The Charlotte News

Wednesday, December 8, 1937

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Four years from this date, the aftermath of the morning before would evidence a more sophisticated machinery than ladders employed to scale the walls of the American battlements afloat in Mamala Bay.

Four years from this day, FDR would declare war on the Empire of Japan; Hitler would then declare war on the United States; three and a half years and several million lives later, it would end in Europe, and three months afterward, in the Pacific.

But four years from this date, Cash's worldly remains, save his editorials, his book, and a few personal effects, would lie in an urn beneath six feet of earth in Sunset Cemetery in Shelby, as the bright December morning dawned again in purple and gold and yellow hues over the piedmont landscape of the Carolina foothills, as children too young quite to understand the gravity of what might happen to their fathers and friends of their fathers in a far off land on the other side of the world in the wintertime and beyond to come, began to wonder what Santa might have in store for them upon that, the last of even semi-normal Christmases for awhile to come in America.

But for now, four years earlier, the time was far away yet. Only the portents of the drone of its planes, the fluorescence of the wake of its battle cruisers delivering and protecting those planes, the silent stealth of the lowland runners approaching and exerting themselves somehow through the nets meant to catch such fish, only the portents of these instruments of man's invention to destroy and conquer other men and other lands for the quest of empire, would today be present in those far off lands where, "by-the-old-Moul-Mein-Pagoda--, looking-eastward-to the sea--there's a Burma girl a-settin' ".

Our pride in Charlotte and Mecklenburg's status as a champion Blue Law town sinks lower and lower. Only the other day we were lamenting here that Boston, with its enforcement of a rule banning any sort of music, save only hymn-singing, in public places on Sunday, was overtopping us in moral fervor, playing Mecca to our Lasa. But now comes Bellows Falls, in Vermont--that monument of loyalty to tradition--to make us look practically a piker. Up there, they're fighting "the devil" (the term is theirs, not our'n) with almost unparalleled zest. On Sundays, there, you can't play golf, you can't buy an ice cream cone, in effect can't do anything but "works of charity."

But it is not Bellows Falls' zeal against the devil that particularly worries us. After all, we do pretty well in that department ourselves, and if our laurels are not actually tops, they are so close to it as to leave us reasonably complacent. What takes our eye about Bellows Falls is that they're not only fighting the devil but "the redskins," too. Yep, it's a fact--up there they're actually enforcing an old Blue Law which requires the males to carry a gun to church to keep off Lo, the Warwhoop.

The trouble with our MAFLO, we think, is that it has no imagination. Dang it! why couldn't it have thrown its weight behind some ordinance out of the ordinary, like that one making it a misdemeanor to trail young ladies of the "seminary" on their way to and from church?

The unchanging East is in fact considerably changed today as the Japanese cluster under the walls of Nanking and thunder at its gates. Twelve inch guns roar in that scene. Machine-guns whine. Tanks lunge about, snarling. Planes drone overhead. Around and above the old dragon-guarded city, modernity in warfare is closing.

But there are two things at least which are present in the scene that have not changed since the Hia and the Shang. One of them is the use of scaling ladders in the attack on the walls. It was exactly so that they were attacking towns in China 2,900 years ago. And if you only added a few movable towers for the throwing of fire and a battering ram, any of the old boys on the most ancient vases might have felt himself at home had he suddenly been called into life.

Well, and the other unchanging thing? We were going to say that it is the Oriental's supreme carelessness of human life with which the whole warfare has been carried on from the beginning at Shanghai down to this siege of Nanking. But maybe we had better change that a little. Senor Franco is pretty good evidence, when you come to think of it, that Western man is quite as casual about the value of human life as any Oriental has ever been. And so is his model, Signor Mussolini, Il Duce. Maybe we'd better put that on the human race at large, and leave the peculiar changelessness of the Oriental to be illustrated merely by the ladders.

Site Ed. Note: Governor Aiken of Vermont would become Senator in 1941 and serve until 1975. His tenure was marked by such progressivism that some of his fellow Republicans labeled him a communist at times, perhaps indicative of the very historical problem dogging the Republicans in varying degrees since the time of this editorial. By contrast, Senator Bridges would become a proponent of his colleague Barry Goldwater, though deceased by the time the latter began his run for the nomination in 1963. Mrs. Bridges would pick up and carry the torch for her husband's brand of "new faces in high places..."

