The Charlotte News

Friday, July 1, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We include the piece below, about how, by the grace and will of God, General Lee captured either Washington or Baltimore or Philadelphia and otherwise routed and annihilated the Army of the Potomac. Ourselves, we missed that part in military history class. Perhaps, we went to a shockingly deficient school.

July 1, 1863

75 YEARS AGO

HIGH HOPES

The accounts, unofficial and imperfect as they are, warrant the belief that General Lee has again, with the blessings of God, achieved a great victory--we are inclined to believe the greatest and most important of his eventful life. If the statements approximate the truth, the Army of the Potomac is destroyed and Washington, Baltimore or Philadelphia, one or all, will probably fall into our hands. The Yankees are, however, sending forward all their troops from Virginia and can get them to the scene of action much sooner than reinforcements can reach Lee.

We wait with anxiety for the official accounts.

--Fayetteville Observer.

Here also the other daily running account on Gettysburg in The News.

The dime taxis were gone from the streets this morning, banished by order of the City Council, and there ought to be a parable in their brief history.

They came into existence as the result of the enterprise by which we set such a store in America and because they had hit upon a real service. Before long they were doing a land-office business, and there were so many cars hauling so many people that they had become, in the aggregate, a common carrier, and as such had to assume very definite responsibilities to the public. Regulation was imposed upon them from without, but still they managed to evade their responsibilities and they failed to impose from within any discipline at all upon themselves. In consequence, they got a shady name morally and a reputation for financial irresponsibility.

And today the dime taxis are gone from the streets, all because they could not put their house in order. They had a good thing, but by reason of their inability or unwillingness to meet simple, primary obligations, they let it slip away.

Der Furious, the great man who sits on the throne of Barbarrosa, and who, according to some of the more enthusiastic writers in Germany, is quite probably the long-awaited reincarnation of that early exponent of Aryan destiny, has found a new enemy out to oppress him. It is the school children of Czechoslovakia. They have been singing little songs about him much like the classic American ditty about Kaiser Bill's journey up a hill to survey the French landscape. What is worse, some of the teachers are said to have stood by and merely smiled while the great man was thus criminally lampooned. And so, Adolf, with his usual largeness of soul, has protested to the Czechoslovakian Government and demanded that the songs be suppressed and the teachers and children punished.

The Czechoslovakian Government, however, is making a mistake in dealing with this mean and brazen demand. For it is pretending to treat it seriously. And the experience of the United States long ago proved that explaining carefully to the Nazis that democracies don't have a censorship merely brings on renewed clamor from them. Mr. Hull tried that polite course several times, and then took to ignoring their demands and protests. And as a result he hasn't been much bothered with them of late.

Old Cotton Ed Smith, candidate to keep on occupying the Senate seat he has sat in for 30 years, was in fine fettle when he addressed his fellow citizens of South Carolina at Bennettsville yesterday.

He began elegantly and politely by stating that the Governor of the State, Olin Johnston, had "lied." Then he went on to say that he, Cotton Ed himself, was the greatest man South Carolina had sent to the Senate since the Civil War, and that, ladies and gents, includes not only the uproarious Pitchfork Ben Tillman, who taught Cotton Ed the trick of politics, and Coley Blease, that shy violet, but also the sainted and storied General Wade Hampton. Said Ed:

"Take my character, record and mentality, and compare it (sic) with that of the men who want my place in the Senate." Which, seeing that those men are Olin Johnston and Judge Brown, the man who proposes to go to Washington and fetch home the boodle, seems to be a proposition to set honest South Carolinians to blushing themselves to death.

That heavy rumbling you hear, comrades, is the sound of all the Pinckneys and Rutledges and Lowndes and Calhouns, all the way from Charleston to St. John's-in-the-Wood, rolling and tossing and lunging in their graves.

Thus Mr. Roosevelt in addressing the National Education Association at New York yesterday. And, aside from a cliche or two, it sounds nice. But the trouble with it is that it is only so many words, and vague words at that. And it so happens that there is in the United States a flagrant example of a town where civil liberties are quite non-existent as they are in any of those "other lands"--Boss Hague's private principality of Jersey City. More than that, Boss Hague is getting completely away with it, is suffering no pains and penalties for his deeds. And because he hasn't, his example is spreading. Already Woonsocket, R. I., and New Orleans have been tempted into trying out his methods.

Yet it lies in the power of the President of the United States to administer him such a pointed rebuke as would serve as a warning to others of like mind. For Boss Hague is Vice-Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and though the President has no direct power to remove him, yet everyone knows that he can have him removed for the nod of his head. Nor is there any reason why it shouldn't be done--save that Boss Hague will control the New Jersey delegation at the Democratic convention in 1940.

And so long as the President continues to refuse to act in this case, his generalized professions of devotion to civil liberties somehow seem both a little hollow and a little hypocritical.

For the little reader at a loss for something at once solid and exhilarating to consume his hours these hot Summer days, we cheerfully recommend the Appendix to the Congressional Record, which is once more coming out retroactively in fat installments, laden to the gunwales with literary marvels and the ripe wisdom of statesmen. Here in the issue for June 24, for instance, we find:

An inspiring address by the Hon. John E. Rankin of Mississippi, on the inequity of the fact that the cottolene trust, having replaced the hog, is now trying to play him on its own account.

A notable contribution to the national literature entitled, "Lowell, the Spindle City," by Major Edward Bowes, preserved forever to posterity through the watchful care of the Hon. Edith Nourse Rogers, of Massachusetts.

Another splendid contribution to American belles lettres, entitled "Wealthy--But Don't Know It," by the justly celebrated Bernarr McFadden, saved to our children through the alertness of the Hon. Sol Bloom of New York.

Two fine flowing inquiries, in the dithyrambic manner, by the Hon. Sam Pettingill, of Indiana, as to (1) what democracy may be, and (2) whether Tom Jefferson is or is not dead.

A sage exposition by the Hon. Francis H. Case, of South Dakota, of the proposition that we ought to encourage the production of wealth.

A brilliant, if slightly lengthy, manifesto by the Hon. Tom Jenkins, Republican of Ohio, that this Congress has dished out more jack than any in history.

A masterful demonstration by the Hon. Manny Celler, of New York, that the Nazis are rats.

Dazzling light on a hitherto dark mystery, entitled "The A B C of Money," by the Hon. Herb Bigelow of Ohio.

Seven tributes to the manes of brother Congressmen departed to Abraham's bosom, which leave you glowing to think you have lived in a country with such paragons.

An absorbing account of the heroic deeds of the Hon. Guy J. Swope, of Pennsylvania, in the 75th Congress, as told by himself.

An even more absorbing discourse by the same great man, entitled "The Making of a Representative"--the same being an account (thoughtfully set down, as he says, to spare future biographers pains and troubles), of how he himself was born in a log house, worked on a farm, married Mayme Catherine Gerberich very early, got himself a Federal job, and went right on up the ladder to his present eminence.