The Charlotte News

Friday, April 12, 1940

FOUR EDITORIALS

Or, maybe he was courting the heavy family values votes among the syphilitics begetting other syphilitics if they could.

As for Mrs. Dilling's search for the "Presidential Man on the White Horse", no doubt, should she have lived so long, she would have eventually found One. Only he was Red. That is, the Horse.

From this date, 79 years earlier, the Civil War had commenced within the volatility of the cavemen afloat in Charleston Harbor.

Five years hence, President Roosevelt would suddenly collapse in his study at Warm Springs, Georgia, dead of a stroke at age 63.

Once, in July, 1968, we were in a restaurant in Atlanta named Pittypat’s Porch, after the character in the novel. There was a piano player providing a moody place among his 88’s for everyone’s note. We were there with our papa and some others. Our papa was about four decades older than ourselves and thus possessed of a clearer memory of time of the 1940's than ourselves.

Suddenly, as we sat listening to the moody piece from the piano, our papa indicated enthusiastically that he recognized this piano player there in Pittypat's Porch; he was, said our papa, none other than Graham Jackson.

The name didn’t ring a bell.

Our papa, however, knew that Mr. Jackson was the gentleman who had tearfully played accordion, captured forever in the memorable photograph appearing contemporaneously in Life, as President Roosevelt’s body was transported from the so-called Little White House in Warm Springs to the awaiting train for the long trip to Hyde Park via Washington. Mr. Jackson, by then a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy, had played piano for the President at Warm Springs on several occasions during the previous decade. Once explained to us by our papa that Mr. Jackson was that accordion player, we then knew who the piano player there in Pittypat’s Porch was, having been touched before ourselves, though displaced in time from it, by that memorable photograph in Life.

Our papa wanted his autograph and a momentary chat with him, and so we went with him to obtain Mr. Jackson’s autograph which he obligingly provided upon a souvenir menu of the restaurant, styled as an old-fashioned manual porch fan.

He was a jovial gentleman who appreciated our papa’s story regarding the touching and indelible memory imparted by having heard him on radio playing his accordion that day of mixed emotions, elation at the approach of war’s end as the Allies were poised to take Berlin, broken by the stunning news that the President who had seen the nation through twelve years of travail was now gone home, in April, 1945.

A few days later, we took a visit over to Warm Springs and toured the Little White House ourselves.

We still have it somewhere, that old-fashioned manual porch fan with Mr. Jackson’s autograph from July, 1968, somewhere at home. We haven't seen it in awhile. We shall try to dig it out one of these days and show it to you, maybe on one of these hot July days when an old-fashioned manual porch fan might become useful.

Is That Which Goes To S. C. To Escape Examination

Here doesn't come the bride. In the first three months of last year, 73 Negro couples took out licenses to wed. In the first three months of this year, the happy pairs were only five.

The explanation of so great a drop in Cupid's trade is the marriage law passed by the 1939 Legislature, requiring medical certificates of freedom from venereal diseases and tuberculosis. And it doesn't mean, necessarily, that business has fallen off because applicants can't pass their examination. Rather, the trouble is with the expense of it.

It costs a couple so much to get the certificates that they find it cheaper to go to South Carolina, or perhaps in some cases simply not bother with a ceremony.

Nevertheless, it's a good law. It only needs holding onto for a while. The Legislature, to be sure, or local governments, may find it necessary to make the required examinations available at a price that the impecunious trade can afford, and South Carolina by all means ought look to its own laws and revoke the privilege it now extends to syphilitics, for a small fee, to marry and beget other little syphilitics in their image, if they can.

Farley Makes It Plain He'll Stick To Party

It was by no means an insignificant thing Jim Farley said to a News reporter at Statesville:

It seems to be a conclusive answer to the question of whether or not Farley will bolt if Mr. Roosevelt is renominated for a third term and accepts.

There never has been much reasonable doubt about it, for that matter. The Farley record said all too plainly that Farley wouldn't bolt, regardless of how unpalatable he found such a nomination.

But the wishful thinkers have busily been raising the question all the same. Farley, they have been saying, was getting together with Jack Garner, the Texas Bearcat, in a plan to head off a third term even if it meant the splitting of the Democratic Party. Jim, they have said, is so worried about the danger of abandoning the third term precedent that he will turn against the party rather than stand for it.

