The Charlotte News

Saturday, February 4, 1939

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: While in Texas, Pass the Biscuits Pappy propped for Dracon's sadistic brother, Delay, slubberdegullion Bob in Washington plumped against props for France to do in Germany's, as Mr. Bone informs, sold to it by the U.S., while Bob's fellow traveler in the House, warring Smalcaldick Marty, got more hay to continue hunting up witnesses against Reds, letting the Browns and Silvers roam freely. And everybody over sixty, rich and poor, would get their thirty to sixty from an ad valorem on all.

No wonder Cash took time off from the present to write some more of the South's checkered past.

A Man Reveals Himself

That the Hon. W. Lee O'Daniel by the Grace of God Governor of the late Republic of Texas, was one of the oddest fish ever to arise in this country, which has had its share of odd fish, has been obvious all along. A flour salesman without eminence of any sort, the man took a hillbilly band, a song he himself had written and elegantly entitled "Pass the Biscuits, Pappy," and on that platform and a promise of pensions of $30 a month to practically everybody not an infant, got himself elected. Then when he came into office, he promptly proposed to the Legislature that it pay the pensions by enacting a transaction tax--the old Townsend nonsense all over again.

But it now develops that the man is not only an odd fish but an exceedingly unpleasant one. Wednesday night he reprieved a Negro, doomed to die in the electric chair for murder, for 30 days. And--told reporters that he did it to drag out the Negro's torture, through "the dreadful punishment of facing death day by day." Texas Legislator, Jo Ed Winfree, furiously denounced that to the Texas House of Representatives as the "foulest talk which has emanated from the brain of a man in this state in two decades." The accusation does not seem too strong.

Site Ed. Note: While on the subject, again, of eggs, be they whole, cooked yokeless, (whites only, said some scientists in early July, 1941, being anti-carcinogens, doubtful though the hypothesis may be save regarding limiting cholesterol elevation and hearty stuff, revisions being apt in such endeavor, such as we now note recently they have taken back soy as a reducer of said fatty-like, but not so, trio of hydrocarbons), rotten, spoiled, dumptied, cracked, slightly or otherwise, or even bulbous, as recently recounted herein, we nearly forgot to reference you back, or ahead as you please, to the other quote we included last summer from Mein Kampf re Mr. Hister's culling of the vaunted Columbus feat therewith, albeit with a slight bit of sleight in progress to achieve it thusly--that bit being of which Hister forgot to account in his putationary bombastery. So, for that bite of poison, nevertheless elucidatory of a valuable lesson for would-be practitioners of empiricutic prescriptions and proscriptions, as a horse-drench, reared on such as with Bob, (cf. Coriolanus, Act II, Scene 1), go to "A Little Bear", June 15, 1939.

Also, bear in mind your ABC's, but we'll get back to that. In the meantime, don't let those new bedbugs in and about NYC, about which we hear, impair your sleep; for as was said in 1519 by William Horman in Vulgaria, 24b, "The flesshe lieth bytwene the bone and the skynne lyke a mattresse of cotton."

Whose Ox, Eh?

The Hon. Robert Rice Reynolds was holding forth on the floor of the Senate concerning the horrible un-neutrality and danger of selling airplanes to France. It was, he said, indubitably just another part of the plot of the Reds to force France into the enterprise of murdering poor Mr. Hitler and 80,000,000 innocent and helpless Germans, and to drag the United States into the same nefarious undertaking. Then up arose the Senator from Washington, to say what we now reproduce from The Congressional Record for February 1:

Mr. BONE. Merely to keep the Record straight, and so that the American people may have no misunderstanding about this matter or have any illusions whatever left, let it be known that shortly after Hitler came into power in Germany American airplane manufacturers began to arm Hitler and the new Germany in the air: and the great air fleet built up in Germany was in no small degree the product of American airplane factories. If Hitler has become a menace in the air and a menace to Europe and any blame or responsibility is to attach to the commercial aspects of that sort of business, the blame must rest upon American airplane manufacturers, for the records of the Senate to Munitions Committee are replete with that picture. Probably 2,500 of the finest airplane engines made in this country were sent into Germany to arm Hitler in the air, in defiance of the clear provisions of the Versailles Treaty. American airplane patents covering the latest devices on airplane engines were freely given to Germany and were being manufactured by the Bavarian Motor Works in Germany.

What we want to know is this: is it more wicked to sell airplanes to France than to Germany? And if not, how does it happen that the Hon. Robert Rice Reynolds never once raised his voice so long as it was Germany which was the buyer?

