The Charlotte News

Sunday, February 27, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The rest of the page is here, sans either a Ripley's or an editorial cartoon, perhaps unique, at least in Cash's three and a half year tenure at The News. Finding ourselves lost without all the pichers, we've no further comment.

Cash also contributed to the book-page of this date "Dawn for Dictators", regarding Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, and its cyclical theory of barbarism-to-feudalism-to-civilization and back again to feudalism and barbarism.

Senator Walsh of Massachusetts seems to have reason on his side in opposing the proposed $5,000 pension for Mrs. Mary Lord Harrison, widow of Benjamin Harrison, sometime President of the United States. Out of considerations of the national dignity, the United States can hardly afford, indeed, to allow a widow of a former President to live in destitution, even though, as in this case, she did not marry her husband until after his term of office--and never served as mistress of the White House.

But Mrs. Harrison is very far from destitution. She has a $5,000 income from a trust fund, and, in addition, the revenues from properties left her by her husband. She may have to live modestly by the standards of great ladies, but there is nothing in that offensive to the American notion of the national dignity. And in these times of a $38,000,000,000 Treasury debt, the tradition that President's widows must have a pension regardless of their need, becomes as ridiculous as, say, that proposal that the widow of every man who ever served more than sixty days in the army or navy must have a pension, too.

Representative Vinson's House Committee was interested in the merits of airplanes as against battleships, and vice-versa. So it asked Admiral Dubose which did he think was better. The Admiral said that airplanes were all very well for secondary uses, but that, himself, he had no doubt that the battleship was still the only reliable primary defense. Then they asked Admiral Cook. And Admiral Cook was even more intense than Admiral Dubose. Airplanes? he said. Oh, airplanes. Why, it would require 5,750 bombers, costing $7,000,000,000, to deliver fire power equal to the fifteen battleships we already have, and then they'd probably fail against battleships.

Thereupon, the committee turned to Mr. Glenn L. Martin, who builds the Martin Bombers, and Mr. Martin opined that bombing planes were so much superior to battleships that the latter would be practically helpless before them. And when they asked Mr. Lester P. Barlow, who has invented a gigantic "aerial mine," Mr. Barlow turned out to be of the same opinion as Mr. Martin.

From which, after extended consideration, we deduce that men who build and operate and work with battleships prefer battleships, and that men who build and operate and work with airplanes prefer airplanes.

That Law Enforcement Committee of the South Carolina Legislature went entirely too far when it described conditions in Columbia as "horrible." We are not prepared to go along with Mayor Owens of that town and call the description "preposterous." We are not prepared, indeed, to argue that things may not be pretty bad. As the charges go, the town has a gambling establishment within hailing distance of the Capitol, a too-generous supply of trollops and their business representatives, and a flourishing numbers racket.

All the same, we submit that law enforcement conditions in Columbia cannot properly be described as "horrible." For, looking into the Uniform Crime Report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 1937, we find that Columbia last year had six cases of murder and non-negligent homicide. And if the word "horrible" is to be used to describe law enforcement conditions in a town which, with 60,000 people, had only six murders, there would be simply no word left to describe law enforcement conditions in a town like Charlotte, which, with 90,000 people, had 37. The South Carolina lawmakers should pick their terms with more discrimination.

While Hitler and Mussolini in the West and the little brown man in the East are absorbing the world's attention, it should not be overlooked that in Russia Papa Stalin is still doing business in the same old way. Only last week the news got out, in Papa's own good time, that a couple of gold-laced admirals in the Soviet navy, along with a half-dozen other "fascist bandits, traders and spies," had been bumped off in the economical Soviet way--a pistol pressed to the back of the head and fired.

For downright gangsterism, Hitler and Mussolini and the Son of Heaven, all three put together, can't hold a candle to Stalin. The trial of the Rev. Martin Niemoeller in Berlin shows that Hitler at least is not utterly contemptuous of any other opinion than his own. The indictment of the cleric has been changed from treason to "disrespect and disobedience to the Nazi regime." In Russia, the indictment would have been stepped up to include all the high crimes imaginable, and Niemoeller and any others like him would by now have had a hole in the back of their heads.

