The Charlotte News
Thursday, December 22, 1938
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: We could comment further on the olde Roman fête known as Saturnalia, forerunner to Christmas, or, as we saw summarized a couple of days ago on The History Channel, the long history since of our holiday here, how it was forbidden for awhile under Cromwell in England until King Charles came back in there, and to achieve the popular fancy, restored it and all its costumed merriment, more a festival regarding the things of which the editorial remarks rather than any religious symbol of the Nativity, how when the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, celebration of it was again forbidden, as being derivative of Bacchus and his kin, and was not really much of a holiday in the colonies until sometime around the 1840's when some enterprising newspaper people began to put the spirit in it, all leading to the popularizing of the invention of St. Nick by Harper's Weekly somewhere around 1880. And then, of course, the famous letter to young Virginia came along much later. And all the red ornaments on the tree started out as apples, to suggest Eden.
As we have been persistent in reminding the last several months, however, St. Nick's cap is melting away in Eden at an arithmetic pace, two-thirds melted since 1979, because of our insistence as a country here on continuing reliance on fossil fuel consumption. So if you go out Christmas shopping this year, a fine pursuit generally of course in the spirit of giving, and do so, however, in an S.U.V., remember what you are doing to the planet by doing so, not giving, but taking--and, so, shame on you. Do us all a favor this Christmas; go to the dealership and trade that hog in for a fuel efficient vehicle; indeed, make it up to us, and buy yourself one of those sleek new hybrids. You'll feel better for it.
All the wars against third world countries won't bring Eden back once its gone, and the tub is filling rapidly, probably upon your beach cottage, by next summer, maybe threatening your mountain cottage in a couple of winters hence. Better start building your boat and gathering up the animals, there Pilgrim. We may need it by Christmas, '10, at the present rate.
Ah, but St. Paul is always worth remembering: The evidence of things not seen. Yet, there must be clear viewing of those things before faith may be turned to responsible action to prevent the things which threaten the very existence of the unseen things. Thus, we recommend this Christmas less shopping, far less driving about, especially in the Tank Truck, and just that, studying those things unseen, so that we might better be prepared in future to combat the untoward, and properly so, with the weapons not of steel, but of the mind.
In keeping with that theme, we thought we would provide you a little more on a Presidential visit to Chapel Hill, N.C., this time in words rather than simply pictures, as we were more in a pictorial mood, (and because our provider's personal scrapbook didn't have those words), when we put the other things here a few weeks ago. Poetry, we stress again, as someone once said eloquently, cleanses. And so, we offer the poetry to the pictures, from October 12, 1961.
Due warning: It may well cause you seriously to question the mundane, the thing of substance and touch, as the ultimate arbiter of reality. So if you are squeamish, best leave it off until you grasp that notion. We posit to you it is not that but that other thing, that unseen thing, which always shall have the Final see. See it? You may have to read a little. Sorry if you have to squint some. We want to show it to you in the original page format as others read and perceived it, rightly or wrongly, at the time. Further warning: This material may not be suitable for the viewing of all adults; if you are young in mind, body, or merely in heart, use your discretion wisely as to who should see it.
So, go here, if you Dare.
Incidentally, we misspoke on that earlier offering: the Bell Tower is not named after William Rand Kenan, as the nearby stadium. Why we remembered it that way, we couldn't tell you. Maybe it was because we just always liked to listen to it rather than so much reading its plaques on the walls at its base. But, we took the time to stroll around it a little bit ago and examine those plaques. So the true story, for what it's worth, is that the Tower is named officially Patterson-Morehead Bell Tower, after a Civil War General Patterson and one of the many Moreheads, instrumental in the University's history. You can look those up at the University's site if you've particular interest. In any event, the Tower was completed and presented to the University on November 26, 1931. We thought it was in 1938 because a picture of it appeared in The News in this October, 1938. C'est la vie. Sometimes, the little mistake of fact is more elucidative of things, nevertheless, than the precision of absolute certainty. So, sometimes we use that serendipitous strain, learnt in study of logic and philosophy, once anon, to that end.
Anyhow, we hope we might inveigle old Apollo back to us come February. What do ye think? You never know. He may be getting tired of our abuse and may turn tail and run like Hell, skeedaddling, before we blow him up completely, as some did, probably with good sense in mind, afore Pickett got charge of them. Pettigru didn't though.
