The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 30, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We know of a few in our midst who behave, more or less, as did Miss Lizzie, the Red Hunter. Their object may be of a different color these days, but the quest is ultimately the same. For, what they are hunting, of course, is only themselves, their own fears of what they are and are not, being the impetus, the defining difference between the prey and predator being their own desperately defined version of what is righteous and good versus what is impure and evil. We know of a few Miss Lizzies in our midst.

The bowling bowl came down the road...

"Return" offers a poetic picture in still life of a warm night long ago, much as had a similar night, two years earlier, suggested "Warm Night in February".

Look through any window...

The rest of the page is here.

Return

A Note On The First Warm Evening Of The Spring

It was perhaps not yet fully Spring though April was at hand and Spring sometimes came so early as February. But the rain which the morning would bring would be ushered in by thunder and would be warm and muggy, would give way for the sun quickly.

And in the evening before--the bowling balls clicked loudly through windows open for the first time since the passing of last Summer. The streets were full of people, walking--not hurriedly and only to go from one place to another, but saunteringly, pausing to look in every window.

Negro bootblacks whistled loudly and impressively at hypothetical persons down the street. Lanky youths broke suddenly into a gallop without apparent reason. Smaller boys moved about in companies, chattering, whistling, their hands in restless motion. Unescorted little high school girls proceeded now in pairs, their arms around one another's waist. The restaurants were empty save for an occasional detached male or a solitary couple drinking bock beer.

The automobiles slowed, their tires singing softly along the asphalt. People called out to each other as they passed, laughed with sudden and unaccountable high spirits.

And underneath all the stir and the sound, there was a silence. The faces of the young men and women were heavy and dreaming as they passed, and upon the faces of the older people there was a pensive shadow. It was as though the world waited, listening. And in the yard of the old house that was gone from Tryon Street, under the shadow of the great bare iron frame of the new hotel, an old, old pear tree was a white cloud. And it was as though it waited, listening, also.

Site Ed. Note: ...Amid the sounds of silence.

Roundabout

Congress Tries To Sabotage What It's Afraid To Kill

The "economy-minded" House this week passed an appropriations bill which exceeded the President's budget by $55,000,000, mainly to the purpose of greasing farmers in an election year.

At the same time, it put through two cuts which are particularly entertaining. One of them slashes $337,000 off the proposed appropriation for the National Labor Relations Board: the other $, 060,000 off the proposed appropriation for the Wage & Hour Administration.

Confessed purpose of this is to force the reduction of the staff of the NLRB, and at least to prevent the expansion of the staff of the WHA. Which is to say that the real purpose is to sabotage the Wagner Act and the Wage & Hour Act. So far as we know, there has been no evidence offered that the NLRB is overstaffed. And the WHA has been so hamstrung by want of funds from the beginning that its enforcement has been pretty largely a joke.

It is an excellent illustration of the way we are governed. Here we have a Congress which in large part, seems to yearn to be rid of the Wagner Act and the Wage & Hour Act. But apparently it is far from sure that the country in general feels that way, is very certain that powerful pressure groups don't feel that way--would move swiftly to punish any such repeal. And so it attempts to achieve the end by cutting off appropriations so as to justify the laws which it, as the primary lawmaking body, passed in the first place.

Definition

How The Nazis Interpret The Duties Of Neutrals

The Nazi Germans are steaming up now for a new demand on the neutrals.

Armed merchant ships, they are arguing, are warships and neutrals must treat them as such when they come into their ports, or be prepared to take the consequences, which German spokesmen intimate darkly will be highly unpleasant.

That is interesting as furnishing further light on the Nazi definition of neutrality.

Some international law authorities agree that an armed merchantman ought to be treated as a warship, on the ground that a weapon is obviously as well fitted for offense as defense and that nobody can draw the line between the two functions. It sounds logical, but the rule is not embodied in any of the agreements which make up the basis of international law.

On the other hand, it is one of the oldest and best-established of the principles of that law as it stands that a submarine is bound not to sink an armored merchantman without warning and provision for the safety of the crew. The world knows that Germany regularly violates that rule, sinks the unarmed ships not only of the Allies, but of neutrals, drowns their crews.

Definition by the Nazis, therefore, seems to be:

Neutrality--The giving up by neutrals of all their own rights under international law as against Nazi Germany, and the strict enforcement against the enemies of Nazi Germany, not only of the rules of that law as already agreed upon but also of all possible amendments to the rules which can serve Nazi Germany.

Growing Pains*

School System Constantly Running Short Of Space

Like any growing family, the Charlotte school system is up against the constant need of new space. It's something that a thriving community ought not to worry about, either. It would be time to worry if we didn't need new space. Ask Mr. Kuester.

A problem within the problem of keeping school facilities apace with the population is that brought about out by shifting residential areas. A school building in some older section of the city will have more rooms then it needs, for the reason that families have moved out to newer sections, which thus require new schools and almost immediately more rooms in these new schools.

Superintendent Harding cites Zeb Vance School in Third Ward as an example of this obsolescence. The area has become largely industrialized. Its families have pulled up stakes and gone where the air is cleaner.

So it is that the city never catches up with its shortage of schools, drawing out of the taxpayers the cry that the schools are always, always asking for more. It seems so, in truth, and it may be that the natural desire of parents that their children shall go to a newer, more fashionable school instead of to one where the young scholars come attired in denim, makes the problem more acute than it has to be.

But that's no more than a circumstance to the main, underlying process of growth, and the increasing investment in school plants that it requires. And the end is not in sight.

Run To Earth

A Lady Spots A Notable Red And Saves Republic

Lizzie is at it again. Lizzie is the lady who makes Reds sprout where no Reds grew before, by the simple device of applying the test: Does he agree with Lizzie? No? Then manifestly he is a Red.

In her private incarnation she is Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, author of the "Red Network," in which it is proved that everybody left of Herbert Hoover is in the pay of Moscow, and of "The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background," in which it is conclusively demonstrated that the real power in the Kremlin is the man in the White House and that Stalin is only a stooge.

Object of her tender intentions in her latest work, "Wanted--A Presidential Man on a White Horse," is the Hon. Thomas E. Dewey, the nemesis of Fritz Kuhn, no less. Thomas, it appears, has been an official sponsor of the Civil Liberties Union, and of course it is well known that all believers in civil liberties (the Civil Liberties Union exists to defend them) as defined in the Bill of Rights, are ipso facto, Communists. Worse, Thomas accepted the support of the American Labor Party, in addition to that of the Republicans, when he ran for Governor of New York. And it surely needs no demonstration that the word "labor" is equivalent to "Communism." Worse still, Thomas is a friend of Kenneth Simpson, New York Republican leader, who has dared to insinuate that he does not think that Herbert Hoover is the proper man to be elected President in 1940. That, of course, is well known to be the Moscow line.

And worst of all.

"Dewey's picture appeared in the Communist Party's "Daily Worker" when he ran as candidate for District Attorney...."

Which seems indisputably to add up to Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

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