find us some Reds and have us a scalping party. Hop on the bus with us and let's go down to Oxford Town, then to Birming-ham.

Lots of Reds down there, said Mr. Dies. Frank Porter Graham, U.N.C. Prez. was the one who organized 'em, too. Wouldn't you just know it. Now we understand why he had to be stopped from being a Senator from North Carolina in 1950 by that Raleigh lawyer and his fine, fine campaign manager.

Un-American Activities, to be sure.

Some say they even go to football games on Saturday, down there from Birming-ham, and scream, "Roll Tide!" Did you ever? Bound to be Reds, being in a town with a Injun name like that.

In fact, while we're at it, we'll stand in the doorway of the schoolhouse and stop those Cats-in-the-Hat people from tellin' us we have to admit them Reds to our Crimson institutions.

We say: Stamp out all Reds. Stomp 'em. Everything red, read and rad, too.

Ah, well. Nobody ever promised us a Red Rose Garden when we was aborned into this here life, now did they?

Actually, not such a bad idea when one thinks about it awhile. Let us see only Blue Blood--in the veins, that is, not spilt all on the pavement or over the blood-muddied field of battle, here or over yonder somewhere, exposed to the oxygen and black powder.

Speaking of caribou, when we were young lil tykes, in the firstest grade, we were asked as a class by our teacher to draw a picture, 'round about Christmas 'twas, a picture of a deer. (Maybe we mentioned this before once here in passing; we forget. Anyway, indulge us again, if so.) Well, we not being of a huntin' fam'ly, and havin' lived only next to a swamp with the crawling beasties for awhile, as we know we mentioned once before, and having never much been out in the open fields with our papa, like some of the young 'uns, a huntin', we only had a limited field of vision from which to choose for our chosen specie of deer.

So, naturally, we drew a white deer.

Teacher got all upset and agitated. (Guess she wanted a Red or Brown deer.)

Now, true enough, we had seen "Bambi", back twixt and tween 19 and 56 and 57, somewhar in thar.

But, we were a lil confuzzled 'bout it all, for our fam'ly had us a lil black and white chihuahua doggie named, you guessed it, "Bambi", which was 'round when we firstest got here; so named by our older sibling when our sibling was a lil pup, 'bout the same age as us when we were in the firstest grade, 'cause he had gone to see "Bambi" then, too, earlier, and thought the lil chihuahua was sort of like the little doggie, that is the deer, skittish lil thing it was. (Damned thing hated our guts, in fact, 'cause we came along as an even littler tyke and stole its thunder; always barked fiercely at us, as we tantalized it, later, unmercifully as a result. Used to hiss at poor lil Bambi 'neath the chair, and Bambi would fiercely yelp back at us. Bow-wow-we-we-wow. We had a lot of fun with Bambi, till one night, in early '63 'twas, poor lil thing keelt over dead of a heart attack from all that yelping--getting up there though, was Bambi, about 105 years old. That's right, Bambi lived through the Civil War. Used to tell us all about it, the guns at Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania Courthouse, burning of Atlanta, Sherman's neckties, Vicksburg, Lookout Mtn., Appomattox, Bennett Place, even a time or two related about Ford's Theater, the whole works of them. Bambi was a well-traveled pup, you see.)

Anyhow, we drew up this white deer back there, it being Christmas and all, and as we said, the teacher went into apoplectic seizure nearly, called our mama and we for sure as certain knew we were in for a switchin', hidin' under the bed with Bambi and what-not, for we knew our teacher believed that we were in need of deep psychoanalytic care as a result of our warped impression of the deer in the woods.

Our mama, however, being sort of wise in the ways of things, she being a teacher herself, explained patiently to our teacher in the firstest grade that this was not an aberration, as our teacher in the firstest grade was convinced surely 'twas, she apparently having come from a fam'ly of plains hunters and huntresses. (We mean no disrespect, as she was a fine, matronly lady who taught us many, many things re Alice and Jerry, Dick and Jane, and their brewed heretics, some of which we've im-perted herein at times. And, we couldn't help being a bit schizoid anyway, for the school wherein we attended in the firstest grade split us all up after a couple months, for overcrowding our classrooms, radical we were, and we had to change from a young teacher--who had understood our somewhat warped percepsheons of the realty 'round us, at least better than our latter firstest teacher had, who, no d'out, suspected us of being out of touch with realty, which we no doubt were, she, the former, having lived just across the street from us--to the older lady. It was weird.)