Furthermore, we should be remiss if we were to fail to wonder at least a little at where the President heard that one about First at Bethel, Farthest at Gettysburg, and all that. We don't know whether the President ever read The Mind of the South, but he certainly behaved as if not only that he had, but that he was a very well-read scholar of it. Reportedly, and by the evidence which we saw, he was a voracious reader--and of course he spent some time in the South, visiting Charlotte occasionally between 1939 and 1941 for his health, and being transferred from O.N.I. in Washington to Charleston for awhile in early 1942, before being shipped overseas to the Pacific. So, early on, he had the opportunity to glean some personal observation and understanding of "Uncle Sam's other province".
As always with such things, the truth lies somewhere in those things unseen probably. Regardless, we regard it all as a pretty good read. Some people, however, in those days, anyway, couldn't see; some of them, seemingly, couldn't even read.
Baby often can't.
So, if you missed it, by chance, here's another little excerpt from Cash's book, section 11, Chapter I, "Of Easing Tensions--and Certain Quiet Years", Book III:
But now, there was of course change involved in all this growth and absorption in empire-building. It rises up and becomes manifest in the very telling of the story. And yet--as regards the Southern mind, which is our theme, how essentially superficial and unrevolutionary remain the obvious changes; how certainly do these obvious changes take place within the ancient framework, and even sometimes contribute to the positive strengthening of the ancient pattern!
Look close at this scene as it stands in 1914. There is an atmosphere here, an air, shining from every word and deed. And the key to this atmosphere, if I do not altogether miss the fact, is that familiar word without which it would be impossible to tell the story of the Old South, that familiar word "extravagant." Probably it would mean nothing if I said that the skyscrapers which were going up were going up in towns which, characteristically, had no call for them--in towns where available room was still plentiful, and land prices were still relatively low--for it would merely be said that the Middle West was doing something of the same silly sort. But if I told you that they were often going up in towns (like Tar Heel Charlotte and Winston and Greensboro, or South Carolina's Columbia and Greenville and Spartanburg) which had little more use for them than a hog has for a morning coat--in towns where there was no immediate prospect of their being filled, unless by tenants willing to forego a meal now and then in order to participate in such grandeur?
Softly, do you not hear behind that the gallop of Jeb Stuart's cavalrymen? Do you not recognize it for the native gesture of an incurably romantic people, enamoured before all else of the magnificent and the spectacular? A people at least as greatly moved by the histrionic urge to perform in splendor, and by the patriotic will to testify to faith in their land and to vindicate it before the world's opinion, as by the hope of gain and the belief that tomorrow's growth will bring forth tenants in profusion?
But I generalize too easily, I am a little fanciful and maybe a little dubious, and of course I ought not to be so. Well, but listen now to that boasting--to that great outburst of pride I have alluded to. There are strange notes--Yankee notes--in all this talk about the biggest factory, about bank clearings and car loadings and millions. But does anybody fail to detect the authentic Southern pitch and tone? Does anybody fail to hear once more the native accent of William L. Yancey and Barnwell Rhett, to glimpse again the waving plume of, say, Wade Hampton, that trooper whose perpetual gasconade so irritated William Tecumseh Sherman?
Or, again, does anybody imagine that these new boasts have eliminated the old? Then let him listen to the orators, as I myself listened to them as a boy in North Carolina in 1914. Let him observe how certainly such a boast as "First at Bethel, farthest at Gettysburg, and last at Appomattox" precedes these new ones; how certainly the latter are felt merely as the crown upon the former; how the cheers spring up for the one as for the other; how surely the adjective "Southern" sounds through the whole.
Nevertheless, there is Rotary, the sign-manual of the Yankee spirit, the distillate, as it were, of the Yankee mind; and not the most fanciful man will venture to suggest that its appearance in Dixie is not witness to a most profound and searching change in Southern psychology? But I am not so sure.
