As to the recognition in the South of Lee-Jackson Day, still celebrated in Virginia, now on the Friday before Martin Luther King Day, which would be yesterday, the column would comment again in "Two Southerners", January 19, 1940. We disagree with the column's premise that this memorial day is alright to maintain as an official holiday, especially today as it serves as a direct, reactionary slap in the face to Martin Luther King Day. Privately, you may celebrate Adolf Hitler's birthday, for all we care. But not as an official holiday.

As we suggested before, such an official recognition conveys a backwardness in our estimation which represents not merely a quaint attempt to appreciate the history of the South, but suggests an official acceptance of the spirit of the Confederacy, as surely as the flying of the Stars and Bars on state flags, that it should live on as an honored tradition of the South to so inveigh as did the Confederacy.

But the Confederacy, when reduced to its essence, had as its central goals the pre-eminence of states' rights, preservation of slavery, and, finally, abolition of all recognition of the power of the Federal government over its affairs, a treasonous and despicably immoral set of ideals which may not be justified by any quaint apologetics for its having arisen in the middle of the nineteenth century, cloaked in a tradition of the chivalrous cavalcade of gasconading, high-plumed cavaliers.

To continue to recognize Lee-Jackson Day is to do violence to the concept, especially in the conceptualizations of the young, that the country is a Union, based on the Supremacy of the Federal government to the states and local governments. That is the basis for our constitutional frame of government since the beginning, not merely an opinion. Many of the most tenacious of the Confederates hadn't the sense to read the document and understand the Supremacy Clause, the basic foundation for it all, that states are not co-sovereign with the Federal government and on equal footing with it, free to accept or ignore in advisory fashion what the Federal government passes as the law of the land. That these men, educated enough to know better, led the charge against this basic understanding does not therefore suggest that we should honor them, their captains who led them in treason. It is about as ludicrous as someone fifty years from now suggesting that we have a Tim McVeigh Day.

Anyone who tries to suggest that when they find admiration in the Confederacy, it is not for slavery but rather for its steadfastness to its beliefs, speaks from both sides of their mouth, disingenuously so. It conveys a hidden agenda, one of states' rights and decentralized government, which ultimately leads to Balkanization and despotism of the type which has plagued Europe through time, which led to the world wars and the Cold War. Thus, it is not only contrary to our Constitution but is simply an impractical form of government leading only to chaos, leading only to private fiefdoms where local officials are subject to unrestrained misprision through bribes offered by business desirous of becoming bigger by stealing property rights of the citizenry, leading either to discriminatory omission to enforce the law or affirmatively enforcing the law selectively and with technical application of laws in ways not intended plainly on their face--the very set of conditions, Jim Crow, which prevailed for a hundred years in the South after the Civil War.

Let the states' rightists govern things for long and, well, welcome to Mexico.

Six men are dead in the general strike in the state of Vera Cruz, Mexico. There was some dispute between the CIO and AFL--we beg your pardon; we are so used to speaking in terms of these States. What we should say is that there was some dispute between two rival Mexican labor organizations, called the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers and the Confederation of Mexican Workers--some dispute as to who is really entitled to represent the Mexican workers and run that strike. And so, to settle it, they went to work on each other with guns and clubs, and proceeded to kill six of their number.

And while we are very sorry that it happened, it goes to show nevertheless that the rough stuff between capital and labor can't hold a candle to the rough stuff that takes place when labor is pitted against labor. We made that discovery in the 1934 textile strike, and we haven't found any reason to go back on it since.

Chalk up one thing for Frank (I Am the Works) Hague, mayor of Jersey City. Yesterday he did the nation a high service. The new Governor of New Jersey, A. Harry Moore, who got into office with the backing of Hague, tried to appoint him (Hague) to the seat in the United States Senate which he (Moore) is giving up to assume the Governorship. And Mayor Hague--Mayor Hague declined.

Modesty? We do not suspect it. We suspect, indeed, no noble motive of any sort. We suspect, candidly, that Mayor Hague declined quite simply because he preferred to be the Law of the State in his relatively small bailiwick of Jersey City to being merely one Senator out of 96--a big frog in a little pond instead of the reverse. But motive does not matter. The deed stands forth on its own legs, shining and splendid and glorious. We haven't a doubt of it: when Frank Hague chose to deliver the United States from the burden and the humiliation of having Hon. Frank Hague in its Senate, he rendered it a single service. Let him have the credit of it.

Fred Beal, who was arrested by Lawrence, Mass. police early today on a warrant issued by Gastonia police, is a convicted criminal, all right, but he is also a curiosity. For eight years or so, since a sentence of from seventeen to twenty years in the North Carolina pen was hung on him and appealed, he has been a fugitive from justice, a shadowy figure who turned up here and there and then lost himself in obscurity again. But did mothers, when they heard that Beal was loose in the neighborhood, grab their children, run into the house and lock the doors? Did the police "throw out a dragnet?" Did North Carolina wire instructions to "get that man?" Did anybody care a great deal whether he was got or not? Nope. He wasn't that kind of convict.