Anyhow, we suspect that from thenceforth we were certainly under grave suspicion of being some kind of a Red ourselves for having been so im-partinent as to have dared draw this white deer.

Had a big red nose, we recall, too.

But, so it goes, when you're in the firstest grade and your percepsheons are a bit skewed by your limitations of experience. (As we learnt later, while studying property law somewhere, probably some Red school pretending to be Blue, a person's got to know their limitations.)

And, furthermore, we hadn't reckoned with "Bambi", the way some of t'other of our fellow firstest graders had, no doubt.

It was our earliest impressionist percepsheon committed to canvas. Come to think of it, we may have dabbed in our paints a lil, and put a few black spots on our deer, too.

Which, understandably, made us Red, in the percepshun of some t'others.

Like as not, the teacher, the latter, was all confuzzled as to whether our deer was neither beast nor man.

Anyhow, that's our lil early Christmas story this year, about Bambi and Reds and blacks and whites and deer and the North Pole, now melting fast away--20% gone since 1979, as we have said alreddy couple times afore.

Now, all these years later--that was nigh on 19 and 59, we recollect--we here find out from this M'Caashie fellow that we were right all along, in the firstest grade. We knew we were brillyunt.

In fact, we drew her a cariboo.

We didn't know then, however, about the due clause, that is the Duke laws, but we later found out what they were for and why. That's so they can skeedaddle good across the wetlands, when the Dukers come a huntin' fer ye, in the dead of winter, down in the Belgian Congo where all those radicals were hanging out, of which Einstein spoke to FDR anent in August, 1939.

We had some experience with all that, too, in 1962, October.

Nor did we know about the half-seen to the covert wending. Of which we would later learn, too.

In fact, you haven't lived, Pilgrim, till you are summoned onto your front porch of a Sat'day night, with an air-raid siren a-blastin' your tympanum, with all the add-ults a-lookin' up to the sky, just as "Naked City" was a comin' on, too, and it being, as you knew from being a copious and assiduous reader of your Weekly, that we were in a fierce fix with those East Berliner boys over yonder, all those Reds having built themselves a wall, and food being airlifted in to the Western side, and all of that. And then the air-raid siren a-blastin' right up against your brain pan, with the add-ults a'lookin' at the sky, all quiet and somber, like as if somethin' was about to go "boom", and you could pert near figure that you might have drawn your last deer. It was weird.

But, after all of that, turned out 'twas just some bit of dampness got on the wires up there on the roof of the building a block away, from whence the sound emanated, causing that cyclin' round and round blasted horn to start a blastin' out of turn, touching ground somewhere in the circuitry, a flickin' the switch of its own accord, or so we were told--unless it was just some practical jokester, maybe, over there off of the Robin Hoods, trying to get us all cudgeled up and uneasy in our unawares, what us having this terribly inexperienced man in the White House, ye see.

He had only swum himself a few miles and saved a few of his fellows back there in World War and II, off his PT boat, natives carved the cocoanut and all that, that's all, and been a Representative and Senator. But just a pup he was, they said, some did there'bouts anyway. We kinda liked him though, all us, mama, papa, sibling and so on. He gave us a lot of info. and intel., in the afternoons after school, 'bout once every single week, 'twas. True enough, we ourselves couldn't figure out half of what he was saying, it being above our wee lil tyke heads much of the time, or, for that matter, what his questioners were up to neither, but we liked his rhythm and rhyme and the tenor of his voice, it being nicely familiar somehow, and making sense somehow to our wee lil heads with or without full understanding of it all, and so we just a-sat and listened and listened and listened.

Reckon as not, we learnt a couple things, too, from him, all about Cubar and the effectiveness of blockades versus thermonuclear war, which, if done, could have threatened our lil bed, it being in range of those thermonuclear rockets, and the Berliners and the Commerce Clause, Mrs. Craig and Mrs. Murphy, the Redstones, the Saturns, the payloads, and a hundred years of delay being far too long, and this and that, which stuck with us over time.

Now, many years hence, when we read the transcribed proceedings of all of that, and listen again to some of it occasionally, seems to all come back somehow, pretty quickly, now that we have a lil better understanding of what they all were talkin' 'bout back there.

