The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 10, 1937

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Here is an editorial we ran across from 1960 which fundamentally provides the final absolute proof that President Kennedy was insistently and constantly and steadfastly seeking attention of the ladies, so much so that it is said that he would arrange tea parties with the ladies—and this editorial conclusively proves the thesis which for so long has been known by others. Need we say more?

Keep it hush, hush and on the Q.T.

Incidentally, that editorial within the same column reprinted from an Oklahoma newspaper gives us plenty pause, too. We were not aware of the thousands of agents from the Soviet Union on our soil in 1960, or that there were fishing vessels which were disguised Russian spy ships in fact off our coasts watching our rockets launch. Can you imagine? (And, that was Mr. Kennedy’s fault, obviously, since he was a Senator after all and should have been stopping these things.) We do have to take a moment, however, and ponder just why the Soviets went to all the trouble to disguise the fishing boat if they had thousands of people on our soil who could go to any place they wanted around Cape Canaveral and watch the rockets launch.

But, we shouldn’t become too hyper-technical about these things. The folks out in Oklahoma had plenty of inside intelligence, no doubt, which they had acquired from reliable confidential informants steered to them by other reliable sources, steered in turn probably from some of those thousands of agents.

Whether you agree with that elucidative editorial or not, you cannot refrain from agreement on its last paragraph: that, had Mr. Nixon and Mr. Lodge been elected, Khrushchev’s head would have been just where the editorial suggests. Just to what that might have led, love feast or world war, however, we are not sure. But they would’ve shown Nik a thing or two.

It also appears plain from the news of October 15, 1960 as to who would win the general election, as Mr. Nixon drew an estimated street crowd of 200,000 along his parade route in Los Angeles, while Mr. Kennedy, in Pennsylvania, attracted police-estimated paltry crowds of only 10,000 and 8,000, respectively—proving once again that the results of the election were falsified and that Mr. Nixon in fact won that election, fair and square, cubed and rounded, and by a ratio of 200:18.

As to "Mutiny and the Bounty", below, the case of the Algic, mentioned in the editorial, was again mentioned by Cash in "Past’s Echo", February 12, 1940, in relation to another incident, involving the City of Flint, with the same captain at the helm, Joseph Gainard. The editorial immediately preceding that one relates the story of the Kim, a Russian freighter which fetched in five and a half million dollars in gold to an American seller of copper, the copper being consigned to an agent in Mexico, to circumvent President Roosevelt’s "moral embargo" against selling war materiel to Russia while engaged as a belligerent against Finland.

Recall that the Russian tanker in the Cuban missile crisis which became somewhat problematic during the latter days as to whether or not it should be stopped, its approach toward the line appearing initially unremitting, eventually stopping, then proceeding again, and finally becoming dead still, signifying conclusively the end of the crisis on October 28, 1962, was named Kimovsk. It was so named, presumably, after a little Russian village, in turn taking its name from the acronym for the youth version of the Comintern, "Young Communist International”, abbreviated in Cyrillic, KИM, anglicized to KIM.

Then, if you haven’t already done so, you may read on a little further on the pieces of April 15, 1940, and the quoted material we attached at the beginning of the note accompanying them.

"Mutiny and the Bounty" was the first mention made by Cash of Joseph P. Kennedy. Another piece on the elder Kennedy, after he became Ambassador to Great Britain, as well as a compilation of links to yet other editorials in the News regarding both his tenure as head of the Maritime Commission and that as Ambassador, before and after he left that post, are within the note and editorials for October 21, 1938.

We should note also that the second film version of "Mutiny on the Bounty", the first one having been released in 1935, was released the day after election day, November 8, 1962.

Further note the piece below on Ramsay MacDonald, and its last sentence. (It also makes incidental mention of Bertrand Russell, one of the primary critics to President Kennedy’s quarantine during the final week of the missile crisis, claiming it would lead to world war, sending publicly an amatory letter to Khrushchev pleading against response to what he believed was an unwarranted action.)

Even an astute reader might be inclined to throw all of that overboard and suggest it as mere flotsam, unworthy of any special attention, leading nowhere, saying nothing of import beyond that which it was originally intended to convey, editorial commentary on the events, foreign and domestic, of the periods contemporaneous with the editorials set forth within their originally intended context. We have been so inclined many times during the course of this presentation ourselves.

