The Charlotte News

Wednesday, June 15, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We provide the following piece from the day's page, which reminds that Hitler was not the first to seek occupation of another's property and territory by intrusion and dominion over all which he was able by force to acquire and control, while claiming the while through his stooge journals at home that rights to private property were being "respected".

Opposite this piece on the page, not merely by coincidence, appeared Cash's pieces in combination, "Bad News for Rudyard" and "The Nazis and Property", explaining in the first the perception that Chamberlain's hesitancy to act against the piratical sinking of British ships by fascist forces out of Spain derived from his self-interest in the preservation of private propertied classes in England against threatened communist expropriation (as had been occurring in Spain before the Insurgency under Franco, and which was occurring in Mexico), and, in the second, to demonstrate the conundrum at work in distinguishing the two economic systems separated but by the chosen means of stratagem, exploring an example of just how Nazi "respect" for private property in Munich took form.

Indeed, sometimes we see as much of the same mentality today in the way some corporate entities treat the rights and property of citizens of this country, again the distinctions being only the means by which the stratagems are played. (Nazi boobs thought they were cute and smart, too.)

Of course when the Republican Congress is so busy trying to drum up support among their very bright constituencies over such weighty issues emergent to the continued viability and very existent frame and foundation of the republic as an amendment to the Constitution to make English the official language, why who could blame these corporatista-fascists for believing that anything goes in this Republican-led republic?

In fact, why on earth didn't Thomas and James and the boys think of that one from the very beginning, why with all the Hessians and Dutch and French and what-not threatening the very viability of our language itself? They must have been remiss. Time it is, after 220 years, to correct their lack of understanding of the country they founded. The smart Republican Congress, finally, have come to our rescue!

(Incidentally while on the topic, a suggestion re this proposed English-as-official-language amendment: Be careful of that for which you wish, for you may find that, were it to pass, the two-thirds of the would-be constituency promoting this silly thing could barely, if at all, read and write the language themselves. What of them? Deport them to Argentina? Perhaps the better amendment, for their insured security in a changing world about them, ever-threatening their little insecure place within it, might be rather an amendment which reads: "Henceforth, and by these presents, the official language of the United States shall be video and photographic imagery, with any heading or explanatory matter associated therewith being in monosyllabic, popular terms, the sum of which are capable of ascertainment and reasonable comprehension by anyone attaining to the age of five years, either neither challenging to the understanding or nor demonstrative of discernment by anyone who shall have attained the age of five years, provided that such images and associated terms are neither deemed controversial nor in the least susceptible of subliminally symbolic representation to the conscious or subconscious mind other than that to which the original, plain and elementary meaning conveys by virtue of the official English language dictionary, which shall be designated "Homeland English Language Libris", as subsequently adopted by official acts of Congress, by which adoption shall limit the words which may be spoken in the Homeland to that contained therein. Whether such images and terms are compliant with that herein made requisite upon them shall be by such acts and implementing authority as the Congress shall from time to time determine as necessary and proper. The provisions of this section are exempt from its requirements and expressly override the First Amendment of this Constitution, deemed by the constituted super-majority of the people of the United States to be expressly susceptible of necessary limitation for the insurance of continued exercise of freedom in the Homeland by all, but only, the homers and homeys thereof, as further defined and determined for each and all in Homeland English Language Libris.")

After all, it was that great exponent of modern democracy and republicanism, President Alexander Hamilton, who sustained the belief, expressed in Federalist Paper No. 84, that a Bill of Rights in the Constitution was wholly unnecessary from the beginning, that such would only confuse matters, (as it most certainly has), and that all freedom deriving, as it does in such a government constituted of the people, from the people may only be delimited by the people, and thus any expressed proscription to the government in apparent prohibition against curtailment of freedom, no matter how absolute in expression, would be susceptible of interpretation as having implied limits to the freedom thus granted in the first instance by the very form of government deriving of the people, it being enough to the assurance of republican freedom to have granted habeas corpus, (except in times of domestic rebellion as deemed by the Executive), prohibited bills of attainder and ex post facto laws, and prevented attainment to titles of nobility. A master of logic President Hamilton was, you will certainly note: Do not express freedom, for to express it is thereby to place shackle upon it. And, incidentally, do not, either, exercise it at all, for to do so, fellow countrymen, is to endanger it! For, we, gentlemen, mean not to deprive you of your freedom, but we know best, being of the people ourselves, and therefore shall curtail your freedom only to the extent necessary and only when necessary for your own mutual benefit; leave it to us, being of the people. And do not therefore restrict yourselves by restricting our hand upon you! You fought this Revolution to be free from John Bull and to be free in the most absolute sense; thus to be free, do not delimit freedom by constraining it with words declaring this and that particular to be free from government curtailment, for that is the sure path to insure other rights will be usurped which are yours as free men!

