The Charlotte News

Thursday, February 1, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: These pieces by Cash, while making his usually cogent points, read with less polish than his usual output; perhaps a bad or harried day for some reason.

The following little piece about a budding mad genius, also from this date's page.

Though the age would be right, we doubt it was little Elvis. And it was before Bob's time.

More like, perhaps, Charles Starkweather.

But, since his mother had the good sense to do what she did, he probably had the good fortune to grow up to be a psychiatrist, or at least a lawyer, rather than becoming a mass murderer, or at least a country singer.

Excerpt from Readers Digest,

January, 1940

The following is a part of a running monologue chanted by a little four-year-old boy in the bathtub every evening. His mother took down as much of it as she could get and sent it in to the Digest.

He will just do nothing at all.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

And when they speak to him he will not answer them.

Because he does not care to.

He will stick them with spears and put them in the garbage.

When they tell him to eat his dinner he will just laugh at them.

And he will not take his nap because he does not care to.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

He will go away and play with Panda.

And when they come to look for him,

He will put spikes in their eyes and put them in the garbage.

And put the cover on.

He will not go out in the fresh air or eat his vegetables.

Or make wee wee for them and he will get thin as a marble.

He will just sit there in the noonday sun.

Thompson Is Guilty Only If Truth Is Hysterical

Dorothy Thompson's column printed on this page today is probably the sort which prompts a good many people to call her hysterical. For Cassandra at her best was never more ominous.

Nevertheless, nobody who is conversant with the writings of the Nazis themselves, of Hitler himself, or with what is going on in Poland, will call her hysterical.

The most dangerous thing in this country at the moment is less the plot of anybody to drag us into war than the wild suspicion of a great many people that somebody is plotting as much, the tendency to discount every true charge against the Nazis as cunning propaganda, and the determination to keep cool by burying their heads in the sands and asking in what they conceive to be an eminently dispassionate and fair-minded manner: "what, when you come right down to it, is really so bad about Hitler?"

The only thing calculated to get us into war is the necessity of our own self-interest. But the present ostrich attitude is apt to lay us wide open to disaster. Certainly, it is already giving rise to the most hysterical sort of rumors. One of the most astounding of those is a story, which is even now going the rounds in Charlotte itself, that the Jews, alleged to dominate the banks and all other business in the country (which they demonstrably do not), are plotting busily to get us into war with Hitler by way of revenge for themselves. Some of the people who repeat this pride themselves on being intelligent and well-informed--on their immunity from propaganda. But, as a matter of fact, they are here the victims of the grossest form of propaganda, as all readers of "Mein Kampf" should know.

Boss Green Seems Out To Give Boss Lewis A Break

You might almost think Boss Bill Green was out to do Boss John Lewis a favor by driving the International Typographical Union into the CIO fold.

According to Boss Green's own account of the matter, the ITU has already been looking more and more kindly on Boss Lewis's outfit. But, with that before him, Boss Green has the union suspended and promises to have it expelled from AFL for good if it does not pay up special assessments by August.

The special assessments were levied to fight CIO. But the ITU regards war in Labor's ranks with disfavor, wants to heal the breach instead of helping to expand it. And the ITU constitution, accepted by AFL at the time of the union's affiliation with it, forbids the collection of assessments not authorized by a vote of the membership.

Boss Green seems to be on very poor ground, any way you look at it. The attempt to force the payment of the assessment is plainly high-handed. And the loss of the ITU promises to be a major disaster for the AFL. And that is true, whether the union elects to go over to CIO or to set up permanently as an independent. The typographical union represents the aristocracy of Labor. Not numerically as strong as some others, it is perhaps the strongest of all in its unity and in its record of success in reaching amicable agreement with employers.

Dies Committee Forgets To Tell Us Several Things

The Dies Committee is much too reticent. Tuesday night it issued a statement to the effect that a "Washington man" admitted in a secret session that, at the instance of "one Harold Weisberg" and "a certain group which was opposed to the Dies Committee and which was headed by Gardner Jackson of Labor's Non-Partisan League," he forged letters designed to smear Martin Dies as a pal of William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts.

That is to say, the Dies Committee gives us the names of the accused without giving us the name of the accuser. And that violates every principle of American fair play and American law.

If this "Washington man" has confessed forging these letters and signing the name of Pelley to them, and if he has offered credible evidence that the man he accused of hiring him to do it did actually do as much, then the public is not only entitled to know who he is--it is also entitled to see indictments promptly brought against him and those he names. And if he has not offered any such proofs, then the naming of these men, without a shadow of supporting proof, is itself a smear of the grossest sort.

There is still another thing that the public is entitled to know. The plain implication of the Dies statement is that Weisberg, Jackson & Co. specifically hired this man to commit a forgery by way of framing Dies. Yet that same statement also quotes the unnamed as saying that he went through with the business in order to "put Weisberg, Jackson, and their associates out on a limb." That is, to entrap them in a crime. But the leading of men into a crime to entrap them is itself a crime. Question: did the "Washington man" do this on his own account or did somebody put him up to it? And in the latter case, who?

[Editors' note: Under a storm of protest, the Dies Committee yesterday revealed the name of the "Washington man." And Mr. Jackson charged that the "Washington man" was in the employ of the Dies Committee when the forgery was committed.]

This Boot Fits Adolf Better Than Churchill

Der Furious was evidently proceeding on the principle that it is very good tactics to charge your enemy with the crimes of which you stand convicted yourself, when he charged Mr. Churchill with making war on women and children.

As a matter fact, Mr. Churchill can be charged with that only incidentally and indirectly. His blockade is primarily directed to make it impossible for the German armies to secure supplies. If that works out so that the German women and children suffer, it will be only because the Nazis deliberately choose to feed the soldiers at the expense of German women and children.

On the other hand, the only women and children who have so far been deliberately attacked and killed in this war have been the victims, not of Mr. Churchill but of Der Furious and his gangster partner.

It was a German submarine, not an Englishman, which sank the Athenia.

It was German aviators who bombed helpless women and children in unfortified villages all over Poland--who, on the testimony of the American Ambassador to Warsaw, and American reporters and photographers, machine-gunned little girls working in Polish fields far from any military objectives.

It is Russian aviators who are today killing women and children in Finnish cities.

If Boasts Can Win, He Has This War Safely In Bag

What is more curious than Hitler's Peckniffery is that he still apparently believes that boastful words will help him win the war.

It all sounds like a small boy advising another that he is going to take him to pieces, without ever getting on to the fatal blow. And the last, of course, is pure nonsense.

In any case, one inevitably wonders why if Adolf is so confident of victory, he does not proceed to strike and get it over with.

The only possible excuse offered so far is that he needs to build a lot of his new Messerschmidt [sic] fighters to act as escorts for his bombers. But there seems to be little percentage in that, since the British are unquestionably building their new Spitfires at an equal rate.

Somehow, we can't get over the feeling that the thought that while Daladier and Mr. Chamberlain are feeling the Ostmarkers and other divisions, these Ostmarkers and other divisions will themselves be feeling something more remarkably like French and British bayonets and French and British bombs has something to do with it.