For no one who was rational surely would have read that material in some other manner, even a quarter century later as forced integration of public schools and other public facilities in the South had stoked the old fires of virility and racial purity once again to the flashpoint, not to gain from it its good information and commentary, but rather as a kind of mental coding device or as a brainwashing tool, to get the henchmen once again to do the biding of the overlords, to stoke the fires for the lynching.

But, rational thought is not always the actuating factor for behavior, even in normally rational persons. And untoward behavior is always the product of irrational thought, even if the actor is at the time "rational" vis à vis the standards for behavior within the frame of reference for the particular gestalt in which the behavior occurs.

And, linear perception of the printed word on a given page is not the way in which every perceiving mind operates at all times, even among the reasonably intelligent and those capable, more or less, of reading and writing.

Witness that first editorial we mentioned from 1960 in Oklahoma. No doubt, you could pick up probably any newspaper today, or tune in any news program for an hour or so, and find equally strange views culled from the same events of which you have read or heard and from which you have come to a polar opposite opinion or conclusion, based on facts imparted, reasoning, and, sometimes, even direct percipient data. Today, there is far greater access, via the internet, than in the past, to original source material, such as transcripts of testimony or conversations, clearer photographs than newsprint affords, unedited audio, etc., with which to provide a reasonably clear base of facts on which to found a conclusion or opinion.

So, the diligent and astute person today is much less susceptible to being manipulated by the manner in which a matter becomes reported, the McLuhan "Medium is the Massage" idea, than in the past.

Some may think that reporters deliberately skew stories by choice of words or stressing certain facts over others, to accord with their own subjective beliefs. And, indeed, in some cases, they may. Even the manner of the layout may suggest deliberately subliminalized thought, to create in the unwary ideas not communicated in the print. And, again, sometimes, it may be deliberate, but not always for any sinister reason; it may simply be for dramatic or comedic effect.

But whether all or even most such apparently implied ideas derived from layout, or even particular wording of a story or stress of certain facts, are deliberately communicated or simply the result of overly imaginative impressions gleaned from reading ideas into the print, things which may either be true or not, we are by no means sure. More than likely, it is simply the result of deadlines on reporters and graphics departments, the necessity to block and fill so much newsprint on any given day. Since such is done by a human mind, and rapidly, and not by random selection, what headlines will say, which stories obtain prominence, which fall on the inside of the newspaper, the location of ads, juxtaposition, etc., inevitably determine a human thought pattern communicated from some other human thought pattern, individual or collective, allowing, though not determining, thus to form a subjective opinion, probably to creep in, as the perceiving mind inevitably tries, consciously or unconsciously, to make sense of what one is seeing and reading, whether the mind consciously reads the whole page or not; the eyes see it, the brain perceives it therefore, and somewhere on the cortex registers things which the reader did not necessarily understand were registered, and, in that process, connects those things together, again consciously or unconsciously, to form ideas derived from the layout, the juxtaposition, the stress of stories, as well as what the story itself says.

Sometimes, when the mind is rational, the mind will put those matters together rationally and logically.

Sometimes, if the mind is in a lesser state than astute rationality, either because of a permanent condition or something mutable, depression, tiredness, or otherwise not up to par, the data perceived may be thrown hither and thither, temporarily or permanently, providing a somewhat disjointed or even completely irrational perception of the day’s events.

Sometimes, we glean, because the mind normally reads matter, such as the print contained in books, the place where most of us first learn to read, in a straight line, either left to right, as is usually the case, or the other way about in certain languages, such as Hebrew, we may indeed bleed from our conscious reading cycle into an unconscious cycle, as we read columnar print, either in newspapers or magazines. The disciplined mind will naturally follow the column, filter the extraneous matter juxtaposed to it on either side, and constrain thereby conscious perceptions received from the print to that received from within the proper linear order for that particular printed column. Skimming and speed reading trains the eye to look for proper nouns and certain action words, verbs, adjectives, to read the story in quicker than linear fashion by grabbing it in some circuitous manner off the page.

