The Charlotte News

Friday, January 28, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Reminiscent of the 60s", re anti-cloture votes on filibuster of a bill for racial justice representing a nearly solid South against a nearly solid North, juxtaposed immediately to a column criticizing someone named Kennedy--indeed, reminiscent of the 60's.

For a fond farewell in epitaph to playwright Sidney Howard, mentioned in "Unhappy State", and author of the screenplay for "Gone With the Wind", see Dorothy Thompson's piece of August 29, 1939.

The rest of the page is here, from which we are happy to be informed, among other things, that the young ladies of 1938 were not, as the WCTU proclaimed in most intemperate calumny, 3 to 1 Dame Quickly's to Quickly Educated Dames, but instead more than 10 to 1 the other way about. And, as everyone of course knows, such would be an ill-advisedly ignorant hypothesis even to propose, as the Q.E.D.'s of college towns never, ever, then or now, deigned to place their dainty, damoselic heels within any such shameful establishments wherein are served libations of a spirituous nature liable to liberate libidinous libertinism; indeed, last we heard, no such establishments of low repute and ill-tempered fame dare exist in such burgs and villes of supreme epistemological and ontological stimulus, in an age of vastly superior Morality, and especially in the vastly supraliminally Moral South, such as we have it imparted to us regularly and in great regimen in these days of the post-modern and high-post-modern eras. Heavens no, such sacrilege is not to be observed in a land of so supremely Christian temperance, Morality, and stentorially sententious, even sanctiloquent, Senators and Congressmen and various other elected and unelected officials, as we contemplatively view daily in the midst of this most pastoral, paciferous scape of hazy, great smoky purple mountains majestic, and those daily out climbing them, as we have here in plenitude.

The Thunder Recedes

Bill Green is represented as being a little cold to John Lewis' proposal that the AFL gulp the CIO down whole and issue charters to the rebel unions as is. But for all that, there are signs that labor peace is generally on the way. For last Monday Bill made a speech in which he made many references to the CIO and to John Lewis. And Wednesday John made a speech in which he made many references to Bill Green and the AFL. And in his speech Bill actually called Mr. Lewis, not a swollen-headed blatherskite out to establish himself as a dictator on the ruins of the labor movement, not a rule-or-ruiner, not any of the things that he has customarily called him, but simply John Lewis. More than that, he referred to the CIO simply and directly by that name. And John Lewis in his own turn spoke of Bill Green, not as a stooge for Big Business, not as a traitor secretly out to sell labor down the river, not by any of the low terms he has customarily applied to Mr. Green, but simply as Bill Green. And in his turn, too, he spoke of the AFL as the AFL--just like that.

And when two such masters of the epithet get around to restraining their gifts to that point, there isn't, we think, much doubt that they are about ready to kiss and make up.

Unhappy State

Our good Tar Heel State, it seems to us, is in the unhappy position of being in for a good deal of unpleasant publicity over an argument for which it really has no stomach in the first place.

The Reds and Pinks of the country are all too joyously rushing to make a cause celebré out of the case of Fred Erwin Beal. As witness that defense committee formed at New York and composed of Socialist Chieftain Norman Thomas, the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Playwright Sidney Howard, and Novelist Rose Wilder Lane; all of them one shade or another of rose. Logically, of course, Beal is hardly entitled to radical sympathy, since he has publicly repudiated Communism. But logic never bothers the Pinks when they have a chance to set up a martyr and to brand North Carolina as a wicked capitalistic tyrant.

It seems ashamed that the State should be the whipping boy in such a case when it doesn't really want Beal at all. And that it doesn't want him is plain from the fact that it let him so long wander freely about the country--and even visit Raleigh, according to one story--without grabbing him. But it is difficult to know how it might get out of the business, since Beal's conviction for conspiracy to murder stands implacably on the record and since the State is, of course, bound by the record.

