The Charlotte News

Monday, July 17, 1939

FOUR EDITORIALS

Its Own Medicine*

Government Gets A Taste Of A Bitter Dose

Senator Murray of Montana had already introduced an amendment to restore the prevailing wage scale to WPA's scale, according to organized labor's insistence, when the Siege of the Sewing Room took place in Minneapolis. Saying something about being "embarrassed," Senator Murray indicated that he would not press for action on his amendment.

The good man's behavior is only natural. He sees labor's point and would have liked to do something about it, but he's just be doggoned if he's going to be terrified into doing it.

Everybody is agreed, for that matter, that the Government cannot permit itself to be coerced by riots, bloodshed and defiance into a reversing its deliberate action in giving organized labor what it wants. We quite agree, but are bound to remark that this is precisely the dose which the Government has been compelling private employers to swallow.

That is the Government has made organized labor an instrument of Federal policy. Organized labor has adopted, in all too many instances, notably in the automobile industry, the tactics of the gas house gang. To avoid a showdown--nay, to avoid actual pitched battles--the authorities have had to look the other way, and employers have had to sit down and bargain collectively with the club over their heads. We do not believe that we overstate the case.

Employers, like labor's friend Senator Murray, have been "embarrassed." But they've had to go ahead and, on pain of violating the Wagner Act, bargain all the same.

Nazi Progress

Maybe Painting Prospers But Knowledge Doesn't

Said Adolf Hitler in opening the German National Art Exhibition at Munich yesterday:

"The National Socialist (Nazi) star of art is shining in the heavens."

After which highly original rhetoric Herr Adolf Wagner, Munich district leader, proudly proclaimed that the exhibition was growing with "the same measure and tempo with which the Fuhrer augments the Reich."

Well, maybe so. We have no exact facts on the graphic arts. But we know that they never have flourished in a strait jacket. And we have some collateral evidence. For one thing, the fact that every living German writer of any importance is today in exile from his native land. And these facts dug up by the American Association of Scientific Workers Boston-Cambridge branch, as to what happened to German education under the Nazis.

In five years the enrollment in German universities has decreased by over half--from 116,154 students in 1932-33 to 53,753 in 1937-38.

In the first four years of Hitler's regime, university teaching staffs dropped 15.8 per cent.

About 1,500 university teachers have been dismissed because of their political views.

In one year after the seizure of Austria, the University of Vienna lost 48.1 per cent of its teaching staff.

As measured by the number of pages in German chemical, bio-chemical and physiology journals, research has fallen off 50 per cent. Foreign contributors account for a large part of the content of these journals now, so that the loss is actually more than indicated. All the older celebrated physics and mathematical journals are reported as having "lost quality." And Logos, once celebrated as a philosophical journal, has become an organ of propaganda.

Cuckoo Tour

The Silly Season Waxes All Around The Globe

The greatest array of the biggest sun spots in years marched across the face of the central luminary. The dog star got himself settled into his baleful annual business. Poison ivy, chiggers, and sunburn flourished. The weather bureaus here and there reported the hottest July since 1931. The Friendly City's pavement turned into goo.

In Germany Adolf Hitler's alert agents discovered a new British menace to lebensraum--the "Chamberlain With Umbrella" doll, which they said was wickedly ruining the German toy trade in London.

In Tokyo 50,000 Japs yelled that England must be pasted in the snoot just like that.

In Baltimore a judge tried to coax a sullen parrot into saying "Mildred," as to find out if he was one family's Peter or another family's Polly.

In Yokohama, Jap police refused to let 63 chorus cuties, American and British, land on the ground, that they might make susceptible Jap swains think more kindly of the evening lands. They shoulda let the boys take 'em to dinner.

In London, an American lady tourist saw a newspaper poster in Regent Street and posed a question: "Where is Axis? I can't find it anywhere on the map."

In Salt Lake City a kidlet wrote a postcard, addressed simply to Mom and Dad. General Delivery, Denver, announcing that the cow had calved, and signed it only "Marion." In Denver the post office went rapidly nuts.

In Rhode Island a man wrote to the Treasury Department asking for the hundred smackers which he understood went to all babies born on the Fourth of July, got the Department's regrets.

In Oakland, Calif., a cop who has had the hiccups for nine weeks, surveyed the cures advocated in an avalanche of letters, decided that he had rather keep on having them than risk the recipes which ran, "a gargle composed of camphor, ice-cream, and raw potatoes," and "have a friend pull your ears while you drink water without breathing"--reserved judgment on the one which read "a glass of strong beer."

In Charlotte the library, remained closed and the cop situation stayed a dizzy tangle. And even up here in our platinum and chrome tower, with our solid gold cuspidors and the solid sapphire air-conditioner set at 40 below, we sadly mopped our brows and thought wistfully about old Bishop Tucker, the gent who takes a book in the surf with him and reads it while he floats.

The Original Sin

Louisiana Crookedness A Wholly Logical Outcome

A rather incurious omission is to be noted in the indictments brought in by the Baton Rouge, La. grand jury. Prexy Smith is named, all right, on 23 separate counts of forgery and falsification of public records. So is Dr. Lorio, State Senator and member of LSU's board of supervisors, as well as the University's official physician. So is E. N. Jackson, its business manager. So is George Caldwell, who was construction superintendent and apparently the man who did the dirty work.

But no mention is made of Huey Long, to whom all these crimes directly trace. Patron saint of Louisiana politicians, Huey is the bird who taught them their tricks, the bird who cracked the whip over the Legislature and drew off its power for the use of his gang, the arch, preposterous crook who robbed the State of Louisiana in so brazen a fashion that they loved it and buried him on hallowed State ground.

There would have been, to be sure, no especial point in indicting Huey, who long since has got what was coming to him. But it might have helped Louisiana to learn a lesson--that to tolerate corruption of public in a public man is to invite corruption by those you may despise.

 


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