If one took the Southern extravagance and brag, if one took the old Southern gregariousness, the unaffected delight of every proper Southerner in the company of his fellows; if one added to these the Southern love for high and noble and somewhat nebulous profession, and the Southern joy in the sense of participating in tremendous though indefinite enterprise and in mysterious bonds; if, again, one added to all these the old horse-trading instinct, and the continual growth of that instinct under the conditions which had reigned since the Civil War, I think we should hardly have to suppose more than an unfortunate decline in the dignity of the Southern manner--the grafting of Yankee backslapping upon the normal Southern geniality--to arrive at a startlingly accurate portrait of Rotary, exactly as it was to flourish in this country. I am myself, indeed, perpetually astonished to recall that Rotary was not invented in the South.
And when we turn from Rotary as an institution to the men who made it up, when we go on to examine the heroes and captains of Progress as they stood in 1914, and the forces in the South which they bodied forth, we find much the same story continually unfolding. These men, as I suggest, distinctly had the stamp of George F. Babbitt upon them; and their example was combining with the whole flow of the times to set the stamp of Babbittry ever more closely upon those about them, and especially upon the young men who were boiling out of the Southern colleges.
The element of calculation was by now an immeasurably great force in the lives and characters of these men--was becoming an immeasurably great force in the life and character of the South at large. There was a word--"smart"--which was increasingly upon Southern lips in these days, a word serving as the touchstone and accolade of success under Progress. And what was epitomized in this word was, first of all, of course, a constantly mounting acquisitiveness, the fact that the mere making of money was everywhere getting to be the ultimate test of a man, a growing obsession in the upper classes, in all the ambitious elements of society, greater in the towns, but great enough even in the country-side. This, and a rapidly rising pride in and admiration for cleverness in acquisition. And more still--a rising pride in and admiration for cleverness in acquisition that was in fact no more than cunning, an increasing carelessness as to the scrupulousness of the means employed.
The Sun Returns
Yesterday the sun, having touched his farthest point south, turned back northward. And almost nobody, including ourselves, bothered to remember more than casually that it was after all the Winter solstice. Once it was not so. Once a man watched the retreat of the great luminary with gloomy misgiving. Would he ever come back? True, he had come back last year and the year before. But no one might be sure that he would not go on walking down the sky to the south until he was altogether lost from view, to leave the world to everlasting darkness and cold and death.
And so it was imperative for men to try to persuade him to come back, on the chance that it was his own bull-headedness that was taking him away--or to rescue him, if, as was quite likely, a dragon had him in tow and was carrying him off to eat him. And so everywhere on earth priests and people alike performed many rites designed to these ends. And everywhere they made holiday and declared high festival to proclaim their joy when the watchers in the high places reported at last that it was true--that he had paused in his going, and was beginning to return. The Roman Saturnalia, which is commonly said to be the forerunner of our Christmas, was such a festival, and when we fire off firecrackers today we are following the ancient custom of loud noise-making which belonged to that festival.
But for us it is all a matter of course. We know that the mighty giver of life will return in his appointed time, that for a little while yet the days will grow colder still, but that with the coming of February the trees will begin to wake, and that presently the dead earth will wax fecund again and flower into full Spring. Knowing it, and thinking we understand it quite well, we neither marvel at nor celebrate nor even much think on it any more.
Independent of Politics*
Greenville, N.C., is getting a good man in Marvin Westmoreland, municipal accountant here who goes to take the place of director of finance and purchases, with a possibility of becoming city manager, in the eastern Tar Heel town. It's not only a compliment to Mr. Westmoreland but a sign that the City of Charlotte is run on a business-like rather than a political basis. Whoever heard of one city's bidding for the political hacks of another? That sort is a drug on any place's market.
And as further proof that ability and not political service rendered is the test of municipal employment here, the City Council at its meeting today is almost certain to promote Mr. Westmoreland's assistant, J. M. McCorkle, to his place automatically.
Argentina Balks
President Roberto Ortiz of Argentina, who yesterday set the Pan-American Conference back on its heels by voting a declaration which itself represents a concession to his country's expressed mistrust of the United States, is what would be called in this country a business-man President. Self-made, with a considerable fortune accumulated out of the law and an importing firm, he was elected last February by the largest popular vote ever, which was altogether satisfactory to Argentina's beef barons and the foreign interests which have four billions of dollars invested there.
The difference between what Argentina refuses to sign and proposes in its place is, to the direct mind, as the difference between tweedledum and tweedledee. But, the Europeans who have investments in Argentina and the customers of Ortiz' importing firm and his exporting friends will perceive the difference at once, and take comfort from it. It means, in all likelihood, that Senor Ortiz is not above practising a little dollar-diplomacy all on his own account, and that far from being rushed into rebuking exponents of an ideology which happens to be non-American, business will continue to be business.
