The Charlotte News

Monday, December 6, 1937

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The other part of the day’s page is here. Incidentally, as to Mr. Broun's piece, even though one of our caretakers, by the swamp down yonder once upon a time, was named Lenny, a very nice person, we did not do to the little pups that which Lennie did. As we said, our friend's hysterical reaction to his witness of our petting them notwithstanding, they all grew up to be straight and strong, after we found them in the tree trunk. The mama's name was Blackie. Whether the papa was Whitey or Milwaukee, we don't think the jury ever determined. But it could not have been Bambi, for Bambi was a girl--that is, when she wasn't being something else.

We must've had pert near 20 dogs, ourselves. But our papa didn't once go rabbit hunting. The only thing we ever went after was snakes. We caught a few, too. Made us a nice pair of boots out of a couple of 'em one time, also.

A few years later, after we got civilized in the Big-City, it was far more fun watching for the Motorist there from the village window than being on top of the refrigerator by the swamp, whether at Swift and Company or at Steinbeck and Company, albeit the swamp was when we was illiterate.

In any event, we liked the novel ourselves. We also like his pianoes.

Now, for some more harmonica music.

Great Dame's Passing

The news that the old Leviathan is at last to be broken up for scrap iron will bring a pang to most of the tourists who have journeyed to Europe in the last fifteen years. Most German-built ships are inclined to look a little pot-bellied. But not she. There was the appearance of the swift arrow about her, and to see her coming racing into the breakwater at Cherbourg, lie there nervously for an hour, and go leaping northward toward Hamburg, was to experience sensations of power and grace, of the same kind, we imagine, as men felt in the old days when the clipper ships came booming in under their towering clouds of white.

There are greater ships than she afloat now--the Normandie and the Queen Mary. There are finer ships. In truth, the George Washington and the Manhattan, the new ships in the United States line, make the somewhat rococo splendor of her salons seem tawdry. There are faster ships, too, much faster. The best she could do, slightly under five days for the crossing of the Atlantic, seems almost a crawl compared with the Normandie's record of less than three days. But she was a legend and a name, and the most beautiful of beautiful things, a really beautiful ship. There will not be another like her at once.

Tip for Mr. Marinelli*

Mr. Albert Marinelli, it begins to appear, still has his troubles. Manhattan's special prosecutor, Thomas E. Dewey, seems, indeed, to be satisfied with having forced the resignation of Mr. Marinelli, whom he once described as the "ally of big-time racketeers, thugs, and thieves," from his pleasant post as New York County clerk. But now comes the Federal Government to have its say in the matter, and take up where Mr. Dewey left off. The assistant United States District Attorney in New York has asked Mr. Dewey please to let him have the evidence against Mr. Marinelli for presentation to a grand jury.

Possibly Mr. Marinelli feels that life is dealing a little roughly with him, and is inclined to despair. But let him remember the case of another famous employee of New York City who also had to resign under pressure and the blackest of clouds--Mr. Jimmy Walker, no less. Let him remember the case of Mr. Walker and take heart. For from that case it is manifest what Mr. Marinelli ought to do. He ought to go to Europe. He ought to stay there for six or seven years. Then he might return to the states in the full confidence, not only of never having to face trial on the charges lodged against him, but also (1) of being given a rousing and enthusiastic welcome by the populace in New York, (2) of being received in the White House, and (3) of landing again on the public payroll.

Mr. John's Job

A man whose job we don't envy is that of Mr. John Carson, Consumer's Counsel in the Department of the Interior. Mr. John, as you may see by the letter we are publishing in our letter column to the right, is presently calling on all earnest consumers to come to Washington and aid him in keeping the ICC from granting the railroads the increase in freight rates on bituminous coal which they say they need desperately.

And at one and the same time, the coal commission in Washington has just published minimum prices for all bituminous coal produced east of the Mississippi and in Iowa--practically all the soft coal produced in the country, that is--to go into effect December 15.