He Who Slaps

It is a curious situation in which we are involved in China. That the Japanese government approves such incidents as the slapping of Consul Allison, seems highly unlikely. The Japanese government probably understands quite clearly that the notion of the United States being too cowardly to fight is not borne out by the record; and that a clash with it might be disastrous for Japan in its present extended position.

The only rational explanation of what is happening is the one which has it that the Japanese civil authorities are without the power actually to control the military forces. And those military forces, puffed up with their victories, over a half-willed people, are pretty palpably affected with the megalomaniac delusion that they can successfully cope with all comers. Hence the multiplying instances of arrogant violation of the rights of our and other nationals.

It seems to leave us in the position of having either to go on pretending to accept the apologies and promises of the government which plainly can't do anything with its soldiers in the field, or to deal directly with them.

Reminiscent of the 60s

A tabulation of the votes on cloture for the filibusters by those states which have two Democratic Senators apiece rings out an illuminating, if not exactly astonishing, division. For instance, when both Democratic Senators voted alike, the division runs:

For Cloture

Against Cloture

Colorado

Alabama

Connecticut

Arizona

Kentucky

Georgia

Indiana

Florida

Missouri

Iowa

New Mexico

Louisiana

New York

Mississippi

Ohio

Maryland

Oklahoma

North Carolina

Washington

Rhode Island

South Carolina

Tennessee

Texas

Virginia

One might ask what Kentucky was doing alongside Indiana and Ohio, and how Oklahoma got over with the Yanks. On the other hand, look at little Rhode Island nestling cozily between North and South Carolina. Howdy, stranger!

But with these few exceptions, and perhaps the border states of Missouri and Maryland and the newer Western states, the line-up, state by state, is the Confederacy vs. the Federals. It's the Blue and the Gray all over again, with the absurd difference that the only two orthodox Republicans taking sides with the Yanks were Capper of Kansas and Puddler Jim Davis of Pennsylvania.

Ultimately, something may come out of the anti-lynching bill, but the first effect of its introduction has been to restore the Mason-Dixon line.

They Never Learn

"We call upon the friends of temperance in every county and precinct to meet immediately and organize for the purpose of nominating and electing legislatures and law-enforcement officers who close both the beer shops and the liquor stores, and drive the liquor traffic, both legal and illegal, from the borders of the state."

That's the Hon. Cale Burgess, Campaign Director of the United Dry Forces of North Carolina, calling for a bone-dry Legislature next year.

There's something a little magnificent about the Hon. Cale and his friends, and their stupendous contempt for the laws of logic. For thirty years they had their bone-dry law in North Carolina, for twelve they had it in the nation. And was "the liquor traffic, legal and illegal," ever actually driven out of the borders of our state? After all that testing, was it proved that temperance is best served by an attempt to enforce absolute prohibition against all alcoholic beverages, including beer?

Everybody knows the answer. Everybody, that is, except the Hon. Cale and his friends. For themselves, having failed for thirty years with their program, they now blithely propose to launch it all over again, apparently in the fullest confidence that it will work, the laws of logic to the contrary notwithstanding.

The One-Book Library

On our desk as we write lies the 1938 edition of an old friend, the World Almanac. It is, we think, the most useful reference work ever got into one volume. It abounds in all sorts of astounding information, quite impossible to come by anywhere else--as for instance that South Carolina's official flower is the yellow jessamine, whereas you naturally expect it to be something like a red, red rose or a full-blooming magnolia.

Is it that one wants to know what year it was that Hugh Capet grabbed the throne of France? or whether it is Pius X or Pius XI who sits on the Papal Throne at the moment? or what the tide level will be at the Battery, New York, on Saturday, July 9, 1938? or who the Tammany bosses in Manhattan may currently be? or what day it was Wallis Warfield departed from Cannes to journey toward Tours and her awaiting ex-king? or what the total income of the United States or North Carolina was in 1937? or what bangtail has run fastest on this earth? or what kind of government Swaziland may have? or just how the G-men go about getting their man?

One finds it all here. Blessings on thee, little fat book!

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