Virginia Woolf, James Joyce. Probably, these two authors’ works--the ones written in so-called stream-of consciousness, which process, when rendered correctly on the page, we suggest, is anything but true stream-of-consciousness, but rather a kind of trance-like state performed in print, as a musician first sets forth the notes in fitful stops and starts in a composition, practices that composition, and then finally performs it, the composition coming perhaps in a flourish, stream-of-consciousness, but the finished product being something else, a polished deposition communicating to the rational mind—may assist, oddly enough, in enabling some good practice at sorting out the wheat from the chaff as one reads matter. Moreover, as we have stated, we highly recommend reading, quite deliberately and slowly, philosophical works, even if at first the reader is unable to glean scarcely a participle of what is being said. Eventually, it will likely sink in and school the reader’s thinking in rational constructs.

So, why are we spending this much print on how one perceives newsprint and how newspapers become newspapers each day and even how to read a newspaper? Everyone who reads knows how to read a newspaper. While that statement may be true in one sense, we have come to believe in time that it is not true in another, and for the very reasons we have suggested, that ideas intended to be communicated by the newsprint are often completely misunderstood by the reader, sometimes so twisted as to be exactly backward from the intended meaning, true whether an editorialization intended to be irony or whether relatively straightforward news stories. And the reader is not always attuned to manipulation by news stories, accomplished, intentionally or not, by the frame in which they are presented, true especially of course from within the frame of television, interrupted with advertising, and other messages superfluous to the substance of the presentation, filtered, but nevertheless perceived by the mind.

And, while we have made much progress in our society, we believe, in one sense, over time, since the era of the 1960’s, we still find, too often, that we continue to be stuck within the same old paradoxes, sluggishly trying to understand current events, sometimes assuming too much knowledge from too few facts, sometimes showing too much trust of the medium itself or of the communicated information, sometimes showing too much skepticism, without undertaking the task of sorting, logically and rationally, critiquing as we go, the various facts and data presented, remaining conscious of the limitations and vagaries from presenter to presenter, of the medium itself in the process.

Getting back, however, to that with which we began regarding this day’s editorials, in juxtaposition to later ones on connected subject matter, we urge contemplation of why those editorials, and the symbols conveyed, not just ordinary symbols, or ordinary representations of ideas, but with particularity, and in conjunction, appear to point to later events, a quarter century later? Is it a concatenation of pure coincidence? Is it the reading of this print by someone and retention thereof over time; or that, plus the reading by others, later, thinking that print to have formed some sinister notions motile toward change in society, and thus seeking to use that same print to encode, to motivate in others, contrary action to thwart those changes--changes believed to be brought about in threat to tenaciously held traditions, traditions, however, grounded in and founded on and dependent upon pain in others? If that, did it extend far beyond these editorials by Cash from the News, during his 43-month tenure? Were they merely a starting point? In short, did the Klan or the Birchers or some similarly constituted group, use some of these editorials in the 1960’s, twisting them backwards in essence, to attempt to counteract that which they perceived these editorials and, moreover, the book which followed, were stimulating in society? Using them as a spiteful child not wanting to eat greens throws them across the room? Were they used as code? Did attention come to them because they appeared either to predict future events or were in fact used, or were suspected of being used, to better understand the past to better deal with and prevent the worst untoward events in the present?

We do not mean to suggest, however, that this whole matter is merely an exercise in critical thinking. We think that there is far more to it than that, something the result of which has the potential for vastly positive results or mixed or mostly negative ones, depending on individual perception.

You be the judge.

The rest of the editorial page for the date is here.

No Choppers, Please, Sir

"I believe probation in the state is going to be a great success, but I want it understood that we do not claim it is going to wipe out all crime... We are going to have some cases where a probationer goes wrong, chops somebody up or commits some other horrible form of crime."

Thus Harry Sample, North Carolina's new Probation Director, commenting on the new probation law which went into effect November 1, and under which twenty-nine persons have already been placed.