He was funny sometimes, too. We liked to hear all those add-ults laugh in the afternoons like that. Even if they were interrupting the Match Game, Say When, and other such fun things on the tv, after school.

'Cause, when they all could laugh, then we knew it was less likely that the air-raid siren would be a goin' off 'cept on Sat'day noontime, when it routinely did, to test the equipment. (Jeepers, the firstest time we ever heard that sucker, one August Sat'day, 19 and 58, liked to jumped out of our skinnies, sceert us so bad. Went in the house askin' our mama what all that racket was, inside our head, right inside our head, upside us, screamin' at us, high-pitched boogie, a-comin' from up yonder somewhere. Found out. Didn't much like to hear all that--a-war warnin', she said, from when they needed those things back in World War and II, just a testin' the equipment though, not to worry. All the doggies yelped somethin' fierce too. What a racket.)

Anyway, we liked his humor and he eventually got it so that the air-raid didn't have to go off so much.

Unlike his opponent, who couldn't be funny, except by proxy, you might say, sort of a butt, an Ironbutt, you might say. What's more, he had gone to where they have all those Duke laws, too. But, we don't hold that so much against him.

Anyhow, here's a little something from the General from this day that holds some interest, though not something which in hindsight proved very reasonable, though as always, his opinions bear some reading and interpretation.

It remains hard to understand, this age-old idea of anti-Semitism, just where it all started and why, the same with anti-Catholicism, branding of a whole for the action or perceived action--or thoughts--of one who happens to be of a certain religious or racial background, it would appear. Not going to the same church, having a different conception of time, a different conception of divine prophecy, a different language, a different sabbath day, different customs, different holidays, different religious symbols--the Cross and Manger are idols, too, Pilgrim--, etc. But there it is, as close in time as just about twelve handfuls of years ago. But, we make progress as a world and as a people, generationally, at least in some places, as time passes, despite different time clocks in different parts of it.

And, as we saw some do back there as a wee tyke, crossing one's self and a couple Hail Mary's afore free throws, probably a good idea...even if Jewish.

For all his interesting comments, the General never seemed to be one of those baiter types, whom Cash despised ruefully, just a fellow trying to state some opinions so that, no doubt, some M'Casshie-type fellow could a-quarrel with him occasionally, especially on his isolationism, as things crept into 1940-41. We sort of like that, the idea of a-quarrelin' a little, you may have noticed. Helps to get at the truth.

But, today, rather than quarrel with either Old Ironpants or even M'Caashie, we'll just stick to drawing our white and black deer, with a big red nose, whilst the General plays sometimes contrapuntally, sometimes harmoniously, to the medley of hits set forth otherwise.

Hope you can forgive our momentary selves-indulgences--as we have said, it being November. This date, that year, was Thanksgiving, the day to which they postponed that football game; 16-14, our team won, last seconds 42-yard field goal--an escaping moment in an otherwise gray, dreary time, when we lost too much fully to comprehend, at the time.

By the way, yesterday's News is missing from the microfilm, no doubt classified somewhere. So, again, if anybody out there should ever run across it, we would appreciate the copy for our files, here. Send them "Sanity Claws: General Delivery, Red Sea, 19281941". The post office, Mr. Farley, Mr. Hopkins, Francis Hopkinson, too, all know about us, so we'll get it okay.

This Won't Help Jews

By Hugh S. Johnson

WASHINGTON.--In all these plans to create a "Jewish homeland" in Tanganyika or otherwise, there is considerable danger to the Jewish people.

It would be a fine thing to open up any "white man's country" for the poor and oppressed of every nation--Jews, Catholics and the persecuted of every race and creed. That was how America was populated. There are plenty of other areas on the earth's surface with equal natural advantages. The wonder is that they have not developed as quickly and in the same way we did. The reason probably is the increasing barriers to immigration that arose across the world at the end of the World War. If now, by reason of the new waves of persecution, some of these are to be broken down and immigrants are to be assisted, as was the case in our early days, there may be a great foreign surge in development of the raw resources of countries.

But to create new and exclusive Jewish areas would be bad for the Jews. It would encourage the present blind and brutal wave of anti-Semitism in many places where it is now not important. The reaction would be likely to be "now they have a place to go--get them out of here."

