Site Ed. Note: "Heritage" provides us a variant on that funny word again, "moompixures". So it wasn't a misprint the first time around after all, when first we espied it last summer from a year and a half prior to this usage. The mystery deepens. Perhaps, "ubiquitous" brought it back to mind. Whatever it means, we think it portends some sort of plot, probably contained within your drinking water. That gas leak yesterday in Shoeless Manhattan? No, it didn't come from New Jersey. That's just passing the buck to your neighbor, the Boss. It was in fact moompixures. That is what did it. Make no mistake, these moompixures are everywhere, just waiting, waiting to be released in your town, in your village, hell, right even in your own living room, Pilgrim. Beware. Their toxicity is beyond comprehension. Skull and crossbones marks their place. Skull and crossbones, alright.

Lapidable woo w.

Only a piddly 20,000? Hell, we recommend at least three hundred million, Mr. President, give or take a few mil. Women and children, first. That 'll show the Commie bastards who's brave and who's not. Now, where's our pearl handle revolver?

You name the tune, sir, and we'll sing the song to it, right to the last. Right to the very last iota of strength we have left in our sinews, you betcha. Bomb 'em. Bomb 'em good. Yeah. Drop the Big One! And, sir, we recommend a little more zest and pep in your step, while you're about it. You know, the old coup de main thrust of the arms upward with the end-fingers in a "V" for "Venomous". Gets 'em every time. And, as you do that, sir, shout out loudly, to the ends of your vocal chords, "Get Saddam!"

Oh. We didn't know that.

Never mind.

South Achieves The Lowest Figure For All Times

Only three persons were lynched in the United States in 1939. Unless, of course, the boys break loose over the holidays.

That is the lowest on record. Florida led with two, and of course the other state was Old Mississippi, which just naturally cannot go through a year without at least one mob action.

From October 1937 until July of 1938 there were no lynchings at all in the South, the all-time record since the Civil War. But the 1938 score still ran up to six. And in both 1937 and in 1936 the count was eight. In 1935 it was seventeen.

Three, however, looks pretty good as against the all-time high in 1894 when 165 persons, all black, were lynched in the South.

What sounds even better is that there were eighteen cases of prevented lynchings by police officers. And what makes that sound better still is that many times in the past few years there have been around 50 cases of attempted lynchings.

One curious thing which is worth noting is that one of the three lynch victims was a white man. For many years all the victims have been Negroes. Another curious thing is that the standard crime of rape does not appear in the record at all. One of the crimes charged was murder, another was the altercation of a Negro and a white man, and the third was the fatal injury of a boy in an automobile accident.

House Naval Committee Looks Toward 60,000-Ton Battlers

The House Naval Appropriations Committee is playing with the idea of battleships of 60,000 or even 65,000 tons.

That is larger than any ship of any sort ever built by man. The largest battleships in the world at present run about 35,000 tons. But even these are owned by Italy and Japan. Neither the United States nor Britain has a ship which quite measures up to the figure. Britain, however, has several of more than 40,000 tons building. Germany has one of about 37,500 tons which was launched this year but which has not yet been put into service. Japan has several in process. And the United States has two 45,000-ton craft authorized, though the contract for their building has not yet been let.

The main advantage urged for the proposed giant ships is that they would be able to carry more and larger guns. The greatest battleships now carry eight 16-inch guns. But there are rumors that the new 45,000-ton ships will carry 18-inch rifles. The bigger craft, however, could probably carry at least a dozen 20-inch guns.

A few inches in the caliber of a gun does not sound very impressive, but it counts enormously. A 16-inch gun, for instance, hurls a 2,000 pound shell over a maximum distance of about seventeen miles at sea. But the shell of an 18-inch weighs 3,000 pounds and can be hurled even farther. The shell of a 20-inch giant, therefore, should weigh well over two tons, and be capable of traveling a still greater distance.

Site Ed. Note: The 35,000 ton ships then building for the United States were the North Carolina and Washington, together forming the North Carolina class, commissioned April 9, 1941 and May 15, 1941, respectively. They were followed by four ships built in 1942 of the same tonnage but better armor, the South Dakota class. The last battleship array built for the Navy in World War II were the four 45,000-ton ships of the Iowa class. The five planned 60-65,000-ton ships, of which the piece discusses, were to have been the Montana class with twelve 16-inch guns. They were authorized and funded in 1940-41, but the greater need instead for aircraft carriers stopped their plans aborning. Japan was in 1939 building the Yamato, a 65,000-ton behemoth with nine 18-inch guns. Begun November 4, 1937, a week after the hull was laid for the North Carolina, the Yamato was launched December 16, 1941. The class was to have four other ships, but similar to the American program, the Japanese turned instead to carriers and completed only one other ship of the class, the Musashi, commissioned August 5, 1942, a third whose hull was laid having been converted to a carrier during construction. The Yamato was sunk April 7, 1945 near Okinawa; the Musashi, October 24, 1944 in the Sibuyan Sea. The North Carolina remains as a floating museum in Wilmington, having been docked there in September, 1961 and opened to the public the following April, the product of a fund collected among North Carolina's school children--(and we he-elped).