We understand what it was Mr. Sample wanted to put over, we think. And we know well that there are going to be probationers who go wrong. But all the same--we hope there won't be any choppers among them. Human conduct is ultimately unpredictable, perhaps, but by and large it is pretty easy to know whether a man's a chopper or a potential chopper. And the probation law was not designed for persons whose records anywhere near suggest they might be choppers. It was mainly designed to rescue foolish youths who, without having any well-developed criminal tendencies, sometimes get themselves embroiled with the law. People who exhibit unmistakable criminal traits obviously do not belong under its provisions. And especially choppers.

Site Ed. Note: Daniel Tompkins, for whom the Tompkins Building was named, was the son of DeWitt Clinton Tompkins, not to be confused with DeWitt Clinton who became Governor of New York after beating Daniel Tompkins, who was then in 1820 Vice-President under James Monroe, for whom, for good reason, the Monroe Doctrine was named. This Daniel Tompkins, one of the original and foremost of the cotton mill barons of the South, owned a controlling interest in both the News, when it was the Evening Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer. He also served under William McKinley on the Industrial Commission. While revered in his time as one of those "community benefactors" responsible for the cotton mill as a "communal project", of which Cash spoke in his book, Mr. Tompkins built his mills primarily from 12 to 14 hour days put in by young boys and young women, exclusively white, an extension, in other words, of slavery after the Civil War, utilizing these boys and young women as the barely paid factory workers, while the barely paid black labor force picked the cotton in the fields. For the latter, little had really changed, systemically anyway, since the War ended slavery. Mr. Tompkins insisted: "Cotton mill labor is practically all white labor. Negroes are sometimes used for draymen, firemen and other such purposes where there is little or no contact with the white organization. It would seem impossible to work a force of mixed white and black labor where white women and negro men would be brought in daily relations as co-workers. In laundries negro women work very well with and under more or less direction of white women. There is no instance, however, where a mixed organization of whites and blacks of both sexes have worked together successfully. Before the civil war negro slaves were in a few instances worked with tolerable success in a few of the isolated factories that survived through the institution of slavery. In the penitentiary of South Carolina the negro convicts do successful work in a knitting mill. The State of Alabama has a small cotton factory where negro convicts are worked on coarse goods, but the experiment has determined nothing so far. One comprehensive experiment has been made at Charleston, S. C., to operate a large factory with negro labor. The effort failed. The factory had failed twice before with white labor, and this experiment is by no means of itself conclusive." Tompkins opposed compulsory public education, child labor laws, and unions, which he thought the Yankee was serpentinely imposing on the South to restrict economic competition from a cheaper labor force. He also ghost-wrote several publications, possessed of lively and exhilaratingly poetic titles, such as Cotton Mill, Commercial Features. 10-4.

Did you know all that was in your Unawares, Neighbor?

Never mind, for Peter Brown called to say, "You can make it okay."

Farewell to a Neighbor

The news that the old Tompkins Building is to go the way of all flesh--or all, brick and concrete--is somehow a little startling. In reality, as years go, the building is not old at all, and the contractor hired to tear it down declares that it is still one of the stoutest buildings in the city. They built them that way then.

In terms of event and change, it is a veritable Pyramid of Cheops. When its cornerstone was laid in 1905, the automobile had not yet come to Charlotte, save as a rare stinking abomination contrived to the end of scaring horses to death. The heavy clump of dray horses on the macadam awakened you in the early morning--that is, provided you lived close in, for paving itself was confined to only a small downtown area. And street cars were the sign manual of the town's pride--the proof that it was no longer a village.

It was not beautiful, heaven knows, that old building. It was about as ugly indeed as they made 'em even in that age when ugliness seems to have been a cult among builders. But it was solid and substantial looking. And its high Italianate tower, standing up bravely under the newer high buildings, always produced in us the same sort of sensation that a medieval castle springing up in the middle of a modern European town produces. If it hadn't been so lonesome, we'd be almost sorry to see it go.

MacDonald

In his last days they called old Ramsay MacDonald a traitor. But by the record it seems a little dubious. Men who had the courage to stand up and denounce war in the Fall of 1914--such men are not by ordinary made up of the stuff that sells its convictions down the river. He did not go to jail for his anti-war convictions, as Bertrand Russell did, but he suffered for them nonetheless. And so--it may very well have been that when he chose to remain with the nationalist coalition cabinet at the time when Labor was breaking with it, it was, in large part at least, not because of the lure of power and a baron's shield, but genuinely that he felt that Labor had come as far as it might, on its own, and that union is after all better than division.

