The Charlotte News

Tuesday, March 19, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Turk Hedges" advocates that the Allies move to attack Italy, to take them out of the Nazi equation quickly, thereby securing the Balkans from Nazi incursion, alleviating the threat otherwise to Turkey, keeping it within the Allied camp, and opening the backdoor to attack Germany.

But did Chamberlain take the advice? He did not, and in rapid succession, the Netherlands, Belgium and France fell. The cliffs of Normandy were secure for the nonce by June, 1940. And the opportunity was lost to stanch the blood tide, entrenched then, with England preoccupied, after the evacuation from Dunkirk, with its mere survival for the five years to come.

To the Cooler.

Where obscurantism reigns;

Where Squire Hunters and Mis' Sallies don't deign to pass, in the land of perfection;

Where elections are never pained to last nor dared contested;

Where cave dwellers paint their midriffs blue and double-breasted;

Where all's pluperfect, except the goats not shrived nor trusted,

Whose rubble remains just over the hill crested, their lives forebusted.

Well, then, onward to the clockwork orange tournament...

The rest of the page is here.

Cooler

Little Ed Rivers Plainly Needs A Stay In It

Judge Deaver should take Little Ed Rivers up on his announcement. The judge has told him pretty plainly that he is going to put him in jail for contempt unless he quits using the militia to keep W. L. Miller out of the office to which Georgia courts have ruled he is legally entitled. But Little Ed says firmly that he intends to be Governor (i.e., take care) of Georgia until his term expires in 1941, even though he has to do it from jail.

It amounts to the contemptuous defiance of the power of the courts, and indeed of the sovereign authority of the United States. There is no insurrection or riot in Georgia. Rivers is admittedly using the militia for purely political purposes--to be exact, the keeping of Miller from becoming a candidate for the Governorship. The Georgia courts have repeatedly ordered him to desist from his illegal acts, the Federal Court has twice backed up that order with orders of its own.

And so Little Ed ought to be taken at his word. The judge should commit him and apologize to the court.

Little Ed is plainly over-excited to the point of having lost his perspective and acquired megalomania. And jails are admirably calculated for contemplation and the restoration of quiet to troubled minds. We feel quite positive that Little Ed would see things differently behind bars from the way he sees them while in front of them.

Squire Hunter

One Of The Last Of The Vanishing Patriarchs

With the death of Squire John Porter Hunter yesterday, one of the few remaining patriarchs in Mecklenburg County passed on. Patriarchs have gone out of style, for the most part. Not that men don't live as long or sometimes retain their full faculties as Squire Hunter retained his to the end of his four score and eight years.

Not that so much, as that families aren't so large and activities are more scattered. Squire Hunter had, for example, seven sons and two daughters to live after him, and 25 grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren to revere him. Hundreds of people in Mecklenburg County were kin to him and proud to claim it. His interests--magistrate (whence the "squire"), election registrar, tax lister, cotton ginner, wheat thresher, grist miller, saw miller, farmer--were diverse enough to require much looking after, and there again was a bond that held the males of the family together.

And so the Hunter place, the half-century-old home that Squire Hunter built, was always the center of the widening family circle, and the forces that held the circle together were the Squire and, until her death, Mis' Sallie, the wife and mother. Beyond that, a whole community held him in high and beloved regard, and will mourn that the days of the grand old man are ended.

Witch Hunt

The Logic Of This Attack Would Halt All Inquiry

The hue and cry against the New York City College's action in calling Dr. Bertrand Russell to a chair of mathematics is rapidly assuming the proportions of an organized movement. All sorts of persons who ought to know better are rushing to join Robert Rice Reynolds in the fight to bar the Englishman from the job--less on Robert's ground that the fellow is an alien, than on that of moral indignation.

Dr. Russell is pretty far left in his economic viewpoint. He has expressed some very advanced ideas about marriage and the sex relationship, and he is obviously not orthodox in his religious notions. But he is also one of the most brilliant, learned, and high-minded men in the world. He is so honest that he went to jail during the last war rather than compromise on his conviction that war is always idiotic and wrong. And his ideas on social matters represent a sincere attempt to find some solution for the growing chaos of our times.

Moreover, he is in no sense a propagandist. He has published his social ideas in very short books, incidentally to his primary preoccupation with mathematics and philosophy--and let it go at that. The notion that he will corrupt students at City College is pure idle nonsense. There is nothing corrupt about him in the first place, unless intellectual candor is corrupt. The whole movement is simply an attempt to set up the doctrine that anybody who says anything unconventional must be gagged--that students must hear nothing but the strictly orthodox. A doctrine which, if it had been successfully enforced through the centuries (it has always been advanced) would have us still living in caves, and painting our midriffs blue.

Turk Hedges

Allies Badly Need A Single Victory To Stop Stampede

The cumulative psychological effect of Adolf Hitler's lightning diplomatic moves in the last ten days is well shown by the fact that Turkey is reported to be flirting with Russia again. Turkey's ties with Russia cannot be strengthened, diplomats agree, without violating the terms of her agreement with the Allies. And in view of the extension of the Axis toward Moscow, it is easy to see that what her new move amounts to is really a feeler to find out what terms she can get for lining up with the Berlin-dominated bloc.

The great weakness of the Fabian tactics of the Chamberlain Government is at length fully revealed. Such tactics inevitably tend to make neutrals doubt the English-French strength altogether, and to stampede them into the Nazi camp when Adolf Hitler takes advantage of that feeling to stage a diplomatic coup.

Everything seems to be going. Scandinavia is now virtually in the Nazi bag. And with Mussolini lined up, the Balkans are ripe to fall there, also. Turkey is quite right in supposing that, in those circumstances, her present situation would be untenable.

What the Allies desperately need now seems, to the layman's eye at least, to be vigorous action moving swiftly toward an important victory. Such a victory on the diplomatic front now appears to be impossible, which leaves only the military front. And on the military front Italy is surely the most likely victim.

The Allies have every right to attack her. The whole attempt to wean Mussolini away from the Axis, the delay in invading the country, seem now to have been hopelessly wrong. The Italian has double-crossed them all along, and is now openly playing the game of the Nazi dictator.

Taking him to the cleaners ought to be a relatively easy job--one to be completed in six months at most. And if he were eliminated, the Balkans could probably be counted on to come hastily into the Allied camp, thus opening the way to give Nazi Germany its death blow from the rear.

The Judge

Music Union Sets Up To Be Orchestra Master

Leopold Stokowski, in his last season with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra (Dr. Stokowski's last appearances are becoming as numerous as those of the late Schumann-Heink or of Kirstin Flagstad), has got himself into trouble. He fired eight of his musicians because he judged, he said, it was necessary in order to maintain the high standards of the orchestra, which vies with the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic for the title of the best in the world. Regular Conductor Eugene Ormandy okays that action and viewpoint.

But the eight music-makers belong to the American Federation of Musicians, and so do Stokowski and Ormandy. And now the union plans to call the latter two on the carpet to explain why they should not be ordered to take the eight players back.

Oh, no, no, no, the union says it isn't trying to take over the conductors' prerogative of judging the ability of the orchestra members. Merely the reason given for firing them reflects on their "ability and employment opportunities."

But the distinction somehow escapes us. Apparently it is alright by the union for Dr. Stokowski and Mr. Ormandy to judge the abilities of the members of the orchestra, but it is all wrong for them to "reflect on their ability and earning capacity" by dismissing them without asking the union. Which would seem in practice to make the union, and not Dr. Stokowski and Mr. Ormandy, the authority which finally determines the makeup of the orchestra.

Site Ed. Note:


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