What Mr. Farley said seems to knock all that into a cocked hat. For if it meant anything, it meant that he was going to support the party candidate, regardless of whether it was Roosevelt or Jim Farley or Cordell Hull or who have you.

We Present Our Apologies For An Under-Estimation

We seem to owe Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling an apology for grossly underestimating her powers as a Red-hunter. Looking through her latest bulletin, "Wanted--A Presidential Man on a White Horse," and observing that she had demonstrated that Thomas E. Dewey was a Red by the conclusive evidence that he once got his picture printed in the Daily Worker, we leaped to the conclusion that one such giant panda was a full day's bag. But, reading further, we perceive we had done her a grave injustice. Thus:

William Allen White, the Kansas editor; Henry A. Wallace; Harold Ickes; Mrs. Roosevelt; Everett Saltonstall, multi-millionaire Governor of Massachusetts; Rep. Bruce Barton; Senator Thomas; Neville Miller, president of the American Ass'n of Broadcasters; Stanley High; Theodore Roosevelt Jr.; Carl Sandburg; Bishop F. J. Connell; Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford; Robert Hutchins, president of Chicago University; Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick; and Frank Porter Graham--all these are Reds, beyond dispute, because they all serve as sponsors of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But not even that is the full limit of Lizzy's bag. Would you have believed that Arthur Vandenberg was a Red? Well, Lizzy proves it incontestably by citing the fact that his picture appears in the American Hebrew as a member of the Hebrew Medal Judging Commission, along with the following notorious Reds: President Roosevelt, Mayor La Guardia, William Allen White, Bernard Baruch, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Professor John Dewey, Bishop McConnell, and George Gordon Battle.

And if that is not enough, then Robert Taft himself is a Red! The proof is clear and unmistakable. He acts as attorney for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in Cincinnati; he served as a member of President Roosevelt's (italics are Lizzy's) commission which "tried to mediate the strikes in Little Steel in 1937"; he served another commission which "tried to mediate the Toledo Autolite strikes." And "Together With Maurice Sugar (caps and italics are Lizzy's), noted labor attorney, he will handle all the legal matters of the union."

For our part, we always did suspect Herbert Hoover.

Allies Face A Desperate Race Against Time

The claims of Mr. Churchill and M. Reynaud, to the effect that the British and French navies sunk some eighteen German ships since the beginning of the attack on Norway--perhaps with the assistance of the Norwegian Navy and Norwegian land batteries--may be taken as approximately true. Or at least, it is reasonable to assume that they believe them to be true.

But when analyzed down, the score of eighteen vessels by no means indicates a decisive victory. Four heavy cruisers is a great loss for Germany, for she had only six or seven, but it falls short of crippling the Nazi Navy. And if the British got eight transports in the Skagerrak and Kattegat, at least five of the same convoy appeared to have got away and to have landed 20,000 troops at Oslo. Moreover, it seems that the transports which were sunk must have been the smaller ones, since the number of Nazis drowned is placed at only 5,000. Swedish fishermen rescued some of the Nazis, of course, but it is not probable that they could have rescued thousands.

Nevertheless, it does appear likely that the Nazis are growing doubtful about their ability to maintain passage along the route through the Kattegat. The British claim to have laid mine fields in it, and while the Nazis vociferously deny that and insist that their ships are passing to Norway with clockwork regularity, last night the Nazi radio continuously denounced Sweden in the most vicious terms.

That sounds very much as those Sweden is about to be invaded by way of furnishing a covered passage to Norway and insuring the German iron supply.

Sweden says she will fight. But that is probable only if she feels pretty confident that the British and French will get aid to her in time. Hence the Allies seem to have little time left in which to get around to storming one of the western Norwegian ports and landing an expeditionary force.

The Allies may well be faced with a crisis in the Balkans, too. It was not only Sweden which the Nazi radio denounced last night, but Rumania and Yugoslavia. So a thrust into these countries over Hungary is quite possible, perhaps with the active participation of Opportunist Mussolini, a treacherous customer if ever there was one.

The loud Allied announcement that they are unprepared to meet such a threat is puzzling. It would seem to be the normal thing to attempt to bluff off the Nazis from such an invasion by setting up the doctrine that they (the Allies) were amply ready to repel it. The announcement may be intended as a trap. If so, it is a clumsy one. And may actually be a candid admission by way of warning the world not to expect too much.

To sum up, the Allies have had the best of it this week, but they have not yet had sufficiently the best of it to overcome the time factor which is certainly on the side of Hitler.