The Charlotte News

Friday, June 30, 1939

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Cash traps Hitler's Danzig argument--the argument which ultimately started World War II--in its perfect nonsense when he points out that the same argument would also apply to Milwaukee and St. Louis because of their predominant German populations. He also accurately predicts what England would do in this instance, different from the appeasement with respect to Czechoslovakia, if Hitler engaged Poland in war.

Unanimous

There Are Occasions When The House Can Get Together

It is, it develops, a mistake to suppose that the House of Representatives is always a sort of Kilkenny pit, where New Dealers, anti-New Dealers, Democrats, Republicans, Farmer-Laborites, Conservatives, Liberals, Radicals are eternally engaged in trying to cut one another's throats. There are occasions when the House can get together solidly and with wonderful and heartwarming amity. Witness what happened last week. First an income tax was enacted for the District of Columbia, which hasn't hitherto had one--the idea being to take advantage of the recent Supreme Court decision that Federal jobholders' salaries are subject to local taxation, and make them contribute to the support of the area in which they lived most of the time. But then--the House turned right around and unanimously adopted a resolution exempting the salaries of all Congressmen and all employees of Congress from the tax!

Said the Hon. Nichols, of Oklahoma, by way of explanation:

"I am not here of my own volition. I come by reason of the fact that I am a servant of the constituency of approximately 300,000 people, the same as all of you men..."

They just drafted the great man, you see, and made him go to Washington willy-nilly. The 10,000 smackers per annum, plus clerk hire, had nothing to do with it. Well, we are glad he made that plain. Else some suspicious soul would have been saying that the only way Congressmen can get together is in defense of their right to draw that $10,000 duty free.

Man-Sized Job

Every New Development Shows The Need Of A Police Commissioner

The Police Department, not at all liking what Judge Sims had to say about individual officers forcing their attentions upon prostitutes, deliberately falsifying in court to obtain convictions, and other charges, may ask him to name names and adduce proof. Nothing would be more salutary for everybody concerned, particularly for officers who are above such offenses but who suffer in reputation nonetheless. Two or three rotten apples in the barrel, so to put it.

But, alas, we don't expect anything to come of the sensational report Judge Sims made. That report freely criticized the manner in which the department was run and reflected upon the ability of the Chief to run it. But nothing will be done about that. The trouble is, you see, that the City Council is so sharply divided into factions that it cannot unite for any purpose, no matter how wholesome and beneficial. The trouble is, indeed, that half the City Council suspects the other half of ulterior motives, and that one faction is dedicated to preserving the status quo in the Police Department, no matter how indefensible that status may be, and that the other faction is dedicated to changing it even if it means jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

With such a sharp division likely to remain unchanged for two whole years, the only possible hope we discern for the revitalizing of the Police Department is the new Commissioner of Police. It is obvious that Mr. Grice has a man-sized job to do, and fully as obvious that there's no one else in sight to do it.

A False Favor

Not Everybody Wanting A Loan Would Be Helped By It

Mr. Jesse Jones, RFC's boss and chosen head of the new Federal Loan Agency, doesn't think much of the Mead bill to insure bank loans (up to one million) to small business. He is not only skeptical that it would be of any assistance to recovery; he doubts even that it would help the borrowers themselves. "The great majority of inquiries and applications for small-business loans," he told the Senate committee,

"... come from applicants with promotional ideas, with no record as successful business experience, and little prospect of success or earnings."

His testimony bears out that of James H. Perkins, National City Bank Chairman, an excerpt of which is appended hereto. The National City, with 72 branches in New York City, not only makes loans to big business but to small business; not only commercial loans but term loans, that is, long-time capital loans; not only term loans but personal loans, that is, installment loans. It made one chap a $200 loan to market artificial fish bait.

And the National City found, by going back over years of business, that if it had made every last one of the loans it had been asked to make, its loans outstanding would have been increased by only five per cent. We dare say that its collection department, however, would have experienced a far greater acceleration in activity

Mr. Hitler Gambles

With Marked Cards, He Plainly Thinks; But It May Be That The Marks Are A Little Mixed Up

It is pretty plain that what Mr. Hitler is up to is to have Danzig suddenly announce that she has "come home to the Reich" of her own free well--with the purpose of forcing Poland to strike the first blow if war comes, and so giving him technical room to cry "aggression" and portray Germany as an innocent power engaged only in "self-defense." What is more, there are apparently people still left in the world who will fall for it.

Five times already Adolf Hitler has violated his solemn and voluntarily-given promises to the effect that "this is the last territorial demand I shall make in Europe." This will be the sixth time. But it will be said with a perfectly straight face that after all Danzig is inhabited mainly by Germans, and that a "free city" has the right to surrender its "freedom" if it chooses. In the teeth of the fact that this man who demands "self-determination" for Germans in one breath, in the next demands a fifteen-mile strip across the Pormorze Corridor inhabited entirely by Poles, and that he has already deprived the Czechs and Slovaks of the right of "self-determination." And in the teeth of the fact that Danzig lives as a parasite on Polish trade, two-thirds of which reaches the Baltic through the port; and that Hitler wants it, not because of any handful of Germans but because its possession will make Poland his economic prisoner, and so ultimately his political prisoner. If Hitler is entitled to Danzig, then he is entitled to Milwaukee and St. Louis, both of which are predominantly inhabited by Germans (anybody who is of German extraction remains a German under the Nazi theory, even though he and his fathers have lived abroad for a century), to make their living from the economic system of the United States.

Will the Governments of England and France themselves still be ranged among the suckers? That is a question which nobody can answer with certainty. Mr. Hitler himself obviously expects that Chamberlain will grasp the technical excuse, bring pressure on Poland to acquiesce in the cutting of her throat, and refuse to aid her if she is rash enough to go ahead and fight anyhow. He has ground, too, for it was exactly such a technical out that Chamberlain used to escape from his obligations to Czechoslovakia.

Nevertheless, Hitler may be making the fatal error of his career. England's strange quiet before Japan, whom she could smack into oblivion without half trying, may be the result of pure indecision. But it may also proceed from the cold purpose of once for all having it out with Hitler. It is plain enough that compromise with him does no good, but merely makes him stronger for the final day of reckoning--that there is little likelihood of peace in the world until he is hanged and his regime obliterated. And it is more than probable that even Chamberlain noses much now. If he dies, then that story of what Halifax has told Ribbentrop, "if you want war, you can have it," may well be true. And if it is, Mr. Hitler had better not doubt that England is fundamentally incapable of action. Over and over in the past, she has dallied in much the same fashion--and then struck when her enemies were quite sure she wouldn't.

 


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