The Charlotte News

Sunday, April 16, 1939

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We maintain the other two editorials of this date, previously placed, here.

Also, on this date, Cash contributed to the book-page "O. Henry Passes the Test", a day after meeting with Al and Blanche Knopf in O. Henry's birthplace, Greensboro, a meeting primarily regarding the slow progress on the book, and incidentally to inquire of any potential new authors with whom Cash was acquainted in the area--perhaps the latter having been more a subtle hint to Cash that unless he got on with it, some other aspiring writer might eclipse his work before it came to full being and fruition.

And, on the subject of O. Henry, and the occasional Gaelicized misprinting of his nom de plume, see the plaiful "Plain Ol' Possum", December 27, 1938, and the editorial from Zebulon, N.C. by which it's stimulated, its lively inspiration; and it's most certainly en règle by both the gentleman and lady, (though we're not so sure about its accompanying note as to whether it's or not its).

Whose Yadkin?

Clyde Hoey's, Now, or Franklin R. McNinch's?

Governor Hoey will probably lay himself open to a barrage of dead cats if he carries out what is said to be his intention and intervenes in the High Point case on behalf of the State. But in point of fact such intervention is probably desirable from any viewpoint save that which has it that the end justifies the means.

The State certainly hasn't any business intervening in behalf of any power company, or attempting to use its place to suppress the High Point project in favor of a power company. That High Point has a right to build a power plant, and that no existing power company has a right to monopoly over and above the municipal government, are self-evident propositions. The sole question at issue in the original suits was whether or not the Federal Government had a right to subsidize High Point in building such a plant. The Supreme Court decided that it did. And regardless of what you think of the policy of the decision, that settles that. High Point has a right to build that plant, subject to the decision of the courts in the pending cases.

But North Carolina has a right to have it decided who shall control the plant if it is built--the State or the Federal Government. It has a right to have it decided who controls the waters of the Yadkin. The Federal Government says it has a right to both controls, on the ground that the Yadkin is "navigable." But everybody in North Carolina knows that it is not in fact navigable, and it seems more than doubtful that it affects truly navigable waters farther down.

The whole contention looks like an effort unreasonably to stretch the legal authority of the Federal Government to attain powers which it considers desirable but which do not constitutionally belong to it. And, if the Federal Government can do that in one case, it can do it in all others--until the State will have no real authority left. North Carolina will be entirely within its rights in demanding that the courts, not the quasi-judicial Federal Power Commission, settles that question.

Vain Argument

As Is Any That Runs Up Against an Attitude

Tomorrow, the County Commissioners will come to grips, head to head, with that momentous question, whether to sell confiscated bottled liquor to the state's elsewhere ABC stores or to let all the little cat and kittenfish in the Catawba River have a swig. On hand is a stock of so many pints, but the policy is the thing, for there will be other pints by the case during the rest of this board's term, and in the aggregate a real piece of perfectly legal change is involved.

To all proposals of re-sale, two or three of the Commissioners have exclaimed, so to speak, "What! Wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?" Nay, verily. But as an entirely practical proposition, it seems a good bit less than ordinarily sensible for one county to destroy a commodity which another country is selling and for which it orders off to the "Foreign Distillers." This would be an egregious sample of what the drys mean when they decry the "economic foolishness" of sending money out of a poor state to keep up the liquor barons.

But we are under no delusions that we have the drier Commissioners nailed down with an unanswerable argument. Their attitude toward the transaction will be, in all probability, the attitude that is the foundation of the whole prohibition faith. Liquor is evil, that is, and should be condemned.

And that is that.

Dark Suspicion

La Guardia Hollered "Famine" Before He Was Hungry

There may be more than meets the eye in New York City's imminent coal famine. Mayor La Guardia is more alarmed, apparently, than anybody else, and is talking wildly about buying or leasing a mine on the City's account. The Mayor, it happens, is a great friend to Labor's cause, and not above using an industrial emergency for ulterior socialistic purposes, such as going into the coal-mining game. Furthermore, a Congressman from New York State implored the deadlocked miners and mine-operators to arrange to release coal to Buffalo, where hospitals and other essential services he described as being seriously affected. The city's public health commissioner, however, reported that he had received no intimation of any coal shortage.

One would think, even after failing to find the statistics he was after, that in an industry so given to over-production as the coal industry, the mere matter of a fifteen-day strike would not cause so acute and so immediate a shortage. But then, one not being able to support his suspicions that the cry of shortage had been raised for a purpose, might be mistaken.

 


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