We have convinced ourselves ere this that fascism is by far a greater menace to world order than communism; that Russia has enough at home to keep her from eyeing the rest of the world speculatively. But internally, Russia under Stalin is incredible. The man's a butcher, reveling in blood.

Site Ed. Note: Out of the thirty-nine months of newsprint we have thus far covered from Cash's four month longer stint at the paper, plus the nearly three year's worth of sporadic contributions before it, this is the first and only time we have ever seen anything which, even obliquely and through the backdoor, gives Hitler or Mussolini anything other than the labels both deserved: monsters, or monsters posing as clowns. Cash's seeming charity toward them in this single piece, by way of comparison to Stalin, America's eventual ally in the war against fascism and Japanese empire, would be transitory, lasting only to the extent that this day's page was dry and on the streets, offering it more by way of arousing public awareness of Stalin's domestic atrocities than providing any mitigation to the horrors being perpetrated by the others, obviously.

But, in the end, the irony of history is that without the Soviets combining with the Allies in the War, it might well have turned out differently, with Hitler in charge of the world, at least for a few months, until they dropped a nuclear bomb in the middle of Berlin, that is. --But would they have done that to Europeans, under any circumstances?

Fortunately, no one ever needed to answer the question, confronting coldly the racial aspect with respect to the war on Japan, for the very reason of Stalin's troops penetrating, pincer-like, from the east, to link up with Montgomery's and Patton's armies from the south and west, forcing the little man in the bunker, the architect of the whole morass into which the world had been dragged,--who had just 58 months earlier, having by then established the major components of his Thousand-Year Reich, been photographed leaning on the balustrade above Napoleon's Tomb, incarnating the new Emperor of all central Europe--to put a bullet through his corrupt and destitute brain.

Down among the cat-fish-whiffed alleys of Blue Heaven, where the aged shotgun houses lean against each other for support and warmth;

Down along the creek banks where slime is, and where the mosquitoes breed, and where the waters rise after hard rains and overflow into the bottom lands;

Down in pitch-black Blue Heaven, where hundreds of families by their very crowding together breed syphilis, diphtheria, colitis and crime;

Down among these shanties, for the use of which aloof and absentee landlords charge so many dollars a week, down where the Negroes live because there is nowhere else to live, down where lies the most virulent single threat to the health and safety of the city--down there, this Sunday afternoon, go the Methodist ministers of Charlotte and Mecklenburg.

They will see Blue Heaven in its Sunday best--perhaps more little porches will be neat and more pickanannies will be scrubbed and rib-boned. Still, if this expedition is not a mere slumming excursion, if is not a mere exercise in "Oh, see how the other half lives," if it is not, in fine, simple unconcerned curiosity, why, the ministers and their flocks can be immensely useful.

Let them see for themselves Blue Heaven's threat to health and safety. Let them make this interest in the other half a pattern of very practical Christianity. Let them report to their congregations and arouse, perhaps, the only inspiration that will ever get anything done about the slums: the inspiration of enlightened selfishness and the awareness of danger.

The office philosopher came suddenly into the editorial sanctum wanting to know if we were familiar with the Fourth Commandment. Of a certainty, and we began reciting it:

Go on, he ordered.

Now stop right there, he said, breaking in. There was the trouble. There was where the Fourth Commandment had begun a long time ago to be disobeyed. Six days should man labor, according to the Biblical injunction; but according to the laws of the New Deal, it was a penitentiary offense to work more than five days of so many hours each.

Oh, but, we argued, the Commandment meant...

Never mind what it meant, he retorted. If you started operating on your own theory of what it meant, you could arrive at any meaning chosen in advance. The Commandments were graven on a stone tablet. The words were immutable. Six days thou shalt labor.

And so what, we asked? So people should work six days, he said; that there was nothing like six days of perspiration to bring about a great and enhallowed lassitude on the seventh. We left it at that, after conceding that he had introduced a side-argument that was unusual, to say the least.