An Appropriation Is Got

We seem to be in for the dismal prospect of another year or two of the offensive Dies Committee. Nobody in his senses objects in the least to a sane and open-minded inquiry into the extent of Communist and Fascist activities in this country. The people are entitled to know by way of information. But the Dies Committee is simply a smear committee. It allows all sorts of crackpots to vent all sorts of absurd charges and plaster them over the front pages without at all bothering to give the victims a chance to reply, or attempting to get at actual facts. And so far, it has shown a remarkable tenderness for Fascists--not more than one per cent of its efforts having been directed to them. The sober fact about this committee seems to be that it does not exist to find out facts at all but to pump up sentiment for bills designed to destroy the Bill of Rights, and respect of free speech and free assembly.

And the manner in which it has gone about getting the huge new appropriation of $150,000 is even more alarming. Congressmen have been deluged with telegrams furiously demanding it. Because the people were so aroused? Of course not. Because it was backed by a number of so-called "patriotic" pressure groups--of which the rank and file would ordinarily be indifferent, if it were not for the politicians who were in command of them.

Sacred and Constitutional

The ingenious justification Mr. Odus Mull, democratic wheelhorse and a member of the Cleveland Clique, put forward for his resolution to eliminate the absentee ballot in primaries but to retain it in general elections is that voting in primaries is a party privilege whereas voting in general elections is a constitutional right. It is a foregone conclusion in North Carolina, of course, that when the Democrats have held their primary, the election is over; and as far as that anti-climactic formality, there is nothing in the constitution about absentees. Indeed, the only pertinent adjuration there is that elections shall be free.

Mr. Mull is plainly inventing citations to fit his case. A more virtuous argument, if frankness be a virtue, was that made the other day by J. O. Bell, a member of the State Board of Elections from Henderson County, which is the horrible example in all North Carolina of abuse of the absentee ballot. Mr. Bell outed with this:

"In the West we need some leeway. [I.e. the absentee ballot.] Unless we have some margin, there will be a flock of Republicans down here."

This is an unashamed admission that an unholy means to a sacred end--the dominance of the Democratic Party in Henderson County--itself becomes imbued with righteousness. Mr. Mull, to be sure, does not go so far. He contends only that to defraud Republicans out of any sparse electoral triumphs is the constitutional privilege of North Carolina Democracy.

Mr. Mooney's Ego

The news that old Tom Mooney plans to divorce the aging and unbeautiful wife who fought for 22 years to win his freedom, pretty well finishes off the picture of the great man as a noble and gentle soul. He himself charges indeed that it is all a scheme--

"... to smear me, and thereby attempt to discredit the labor movement and its liberal allies, which won my freedom."

But his wife says that it is true, and there is entirely too much egotistic assumption in his identification of himself with the labor movement and "its liberal allies." The majority of people who favored turning him out of prison did not admire him at all. And not a few of the people who were most active in his behalf suspected and said all along that he was an egotistic old poseur, who enjoyed the picture of himself as a martyr to injustice. Merely, they felt that, though it was not entirely impossible that he actually was somehow mixed up in the San Francisco Preparedness Day Bombing, the evidence on which he was convicted was clearly framed, and that nobody at all, whatever his character, should be kept in prison on the basis of such evidence.

Mooney in jail was important, not for himself but for the implications of his case. Mooney out of jail is merely another common potato, who has to be judged by the unpleasant character he exhibits and who has no right at all to set up for an incarnation of the liberal spirit who must not be criticized lest it "smear" that spirit itself.

Murderous Thought

A snare and a delusion, the Townsend Plan is called by a former Townsend Planner who now has a plan of his own. His plan goes by the name of the General Welfare Idea, and he described it glowingly for the edification of the House Ways & Means Committee.

This is the way the General Welfare Idea works. You lay a tax of 2% on everybody's gross income, with the first $100 a month exempted. You pay everybody over 60, regardless of need, from Charles M. Schwab down to Indian Bill, $30 to $60 every month. You get so rich trading on the money all these old folks spend that your income jumps up and you don't give a hang about the 2% you have to pay on it. He says.

Maybe so, but sometimes we think this country is going loco in its frantic search to recapture prosperity by giving legal force and effect to the fifth commandment. Sometimes, that is, a choler overcomes us, and we curse, "Damn the old folks--damn 'em!"

But then we happen to recall that the old folks aren't nearly so consistent in their own behalf as all the self-appointed advocates, and we take it back. Even so, a vestige of resentment remains and we almost wish that the old folks would die off (not really) so the country can forget about them and regain its zest for the only true prosperity that has ever existed--hard work and thrift.

 


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