Washington Remains Cold Toward Jap Gestures

Washington is somewhat less than enthusiastic about Japan's great "gesture to the United States" in opening up the Yangtze River to commercial traffic, after keeping it closed for nearly two and a half years. And not without reason, it seems to us.

In the first place, she hasn't opened the river above Nanking, and its commercial importance hinges upon the fact that it is the great trading artery for a thousand miles into central China. In the second place, she has already pretty well destroyed the established trade of Americans and other Westerners in the whole territory, and made sure that it is safely in the hands of her own merchants. To regain trade there now, our merchants would have to begin from the ground up, with the odds stacked against them and with no real assurance for the future.

What Japan appears to be up to, in short, is a sort of shell game. Immediately she wants to negotiate a new trade treaty with the United States to take the place of the one which expires Jan. 14, for such an agreement is greatly important to Japan, which must still look to the United States as the main source of supply for many important war goods, particularly iron. And at the same time, she wants to lull public opinion in this country, to the end of grabbing off the mastery of the Pacific while we sleep.

Apparently, she hopes to do both without actually making any real concessions. But Washington does not seem minded to oblige her.

Site Ed. Note: While the giant slept...

Confederate Ghost Yanks A Man From The Reds

Mr. Howard Rushmore has quit as movie critic of The Daily Worker, Communist newspaper published in New York, and gone out of the party at the same time. Hereafter, he announces he is going in for "old-fashioned American Americanism."

One thing that contributed to Mr. Rushmore's returning enthusiasm for his country was the fact that the Reds forgot to pay him the salary of $25 a week after the Hitler-Stalin pact was made in August. Moscow apparently decided she needed the money at home, and the pickings for the Comrades in New York have been pretty lean.

But the thing that seemed to have decided Mr. Rushmore finally was the ghost of his old grandpapa--a soldier in the Confederate army.

The Daily Worker ordered Mr. Rushmore to pan the moompicter, "Gone With The Wind," as a low piece of capitalistic propaganda, designed to restore slavery and get William Tecumseh Sherman down off that pedestal in Washington. Mr. Rushmore's artistic conscience rebelled a little at that. But his historical conscience rebelled more.

Not that he was greatly taken with the picture. He thought it a "magnificent bore." All the same, there was that old grandpop, and his mother's stories of that old war. And remembering those stories, he reflected that the picture seemed to be sound enough historically. Probably fell to wondering, too, however it had happened that the descendant of a Confederate soldier found himself in such strange and unsavory company.

Then Mr. Rushmore put on his hat and walked out, after making it plain to the Comrades that he sadly no longer thought well of them.

That long sigh was undoubtedly the old grandfather settling down to rest in his grave at last.

People Of Louisiana Still Hold To Huey Long

According to the poll takers, the majority of the people of Louisiana are convinced that the Long machine is crooked and that there is no hope that Earl Long, if re-elected Governor, will clean house. Yet, curiously enough, 60 per cent of them say that they think that, on the whole, Huey Long was a good influence in Louisiana politics rather than a bad one.

It sounds like a paradox, but it is not an inexplicable one. The fact is that Huey actually did something for the common people of his state, made them think he had done a great deal more, though he compelled them to pay roundly through the nose for it, and used the greater part of his take to line his own pockets and those of his henchmen.

He came to power ultimately as the symbol of the people's protest against a machine which ran the state purely with an eye to the welfare of a few people in New Orleans and a handful of the wealthier sort of landowners.

He built roads into rural sections of the state which had been systematically ignored by the ruling powers, and enabled many thousands of farmers who had hitherto known nothing but stagnation and bitter poverty to begin to make a decent living as truck growers. He gave the poor free school books, and so relieved people who had little cash the year round from one of their most pressing worries.

He drained marshes and brought a lot of rich land into use. And so on and so on. Hence, though they know he was a crook, the people of the state still love him.

It is a lesson which the anti-Long party down there, if they ever succeed in heaving the rascals out, should take to heart.