OTHER MINORITIES ARE BEING PERSECUTED, ALSO

Jews are not the only minorities now in great suffering and danger. In Germany and elsewhere, Catholics are coming into areas of persecution. No matter which side wins in Spain, the vanquished are likely to suffer as few conquered peoples ever did. It is not, as was our Civil War, sectional. It is a rift, partly religious and partly political, throughout nearly all Spain. Atrocious cruelty and bloodshed and have marked its progress. Vindictiveness and revenge are sure to follow any victory.

Never since the Dark Ages has "man's inhumanity to man" been so vicious. There are many places among many peoples where the only road to peace and security will be through migration.

The Zionist attempt to resettle Palestine as a political and racial nation of Jews rested on a different basis. It had been their ancestral home for centuries. When that was considered at the end of the World War, I believe that an alternative plan to open up Uganda and Taganyika to Jewish and other oppressed minority migration was rejected in favor of restoring them to the Holy Land.

THE JEWS NEED ONLY AN EQUAL CHANCE WITH OTHERS

It turned out to be a mistake, but that is no reason for not starting out again on the right road now. It seems to me, for reasons already stated, that the right road is not toward an artificial Jewish state, but toward the melting-pot system that peopled and enriched the country with so many varied strains of blood.

There are now and there will be more oppressed minorities as piteous and as deserving as the Jews. They need no special treatment other than the escape that all these refugees need. They have proved throughout the history of the world that they can take care of themselves in any climate and under any hardships.

But if the nations now set up any preferred parking place for Jews, the temptation in many countries where they are envied or discriminated against, or where they are happy and prosperous, may be exactly the same as it has been in Germany--to say: "Take all they have earned or accumulated here away from them, and send them to their new and preferred country."

This country has millions of Jewish citizens who are as good Americans as people of any other racial derivation. Few of them want to trade their present American flag for any other that now exists, or may in future be invented--any place in the world.

Happy Packy

If a private corporation, instead of the City Government, had a franchise for piping water to all the thirsty little people, it would be fun to watch. The newspapers would get some advertising out of it, too. "Drink Sparkling Catawba--It Satisfies." "A Bath Tub in Every Home." "His Friends Won't Tell Him, But His Water Meter Knew." We'd be made water-conscious, inevitably, and it mightn't be a bad idea, at that. Municipal utilities take demand for granted, and seldom try to create it.

Jim Farley's Post Office Department, however, is making a tentative effort to stimulate the sale of parcel post stamps. For the celebration of the silver jubilee of that service, post offices all over the country are to observe a "Happiness Package Movement." And if you think that that sounds pretty awful, wait'll you hear the slogan. The slogan is:

Make somebody happy with a Happiness Package.

Ah, well; maybe a people that took to the hills at the Man From Mars broadcast will take to the Happiness Package Movement. But it's sort of discouraging, even if they should, to reflect that the tycoons of the postal industry can put on no more attractive sales campaign than this happiness sappiness. It's another argument for private ownership of everything.

Pot and the Kettle

"Leftist political groups, he asserted, were trying to establish a dictatorship in France through industrial agitation aimed at the downfall of his government."

The Associated Press so reports M. Daladier on the subject of the French strikes. And in hurling this charge, he is only following the accepted modern European tactics under which you charge against your enemies precisely what you are engaged in doing yourself. What he says may have some truth in it. Certainly, the industrial agitation is being promoted by Communistic sources, and Moscow itself may very well have a finger in the pie.

But on the other hand it is perfectly obvious that M. Daladier is, at this moment, not only trying to establish a dictatorship but actively engaged in establishing it. He has already suspended laws passed by the Assembly--laws that have not been repealed and which remain the law of the land. And now he is clearly out to abolish the right to strike, not by publishing any decree forbidding it but through the trick of calling those who strike into the military service, and forcing them to work under penalty of court-martial for refusal. And though his right to rule by decree is supposed to expire Dec. 6, his supporters are already openly admitting that he means to hold onto the power, regardless.

Mr. Daladier's thesis seems to be that it is necessary to make him dictator to save France from having a dictator.

Caribou Land

From Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, comes a story, on the word of hunters returning from Hudson Bay Junction, that a train was delayed for 24 hours by a herd of more than 10,000 caribou passing in front of the locomotive. It reminds us of the Old West in our own country, when herds of buffalo used to delay trains in their passing and on the fact that not all North America is as completely settled and civilization-broken as we commonly assume. North of Saskatoon begins the great barrens of Canada and Alaska. Almost uninhabited and uninhabitable by white men, and given over mainly to the wild northern birds, a few fur-bearing animals, and this same caribou.