Fred Erwin Beal was convicted of conspiring to murder Gastonia's Chief Aderholt in the labor trouble of 1929 which the Communists fomented. And while Beal was admittedly the "front" of this strike and agent of the Communists, there is considerable room for doubt that he intended any violence. Indeed, it has been contended that he and his associates were convicted on the score that they were radicals, which they undoubtedly were, and had excused a great deal of trouble, which they undoubtedly had. But 1929's radicalism is 1938's respectability, more or less. And as for trouble, we've had more labor strife in this country since that fatal night in Gastonia than Fred Beal and his associates ever dreamed of, and much of it has come about under the impetus of laws enacted by the United States Government its very self!

Murder is still a crime, and so is conspiracy to murder, and of that last Fred Beal stands convicted. But he was convicted in 1929, not in 1938, and there is doubt that in the latter year he would be.

France at last has a cabinet from which the Communists have been eliminated. That bodes well for France. For the Communists, devoted in Paris as everywhere to mere hell-raising for hell-raising's sake, are largely responsible for the chaos in which French affairs have been more and more involved the last two years.

But does France still have an extremely radical government, what with the new cabinet composed entirely of Socialists, Radical Socialists, Socialist and Republica Unionists, and Independent Leftists? A good deal less radical than you might think, Socialism is a term which has undergone many strange mutations in Europe in the last thirty years--such strange mutations that the official name of Hitlerism is actually National Socialism! And nowhere has it undergone stranger changes than in France. Most people have forgotten it, but, with short exceptional periods, the men who have ruled France since 1911 have all been called Socialists of one kind or another. Poincare and Clemenceau both sailed under a Socialist flag. Herriot was a Radical Socialist.

The Socialists, strictly so-called, are the farthest to the left of all French parties save the Communists. But between them and the Reds there is an enormous gulf. Actually their program is more mild than the program proposed in this country by Norman Thomas. In power under Blum, they showed little tendency to attempt to apply their theory of complete ownership by the State of all productive property. And as for the Radical Socialists and the lesser groups, they are, if anything, something to the right of our own New Deal.

Probably it came as a surprise to most people who found the banks closed today that it was in celebration of Robert E. Lee's birthday anniversary and Stonewall Jackson's, too, which really occurred a couple of days later. Certainly it caught us napping, who otherwise would have been prepared with some more or less pretentious eulogy of these two heroic figures. But it really makes very little difference that the people generally were taken by surprise or that we were unprepared.

For the essence of the South's constant love of the memories of Generals Lee and Jackson is that it requires no annual exercises to re-inspire it. Lee and Jackson are as vital a part of the heritage of the South as--well, as the South itself. The influence of their lofty characters is as great today as it was fifty years ago, and a plausible excuse for almost overlooking their birthdays is that the men themselves are forever in our thoughts, special occasion or not.

Lumpkin County, Ga., has been losing population for the last twenty years. In 1930, it had only a few more persons within its borders than Crab Orchard Township, say, of Mecklenburg County. As counties go, Lumpkin appears to be the smallest of small fry. But it has its distinction.

Its commissioners have just decided to make no tax levy this year. Lumpkin's debts are paid and it has $16,000 in cash, which comes to a little more than $3 a head, man, woman and child. Thus it is well able to declare a sabbatical tax year.

And so, for that matter, would be Mecklenburg, almost, if past-due taxes were to be collected. The half-million in taxes owing it would be sufficient to run the County Government for half a year at least, if it were in the bank instead of on the books.

Ford Motor Company attorneys are reported as viewing the proposal of the company for a National Labor Relations Board election at its St. Louis plant as a distinct concession. It is the first time, they say, that the company has expressed its "willingness to permit" such a vote.

All of which sounds somehow a little grotesque. As we understand the Wagner Act, "willingness to permit" on the part of a company is not necessary. On the contrary, the board is empowered to order an election however unwilling the company may be to "permit" it. And we are very far from being prepared to admit the thesis that the Ford Motor Company is an independent principality in which the laws of the United States, good or bad, do not run with the same force with which they run elsewhere in the land.

But if the Ford attorneys sound grotesque, what are we to say about the CIO union, the United Automobile Workers? The election clause was written into the Wagner Act presumably for the benefit of labor--to enable a union to establish that the workers in a plant do in fact want it for their bargaining representative. And the UAWA, of course, claims that the Ford workers do really want it for their agent, and that only the high-handed methods of the company have been keeping that fact in doubt. Well, and now it will naturally leap joyfully to accept the proposal for the election in St. Louis? On the contrary, it has turned it down flat. Which seems to be about tops in grotesqueness or something.

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