And since it happens that the great majority of Argentina's exports consist of agricultural products and livestock, Secretary Hull is effectively prevented from putting in a bid for the Senor's goods and good will.
Temptation to Censorship
Miss Dorothy Thompson,
New York City.
Dear Miss Thompson:
We see by the editorial page of The Charlotte News for Tuesday that you have written an open letter to our own Elder McNinch, who presently, to our great pride and joy, serves the nation as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, calling upon him to examine into the possibilities of choking Father Coughlin, the Detroit rabble-rouser, off the air--under the power given him (the Elder) by law to suspend or revoke the licenses of radio stations which do not serve "the public interest or necessity." But what occurs to us at once is to inquire how you manage to reconcile that stand with your general devotion to the Bill of Rights, and particularly the right of free speech?
Understand us thoroughly. We are dead against this fellow Coughlin and everything he stands for. We agree with you that he is engaged in using his office as priest to lend color to a campaign of racial and religious hatred--that he is striving by skillful innuendo to set up in the minds of millions of uninformed people the equation: Jew equals Communist equals Atheism, with the corollary that the Jew must therefore be dealt with in America much as he has been dealt with in Nazi Germany. And we agree that the "evidence" with which he inflames his suckers is demonstrably false, and that if he doesn't know it to be false, he easily could with a very little honest inquiry. Nor do we underestimate the danger to democracy and the peace of our country which is involved in his activities.
Nevertheless, it seems to us that you are assigning far too much power to Elder McNinch and to that authority of his to revoke radio licenses not used for "the public interest and necessity." Isn't free speech itself a fundamental of "public interest and necessity?" And do you really believe that the clause in question was designed to give McNinch or anybody else the right to interfere with free speech, or that it ought to be so interpreted? Rather wasn't the law designed, and oughtn't it to be interpreted, simply to mean that no radio station has a right to hog a channel on the air purely for advertising and moneymaking purposes--to feed its audience no other diet than, say, hill-billy music, swing and lengthy plugs for patent medicines? That, in a word, it simply means that, to be entitled to the use of the channel on the air, a station must live up to minimum standards in the quality of its entertainment? That it must now and then park the hill-billies in favor of Arturo Toscanini or John Barbirolli or John Charles Thomas or the "Mignon" or--Dorothy Thompson?
And isn't it as plain as plain can be that if you interpret that clause to mean that McNinch has a right to choke off Coughlin, it can also be interpreted to mean that he has a right to choke off the plays of Eugene O'Neill or Mr. Clifford Odets, to stop the mouth of Mr. William Edgar Borah or Mr. Norman Thomas or Mr. Herbert Hoover or Mr. Al Smith (against whom the Elder once led a fiery crusade in North Carolina) or--Dorothy Thompson? Anybody at all?
Ah, but we overlook the test of truth? But there, it seems to us, you get on most unstable ground. The answer that jesting Pilate would not stay to hear, the world has not agreed on to this day. And if Coughlin deals in demonstrable falsehoods, yet, once you lay down the rule that every utterance must be true, you lay the way wide open for the additional rule that the truth is what those in power believe or want said.
Ourselves, we believe profoundly that Stuart Mill was right, and that to exist at all free speech must be really free--that it must include not only the right to say what everybody else on earth disagrees with but also what is demonstrably false. Nor do we think that fact is to leave ourselves defenseless before the Coughlins and their venom. The answer to demonstrable falsehood is not suppression into underground channels, but the demonstrable fact. The answer to the Coughlins is not a gag for them, but the systematic exposure of their falsehoods, the systematic preaching of decency and tolerance, by decent and tolerant men and women--the Dorothy Thompsons. And if it be said that such a course is exceedingly dangerous--why, certainly, it is dangerous. Free speech and democracy are inherently dangerous. And if it should fail? To suppose that it will is simply to suppose that the fundamental assumption of democracy--that the mass of men are capable of distinguishing between falsehood and fact and that they prefer truth and decency to lies and hate, that, in a word, they are capable of governing themselves--is not itself true. If it fails, then the whole democratic process will have failed, and it won't matter.
Editors, The News.
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