The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 7, 1940

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and while she sat watching the White King (for she was still a little anxious about him, and had the ink all ready to throw over him, in case he fainted again), she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, '--for it's all in some language I don't know,' she said to herself.

It was like this.

YKCOWREBBAJ

sevot yhtils eht dna ,gillirb sawT'

ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD

,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA

.ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA

She puzzled over this for some time, but at last a bright thought struck her. 'Why, it's a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again.' This was the poem that Alice read.

JABBERWOCKY

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'It seems very pretty,' she said when she had finished it, 'but it's RATHER hard to understand!' (You see she didn't like to confess, ever to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) 'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are! However, SOMEBODY killed SOMETHING: that's clear, at any rate--'

That’s what Alice said.

Don’t blow your mind out on those changing lights--or at the octagon signs neither.

That’s what we said.

Hazard

If Pedestrians Are Barred Here, City Should Say So

The City police authority should be fair to the pedestrian at the corner of Morehead and South Tryon Streets. That is, they ought to put up signs reading, "Pedestrians Cross Here At Your Own Risk," or they ought to see that he has some reasonable chance to cross the intersection in safety.

As it is, he is called on to have the eyes of Argus, the agility of the kangaroo, the slithiness of the Lewis Carroll's tove, and the swiftness of Achilles, to have any fair prospect of getting over the street still in the flesh and sound of limb.

Yesterday afternoon, we got off the bus at the northwest corner of South Tryon. Immediately afterward the green light showed for passage across Tryon. But it was a complete fraud. In the middle of the street a small roadster swept up far past the white line to the exact line of Morehead traffic, then crept slowly forward. And it was not alone. Behind it came the whole stream of traffic. Nobody ever observes the white lines at the corner, and most people do not really stop, because the red light is timed so fast that it is unnecessary. The only chance the pedestrian has of crossing is to make his way out and around the cars on South Tryon into the stream of traffic on Morehead--at a trot. And that is made doubly hazardous by the fact that cars are turning into Tryon from both directions on Morehead, usually at high speed.

At least one pedestrian has been killed at this intersection in recent years, and several others have been injured. There will be more if the present anarchy at the point is not straightened out.

Site Ed. Note: Once--and we don't make this stuff up--we were in our own little blue roadster, somewhere back there, circa fall, 1973, cambering out of a parking way onto the main drag in Pulpit Hill, with perhaps a bit too much celerity to our credit. As we approached the white line, that is where the sidesand mythically crossed the parking way, yet quite invisibly so to our eyes fixed on other pursuits, we were stopped dead in our rubbery treads by the sudden recognition of the glaring Argosy of a faculty member, one whom we recognized as being the advisor for an organization of which we were a sibling, standing directly in front of our pathway. Well, there he was, stopped right in front of our little blue roadster, staring, or actually rather leering, at us with a mightily caustic expression of disgust and distaste. We sheepishly shook our heads in apologetic acknowledgement. It did not seem to flatter him much, but he walked on across the mythical way, and let us slithily gimble wy.

This little intersection of time and space occurred--again this stuff up make we don't--at the intersection of the exit from the parking way outside the Morehead Planetarium and Franklin Street, there in Pulpit Hill. Well, make of it what you will.

The faculty member's name incidentally, we shall not reveal, but it may have some mystical connection somewhere with why we lost two of them, that is his name, some nine eery years later, there at the Eisenhower Tunnel at Love Pass, Colorado, one snowy dark evening as we passed westward, back when we was, you know, his name.

Deserved

Nobody Ever More Merited Hanging Than IRA Bombers

The Irish Government is on highly doubtful ground when it intervenes in behalf of the members of the Irish Republican Army scheduled to be executed at Birmingham today. And the whole uproar in Ireland makes the claim that the IRA is not representative of the Irish sentiment pretty ridiculous.

There is every reason to believe that these men had a fair trial and that they were guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. And the new outbreak of bombings bears them out--suggests quite pointedly that these men were guilty and that the IRA is simply trying to terrorize the English people into letting them off.

If they were guilty, nobody ever more roundly deserved hanging. Indeed if the English Government rounded up the IRA and executed it wholesale, few people would blame it much.

There is no question here of an oppressed people fighting for its rights. Ireland is completely free today. Merely this Irish Republican Army wants to take over Ulster and make it a part of the Irish Republic--against the will of the majority of the inhabitants.