But in any case the man was a remarkable one in many respects. It was a very long way he came--up from a Scottish fishing village in the coal mines of the North to the mastery of the world's greatest empire. Other Englishmen have sometimes done the same sort of thing. Thomas Becket did it long ago, and Lloyd George in our own time. But it is not easy in England. Without believing too much in Horatio Alger or the kind of mythology which often turns a famous man's merely middle-class background into abject poverty, we may still imagine that the men who have done it at all had to have a great deal more than the common run.

Moderation at Last?

What appears to be distinctly a conciliatory gesture is that of the President to the utilities. In return, he intimates, for de-watering the valuations upon which their rates are based, the Government would undertake to help them finance new construction, which has been backing up ever since the New Deal came in. A further assumption, warranted in common sense, is that active Federal competition except upon the basis of the President's 1932 Portland speech--i.e., competition where rates would not come down and a yardstick had to be provided--would be foresworn.

The genius of this new inchoate policy is that it is moderate. Nobody, we take it, wants to see the power companies continue to get away with murder. They have had under their control a mighty giant which must be harnessed and directed primarily in the public interest. That prior to the New Deal it had not been, goes without saying. If there is objection to that statement, it would be easy enough to document with the simplification of corporate structures, the reduction in rates, rural electrification--all of which have transpired under the lash of the New Deal.

And likewise it goes without saying, we believe, that the sentiment of the country is opposed to handing the power plants over to the politicians to run. It is one thing to bring the power companies to law, quite another to sneak all the way into state socialism while pretending to be striving for regulation.

One extreme--that of letting the utilities run roughshod over the public, or letting the Federal Government run roughshod over the utilities--is almost as bad as the other. And the genius of the new Presidential policy is, we say, that it is moderate.

Mutiny and the Bounty

What Chairman Joe Kennedy of the Maritime Commission inferred yesterday seems to be true. Bigger even than the problem of raising $137,000,000 for the bringing of the American Merchant Marine up to par is the problem of the American sailor. Discipline is well-nigh gone from American ships. There have been half a dozen instances of what was at least near-mutiny in the last few months, notably on the voyage of the Algic. And travellers report that insolence and insubordination are rapidly becoming the rule on passenger ships of the United States.

What we have here is the breakdown or the threatening breakdown at least of one of the oldest, the most rigid, and the soundest traditions of the world. Sailors immediately have signed up from port of origin back to port of origin. And that contract has had all the binding force of a military enlistment--for the excellent reason that the sea is still perilous and that rigid discipline is necessary to the safety of the ship and all aboard her.

What is behind the breakdown is not entirely clear. The Bolshies have had a good deal to do with it, obviously, for they have had great success with maritime unions. But bad wages and working conditions seem to play their part, too. Anyhow, it is plain that if we are going to have any merchant marine--and we must have one and one operating in case of war--the situation must somehow be remedied and the tradition restored.

Comedy Over Europe

From Perpignan, France, the assiduous Associated Press chronicles the following slightly astonishing item:

From Italy, whose soldiers avowedly are fighting for the Spanish insurgents, a shipment of food supplies came today for government Spain by way of France. Eighteen carloads of Italian wheat totaling 300 tons passed through Perpignan on the way to Catelonia.

And in the same day the same great organization recites also that Russia is threatening to retaliate against Italy for signing up with Germany and Spain by "cutting off the supplies of oil she has been sending to Italy."

In fine, Italy, busily engaged in trying to starve the Spanish government, yet sells it food. And Russia, which has been trying desperately to shove oil ships through the Mediterranean to the Spanish government so that it might do Franco down (awhile Signor Mussolini's submarines cheerfully blow them up), has still been selling oil to Italy--to be transshipped in part, no doubt, to Franco himself!

We have lamented before now that Gilbert and Sullivan, the great makers of comic opera, had to die so plainly before their time. But maybe it's just as well. They probably would have laughed themselves to death, anyhow, before they ever got around to setting it to music.

Site Ed. Note: And, if you, like us, like doggies, go here.

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