The caribou is the American reindeer. There are two kinds of him, to be exact. One, the larger, roams the woodlands of Southern Canada and even Maine. And the other is the wanderer of the wastelands with which we have to do here. He stands about four feet high, has stout legs, and splayed hoofs fit for walking on snow. Both male and female alone among American deer, have antlers. In Summer their coats are brown, and in Winter white--in both cases matching the background against which they move. In the autumn they usually migrate from the lands about the northern reaches of Hudson Bay to the lake country just north of Hudson Bay Junction. And it was probably such a migration which the hunters witnessed--delayed because of the late coming of the Winter this year.

Enter the Red-Skinners

These feverish persons who see Reds behind every bush are bad friends to a bad cause. This fellow Dies, for instance, and the Greater Birmingham Committee which alleges that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare is just a bunch of Communists--

In the conference's resolution to do away with Jim Crow laws in the South there was plenty of cause for a diametric difference of opinion. Ourselves, we had already taken the position that the resolution was the work of soul-searching idealists utterly out of touch with reality, and that it was expertly, but unintentionally, calculated to exacerbate the very race relations it sought to improve. But in disagreeing with Frank Graham and his fellow welfare workers, disagreeing vehemently, we did not find it necessary to impugn the motives of any of them save, as an afterthought, the representatives of organized labor at the conference, who mightn't hesitate to trade the comparative tranquility of the black and white South for the expansive, unexploited field of Negro labor.

But the cry of "Communist" and Hon. Dies' alacritous response in investigating "the whole thing"--in fine, the matching of the extreme idealism of the conference with the extreme gullibility of the Red-baiters--drives rational critics of the conference back into their shells or, worse still, to the conference's defense against a palpable canard. Lord, deliver us from extremists of any kind!

Showdown in England

The Duchess of Atholl is going to find out for herself whether or not the British people are actually in favor of Mr. Bumble's policy. There have already been a couple of elections in England which egregiously suggest there aren't. At Bridgewater, known as a Conservative stronghold, a journalist, without party backing and running purely on an anti-Chamberlain policy, succeeded in unhorsing a Conservative who was believed to be impregnably settled in his seat; and similarly at Dartford. And now the Duchess's political club in Scotland has voted not to re-nominate her for the next election, because of her anti-Chamberlain stand. Wherefore the Duchess is going to resign at once, force an election, and run as an independent on no other platform but her opposition to Bumble's foreign policy.

It promises to be a really decisive test. For the lady is an important personage, and she has fought the present policy ever since it was first invented by Stumbling Stan Baldwin. Bumble's clique will throw every ounce of their strength into defeating her, and if she wins it may suggest to Bumble that he resign and call a general election. Despite the odds against her, she may very well win. For since the Bridgewater election, English indignation has been rising rapidly because of the German treatment of the Jews. Moreover, it is every day plainer and plainer that what Bumble and Daladier now have to do is to use more and more empty hocus-pocus to confuse their peoples and obscure the fact that they blundered miserably at Munich.

Two, Plus Two*

One of the most pointless quibbles of recent years is that between Harry Hopkins of WPA and Arthur Krock of The New York Times. It is wholly irrelevant and immaterial whether Mr. Hopkins said to a friend, as Mr. Krock quoted him, or didn't say, that in the rest of the time remaining "we are going to spend and spend and spend and tax and tax and tax and elect and elect..."

Mr. Krock, to be sure, has his reputation for accuracy and fair treatment to look after. But Mr. Hopkins--Mr. Hopkins' whole theory of government is to spend and tax and elect. "I'm committed lock, stock, and barrel," he said in a speech to North Dakotans in 1937, "to the purchasing power theory and believe in more and better distribution of income." He was quoted by The New York Sun only a few weeks ago as declaring that "the only thing that will haunt me when I retire to private life is that while I had the power I did not spend more." His right-hand man in WPA, Aubrey Williams, openly told a cheering crowd of unionized WPA workers just last June, when primaries and elections were coming up, to "keep your friends in power. This administration has shown that the Federal Government can do for society."

And if all that doesn't add up to spending and spending and spending and taxing and taxing and taxing and electing, what pray, does it add up to?

 


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