And if that isn't a reductio ad absurdum of Mr. John's job, we wouldn't know one if we met it on an untraveled road in broad day. Price-fixing for coal, of course, means higher prices for coal, and higher-priced coal, not to mention higher wages and social security taxes, is one of the reasons the railroads are going to have to charge higher rates.

It's Mr. John's job, apparently, to go through the motions of persuading the consuming public that price-fixing in the coal and railroad industries is done with their interest at heart and only over Mr. John's dead body, that the government is trying to do the impossible--to keep prices down at the same time it is raising them. It must take a fellow with a pronounced gift for histrionics.

A Lesson Unlearned

Signor Mussolini crowed very confidently last week in Popolo d'Italia, his official propaganda sheet, that the democratic powers wouldn't fight. They were essentially unwarlike, and besides, he said in almost so many words, they were cowards. That assumption is apparently the whole basis of the Signor's policy, as it is the basis of Hitler's, and as it is the basis of Japan's. Last week the latter, following Mussolini's and Hitler's long series of leads, ran roughshod over the British and American interests, in Shanghai, and Friday they in effect grabbed the French Concession, hitherto the most completely autonomous part of the city.

Well, the Signor and his friends are right as far as that being unwarlike goes. The people of the democratic countries do hate war, and are resolute not to be talked into fighting. And yet--and yet--the nature of peoples does not greatly alter in twenty-three years or in twenty years. And twenty-three years ago, when the German staff ordered the advance into Belgium in 1914, it did it finally because it had proved on paper that there was no slight chance of England's coming into the conflict and that the French couldn't and wouldn't fight longer than three months. And twenty years ago when it ordered unrestricted submarine warfare in the Winter of 1916-1917, it did it because it proved on paper that the United States would never do anything but talk...

Paul Haddock*

Game to the last of a crucifying illness, Paul Haddock departed this mortal coil in the same undaunted spirit that had characterized his two score and ten years within it. Quiet courage this man had in abundance, and if you add a measure of cheerful indomitability, a ready friendliness, a generous charm, innate gentility and skill in those undertakings to which he applied himself, why, you have Paul Haddock to a T.

Worldly, perhaps, he was, always ready for fun and as devil-may-care as the next one. At that, there were plenty of qualities he had which are appreciated and considered to be worth eulogizing in the highest ecclesiastical circles. But first of all and last of all he was a man; and that's tribute enough for any human being.

At the Next Crossroad

Most of us remember Lewis Douglas, the able young Arizona Representative who became Roosevelt's first Director of the Budget, who resigned because of the liberties that were commencing to be taken with that budget, and who subsequently took to pamphleteering furiously against the New Deal. Douglas was one of a group of smart young men who threw in their lot with the New Deal in its original form--Warburg, Acheson, Coolidge, T.J., were some of the others--but who broke with it as the President altered and magnified his ideas.

Well, Douglas disclosed to ten Senators at a secret meeting in the capitol last week a business recovery program of his own formulation. The ten Senators were Glass, Byrd, Bailey, Copeland, George, King, Smith (Cotton Ed) and Van Nuys of Indiana, for the Democrats, and Vandenburg and Townsend for the Republicans. None of them would give out for publication exactly what the Douglas recovery program was, but intimations were that it envisaged tax revision, budget balancing and foreign trade expansion.

And if that's so, here's a queer thing. The President himself, as a result of the recession in business activity, is an advocate, presently, of tax revision, budget balancing and foreign trade expansion. Precisely. And wouldn't it be a creamy jest if after all these meanderings of the New Deal, these detours under the direction of the Corcorans and the Cohens, the President should find himself marching straight down the middle of a broad highway in company with Lewis Douglas, Glass, Byrd, Bailey, Copeland, George, King, Smith (Cotton Ed), Van Nuys, Townsend and Vandenburg? We trow it would.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i>--</i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.