And to further that end, they deliberately pitch bombs into railroads stations, post offices, crowded streets, each time killing a number of wholly innocent people. Such murderous swine deserve to be weeded out ruthlessly. And the Irish Government will make no friends for itself by attempting to protect them.

Case Report

Mr. Caldwell Might Recognize Something Familiar Here

Every so often we run into somebody who is particularly riled by the Erskine Caldwell school of writing about the Southern sharecroppers, etc. It just ain't so, he tells us, foaming a little at the mouth. He has traveled all up and down the fair face of Dixie, and never yet has he seen anybody who answered even remotely to the description of old Jeeter Lester or Ty-Ty Walden and their appalling brood. And as for that "Tobacco Road," house--nosiree, it just never existed.

All of which we are reminded of by a story from Newton, in The Lincoln Times, this week. A man named Charlie Goble Jr. was found frozen to death in the snow in Catawba County. It developed that he, and his half-brother, one Jim Drum, had been at a still, which the police allege they operated, started home drunk. Goble faltered. Jim started to carry him, gave up, went on home. Nobody reported Goble's plight until he was accidentally found the next day--dead.

For what it is worth, we cull the following from The Times' story:

The one-roomed cabin in which Drum and Goble lived with their aunt was a picture of poverty. When officers entered they found Drum and "Aunt Sally" huddled over a small fire made from pine needles and brush. Neighbors later went out and cut some wood and replenished the fire.

It was noticed that a "pallet" bed had been made on the small back porch. Questioning revealed that "Aunt Sally" was in the habit of sleeping out on the porch. She said she had been sleeping there all Winter and was there Friday morning when the temperature dropped to the zero mark. Anyone lying on the bed can easily reach out and get a handful of snow.

The woman said: "I have to cough a lot during the night and I just can't bear being in a room where it is stuffy."

Case For Inquiry

Congress Should Investigate Charges Against Dies

Congress owes the nation a thorough-going investigation of the whole charge that Martin Dies has Fascist sympathies.

Whether or not he has such sympathies we do not certainly know. But the charge has been voiced or insinuated long before Congressman Hook and the "Pelley letters" were ever heard of. And by responsible sources, including Dorothy Thompson.

And surely, the sudden appearance and loud declarations of William Dudley Pelley do not, as the Associated Press assumes, "explode" the charge. They do not even prove that the "Pelley letters" are forgeries, though they probably are. Since when has Mr. Pelley waxed candid with the nation?

The record quite clearly lays Dies open to suspicion. For instance, it is an indisputable fact that, so long as he absolutely dominated the Dies Committee, it made no genuine effort to look into any Fascist organization, including the German-American Bund of Fritz Kuhn himself. It is a fact also that to this day the committee has never taken the slightest cognizance of the activities of Father Coughlin, undoubtedly the most dangerously influential man of Fascist inclinations now operating in the nation. Nor of the Ku Klux Klan, which has been breaking out increasingly in the last year.

And the sudden appearance of Pelley to defend Dies is itself a remarkable occurrence. Does anybody suppose that Pelley is moved by the desire for fair play? If so, then he has undergone a striking metamorphosis in his period of hiding.

All along the Dies Committee has reported itself as quite unable to lay hands on this fellow. But the moment Dies is in danger, he suddenly pops into view. That is partly explained, no doubt, by the obvious fact that charges of skullduggery between Dies and himself threaten damage to the cause of his own Silver Shirts. But does it not also suggest a great tenderness for Martin Dies? Is not that same tenderness strikingly evident in Coughlin's "Social Justice," Robert Rice Reynolds’s "Vindicator," and other American sheets of Fascist inclinations?

We are not saying, mind you, that the charge against Dies is true. As we say, we don't know. But we are saying that there is enough color of fact in the case to furnish solid ground for searching and dispassionate investigation.

The matter is of importance. That the Communists can ever pull a successful revolution in this country becomes every day increasingly unlikely. But there is good ground to fear Fascism, not in the form of naked Nazism, dominated by German crackpots like Kuhn, but masquerading under the form of American patrioteer organizations. There is good reason, indeed, to suspect that the foreign Nazis and the Reds here are rapidly drawing together to form a coalition for the undercover promotion of exactly that.

If Martin Dies has been maligned, if somebody is trying to smear him through spite or Red inclinations, then it ought to be demonstrated, and his traducers ought to be shown up and sent to jail if possible. If not, if he actually has Fascist sympathies, then surely the country is entitled to know. To set a man of Fascist sympathies to investigate Fascists would be quite as silly as setting a Red to investigate Reds.

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