Reports from Harrisburg

June 15, 1863

Harrisburg, Pa.-- Dispatches received up to this hour from Shippensburg show that the Rebels are still at Chambersburg in forces not exceeding 2,000 cavalry with no infantry.

General Jenkins, who commands the Rebel forces, ordered all the stores opened which was complied with. The merchants were forced to take Confederate money and payments for goods.

Rebel cavalry may occupy Littleton, eleven miles from Gettysburg, but at last accounts had not advanced beyond that point.

The Rebel officers at Chambersburg stated that they were only waiting for infantry to move forward.

The farmers in the valleys are sending their horses and cattle into the mountains. The Rebels are gathering up all the Negroes that can be found. Private property has been respected.

--Fayetteville Observer.

And this letter to the editor and editor's comment, re a developing feud at The News which would spill ink aplenty over the pages in the ensuing days immediate. Not since the last scene of Hamlet, in fact, had such drama been witnessed within the environs anywhere in the land.

From the Sidelines

On Thursday last yours readers viewed
A thrust in Charlotte's poetry feud
One duellist proved a poet of parts,
Are we denied the other's arts?

For while they court the gentle muse,
The public wants a chance to choose
Which we may judge the better bard,
If Dickson, John, or Waddell, Maude.

FEM.

Charlotte.

[Note: Mr. Dickson has not been content to take the attack on his gift without some answer. And the answer, we can tell the public, is gorgeous stuff. But, at the last moment he has been taken down with chivalry and the shyness which is sometimes native to poets, and declines to prosecute his quarrel with a lady in public. We have done our part to persuade him, but to no avail. However, there is such a thing of course as a man's public summoning him out of seclusion by the volume of insistence. We promise nothing definitely, but we pass out the gentle hint not unhopefully.--Editors, The News.]

Warning to Consumers*

It will be dangerous for any unwary consumer to pass the Armory-Auditorium tonight at any time between eight and nine. Inside there will be, it is expected, a great congregation of the city's salesmen and saleswomen of all kinds and degrees, and the thing that will have drawn them there is appetite for sales. If word goes around that a consumer is passing by, we cannot answer for the consequences.

This Charlotte Salesmen's Crusade is going to be interesting to watch. Nothing has happened that we know of to make salesmen think that conditions are more favorable now for sales than they were two weeks or three months ago. But they are beginning to think, unless we misread their minds, that perhaps conditions weren't so terribly bad for sales two weeks or three months ago, and that they lost ground by not driving as hard as usual to make sales. At any rate, they are going to put that hypothesis to the test which involves nothing more than accelerated sales efforts; and if it works out as they and we all hope, they will have produced something of tremendous consequence to the whole country, and not of the least consequence to commerce.

Lady on Relief*

What Mrs. Betty G. Powell, 66, appears to have been doing on the WPA in Granville County is simply to pick up a little extra money and to find some outlet for her energy. Her son, Charles G. Powell, $5,500-a-year chairman of the State Unemployment Compensation Commission, says that she is very active but that she is well provided for and shouldn't have done it. He intends to pay back the money she drew.

Well, this is wholly understandable, though nonetheless embarrassing. The lady should have known better, in spite of the philosophy that has developed in this country under the New Deal--the philosophy of helping a sucker to part with his money. Everybody's doing it, Mrs. Powell probably reasoned; so why shouldn't she?

But when it comes to the agency in Oxford which certifies persons for work relief, that is a horse of another color. That agency is bound to have been aware that this genteel client did not need relief and was by no stretch of sympathy entitled to it. And if widowed mothers of sons drawing $5,500 salaries can get relief when they ask for it, the suspicion is aroused that a great many people are getting it who don't deserve it.

An Odd Omission

In the swamps around Lake City, S. C., trustees were after a Negro sharecropper, charged with killing a Negro woman and his white landlord, Lewellyn Singletary, owner of a great plantation in the district. But the sheriff and his deputies got word that the Negro agreed to surrender if he could be safe from lynching. He was given that assurance, and the word was passed around to the posse, and he started in accompanied by the go-between.