Senator H. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire is out with a call for the Republican Party "to clean our own house. We must see new faces in high places" in party circles. And Governor George D. Aiken of Vermont agrees with him. The Governor wants the party "purged of reactionary elements," a "broad prospective program adopted," the [indiscernible word] members heaved off the National Committee, and... "new faces in the high places..."

[Indiscernible words] knows if there ever was a party which needed to pull itself together, it is the Republican Party. Basically it has an important function to perform as the party of conservatism in the country. But as it stands, it is neither soundly conservative nor soundly anything else. It is only reactionary and uncomprehending. Indeed, if it persists in the way it has followed in recent years, it is more than a little likely to disappear and give place to another. It needs a sensible program. It won't hurt it to get the Tieless Joe Tolberts out of its councils. And above everything, it manifestly needs "new faces in high places..."

But it needs more than anything else to discover that the country, not the party, is the thing. Say what you will about Roosevelt, master politician that he may be, he has put the country first--so much so that he has split the Democratic Party. But the Republicans can't even find an issue to split over. They are too wholeheartedly agreed that the Republicans ought to be back in power.

Yesterday Mr. Isadore Poller, counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, offered a nine-page formal motion that something be done about Mr. Hartley W. Barclay's refusal to answer the board's subpoena and explain how and why he came to write an article in "Mill and Factory" criticizing the board's handling of the Weirton Steel case hearing. For, argued Mr. Poller, Weirton Steel had undoubtedly paid for the printing of Mr. Barclay's article, had dictated its content and tone, and is currently paying for having it reprinted for distribution among the Weirton employees. And "if this document... would interfere with the rights of employees--then its calculated use by the Weirton Steel Company may be shown by the testimony of whoever has knowledge thereof..."

And do you get the full force and purport of that, messires? It is to lay down the rule that an employer, if he has a low opinion of the Wagner Labor Relations Act or the National Labor Relations Board, may not, under threat of a fine or imprisonment, express it freely. It is to lay down the rule that, while Congress is prohibited by the Constitution from making any law abridging the freedom of speech or the press, the National Labor Relations Board may, if it so chooses--and apparently it does--abridge at its own sweet will the freedom of speech or of the press insofar as labor relations and critical opinions of the National Labor Relations Board are concerned. It is to lay down the rule that the expression of an opinion unfavorable to the board, no matter how warranted, is an unfair labor practice which happens not to be set forth in the act creating the board.

As we said in an editorial yesterday, we do not take much stock in the notion that as a nation we are in imminent danger of actually succumbing to fascism. Nevertheless that the NLRB's interpretation of the Wagner Act is rapidly turning toward something most marvelously like fascism is clear enough. For this doctrine carried through to its logical end would completely abolish the freedom of speech and the press, and make criticism as impossible as it is in Nazi Germany itself.

And still it is impossible to tell if Andrew Mellon: was an old man much maligned and persecuted for political reasons, or one guilty of unethical practices against the very government he was sworn to serve. For the second time he has been acquitted, it is true, of any fraudulent intent to evade income taxes, and in addition the Board of Tax Appeals awarded the Government only a fourth of the amount of the claim it had filed. But the Government won that fourth.

And it now holds a lien against the estate of Andrew Mellon for income taxes which he sought to avoid at least, while he was Secretary of the Treasury. Furthermore, some of the deductions which were allowed have not what one could call an up-and-up look about them. There were those 123,000 shares of stock of Pittsburgh Coal, a company Mr. Mellon controlled, that he sold to Union Trust company, a Mellon institution, later repurchasing them in the name of the Coalesced Company, his own holding company. Plainly he was flaunting that Biblical injunction and letting the right hand know what the left was going to do. Nowadays, that would be called a "dummy" sale, per se, and would be an outright violation of tighter internal revenue laws which Mr. Mellon did not see fit to advocate when he was a Cabinet member.

But still, we say, it is impossible to put down Mr. Mellon finally as a persecuted elder statesman or a conspirator on the inside. Of this, however, we are positive: that he was NOT the greatest Secretary of the Treasury since--well, even since D. A. [sic, F.] Houston, his predecessor.

Site Ed. Note: The rest of the page is here.

Did you know that Jackie Robinson was not apparently in fact the first African-American to be admitted to the major leagues? He was merely the first to be allowed to be himself in the major leagues.