Then a lone posseman took matters into his own hands. Riding out to meet the two, he issued summary orders:

"Run, nigger, for your life!"

And the Negro ran, while the fellow blazed away at him twice--and got off safely again to the swamps.

The curious thing about the story is that we look in vain for any advice in the Associated Press story that the summary gentleman was immediately placed under arrest and charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and with interfering with officers in the performance of their duty. It does not even appear, indeed, that a warrant has been issued for him. Why, we wonder? We'd honestly like to know.

Site Ed. Note: For more on Kipling's concept of the "price", see "The Lion in a Net", June 26, 1939.

It was not by accident, we venture, that the immediately preceding editorial's subject dealt with the price of the life of this nigger on the run in the swamps of South Carolina, as adjudged by the authority refusing to draw charges against the piratical marauder seeking illegally and brutally, to vindicate the conceptions of property held dear as against the outside forces seeking change to the royal pre-ordained order of things, to kill him.

Bad News for Rudyard

Rudyard Kipling, sleeping in Sussex, must have rolled in his grave yesterday. For Neville Chamberlain, head of that Conservative Party which Kipling spent his life celebrating for its will to exact "the price of a white man slain," stood in the House of Commons and told his countrymen that he proposed to do nothing about the sinking of 60 British ships and the murder of 78 British sailors by Italian and German pilots occupying the status of pirates under international law, except to go on talking as he has gone on bootlessly talking for a year and more.

It is in effect to give carte blanche to Mussolini and Hitler. And it is plainly for England to slip toward the status of a second-rate power. For England is no such country as the United States, but a purely trading nation whose life depends upon her shipping and the safety of that shipping. What lies behind it, according to Chamberlain himself, is his will to peace. The American analysts are saying that what really lies behind it is the will to defend the commercial class to which he belongs in England--that he believes fascism is a bulwark for the defense of private property, and that he has so hated and feared the repercussions in England of the reforms which the Spanish Republic was attempting to set going in medieval Spain that he is willing to risk the life of the British Empire to halt them. And his opponents in Parliament are going further and charging that he hopes to set up a fascist regime in England itself.

These are ugly charges. The thing they allege used to go by the name of treason. And whether they may be true, or what may be true, we don't know. But to find the Conservative Party sponsoring the policy of taking it lying down is surely one of the strangest things in modern history.

The Nazis and Property

The favorite propaganda the Nazis in the United States is that they represent respect and protection for private property as against the Communists' confessed will to destroy it. Well, here's how the Nazis respect and protect it.

The Jewish community in Munich, the once pleasant old capital of Bavaria, has--or rather had--a synagogue, the chief one in the city, which had cost them 1,200,000 marks gold (about $300,000) to erect. More than that, the Nazis themselves had valued it at 700,000 marks gold for purposes of taxation. But the Interior Ministry had announced that it wanted to tear it down, ostensibly to provide a new parking lot but actually, of course, by way of persecuting the Jews in Munich even more than they have already been persecuted by denying them a place to worship according to the faith of their fathers. And having announced that, it offered them 100,000 marks--with a take it or leave it clause running for only 24 hours.

They refused it flatly. But Monday morning, immediately the 24 hours was up, the Nazi working crews started tearing it down anyhow. That's how the Nazis respect and protect property.

Free Speech, Limited

The American Federation of Labor yesterday told Norman Thomas that it proposed to keep hands off in the dispute about the right of free speech and assembly between Mayor Hague and the CIO in the former's principality of Jersey City. Norman Thomas had urged the old-line organization to take steps to repudiate or at least to discipline AFL unions in New Jersey which, he said, were actively backing Hague. The AFL did not deny that the charge was so, either: it merely said that it didn't propose to do anything about it.

That's a pretty kettle of fish for you. The AFL has always professed the most ardent devotion to these rights, and has roared almost continuously about being denied them whenever a labor dispute came up. It might argue, indeed, and no doubt with perfect truth, that the CIO which is even louder than the AFL in its professions of loyalty to free speech and free assembly, would take exactly the same stand were the shoe on the other foot. But that is no justification. It is only a reductio ad absurdum of the whole claim that either is actually for free speech and free assembly. If you are actively for free speech and free assembly, you understand that they must be extended to the other fellow though you hate him. But the principle here is plainly "free speech for me and mine, yes, but that guy I don't like--sure, kick him in the teeth if he tries to pipe up."


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