The Charlotte News

Wednesday, April 17, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The boughs' ghosts bestride the glade, to whom Time and temper have not paid, Curtilaged by the rain, straining to see, stroke bounded chins, wondering at the sight before, the flash's raid. The pastoral enchanted to the sidereal lee of the post's door; the haunted riches' churned in neo-ignoble etchings' non-weatherly lost corps, lighted sinistrally in their cumbering fain. Frankly, it seems not to give, that which carries the lamb through æon's caress to live, she lying plaintively with child in the concave camber of the arbor's dripping bliss, a touch to infancy's forearm, and to the lens a gripping kiss.

All a chimpanzee's fuel rod, of latency's cruel dog, a capon-seized gruel fog, vacancy's rule rog, all aflame in a clenched thripping fist.

Shielded by space and float of the many, the ghoulish figures standing, sitting, entrancingly fitting amorphically amid plenty in the tangle of webs driven by the silken shadows cast long in the frontier vision of the free, who yet, mad foes, transgressed and gave it for a prison, a lock looking for a key, in the captured incisions within the caponiers stayed only by the trebuchet's tree in Lady-triptych's draining tress--to all who wander elliptically amid that fixe-frieze, or by trading ships' cryptic craning dress blowing full tilt at the bondsman's kyll-sickle sixth crise.

"Lordingis in le, I rede ye tent treuly to my teching."

Here is a strange little thing we ran across: We were perusing Kennedy: A Time Remembered, by Jacques Lowe, official White House photographer to President Kennedy, a book we have had in our library since it was first published in 1983. In it is some text we had never before read and of which we had never heard. It ascribes to Mrs. Johnson a note to President Johnson, when they were mutually deciding in early 1964 whether he would run for a full term as President after the conclusion of the unexpired term of President Kennedy. She told him, said the text, that she believed it would be wise to do so and then to serve, if elected, one term, then announce sometime in early 1968 his intention not to seek another, accomplishing as much as they could in the five years, leaving time thereafter for retirement to the ranch in Texas to enjoy his grandchildren.

It shoots a wide hole in the presidential historians' theories regarding the March, 1968 announcement not to seek the nomination, historians who most usually have either ascribed to Johnson a sort of Bolingbroken fatalistic self-doubt of his own policies, succumbing to the mounting war protest of the previous two years, the mounting criticism of a war which appeared un-winnable with daily increscent casualty figures, pretermitting his ability to foresee victory in 1968, or worse, a semi-Machiavellian eclipsed finally by his own too grasping ambitions and the operation of the Peter Principle, forcing him by captious ploy of the fates dosed by the ineptitude of his military commanders and his overriding sense of political reality to step aside.

It would appear instead a matter pre-ordained by the First Lady, a pre-ordination which, ironically, with the successive assassinations in April and June, would leave the void which enabled the foundling New Richard Nixon narrowly to defeat Hubert Humphrey amid a chaotic and quaking nation, split by the divide which Mr. Nixon always so voluptuously savoured and cultivated to his political accretion--and, ultimately, subsidence to the blood-muddied dins of history's alacrious, and unrelished, condemnation.

Perhaps, with 20-20 hindsight in store, the lesson for time is that it is unwise to lay plans too far ahead, for attempts at human pre-ordination, as often as not if not more, though true they may become, end in disaster for all--as Mr. Steinbeck foretold? Or, on another look, all a true plan, simply scattered into pieces by the wild winds of democracy's inevitable fitful stutter steps, to fall eventually back together again in the end to form a semi-perfect picture of peace finally achieved from a great society, even after all of its bumbling trips and pratfalls?

"Witch Hunt" slices down the hay to uncover the true motivational complex for the sort of mentality it discusses, a motivation which by its isolation as a variable, would become ever more apparent after the Cold War ended in 1989-91 and the "Communist" label ceased to be a bogey.

That of which the editorial speaks here would of course grow to epic proportions during the late 1940's and early 1950's, destroying numerous good lives in the process.

That which, with an ever-growing tendency since the end of the Cold War bogeys, is thought to be the other side of the coin, that of political correctness, is in fact just another form of the same phenomenon: attempts to limit speech, association, and thought, to the end of dividing the populace at large and distracting it from substantive issues, thereby enabling political power and booty to the megalomaniacal personalities impelling this disingenuous engine of constraint, in any of its many-guised feints.

The fact that some who practice that more recent form of dictatorial fascism think themselves "liberal" (or, in some cases, are merely conveniently so labeled by their antitheticals of the same stripe, the ones chasing the Afghan hound) does not change the quotient: that the ultimate aim in either mask is to become dominus factotum.

As to the "Difference" between the Nazi manner of empire and that of the United States: "The two cases have this difference (which no doubt seems slight to Nazis but which will scarcely seem so to ‘fair-minded Americans’): that the United States has never set out to murder and enslave a neighboring population by way of taking its lands for Americans."

While we would agree that, except in the most cynical view of matters, such remains a true statement, (excepting perhaps the Westward Ho expansion a la rebus sic stantibus vis à vis Native American populations in the 19th century, but you can't blame them for that as most of their pale faces could not read, let alone reflect), that of economic coercion and virtual economic enslavement of a foreign labor force, especially those of third world nations, to the relatively affluent will and whimsy of modern American material demand within the world's "free market", free as long as one has the scratch to play the roulette wheel, that is, has become increasingly, in didactic dialectic anyway, since World War II, the method by which America achieves empire around the globe, empire by economic, not political or physical, servitude.

But who wants to give up those cheap sneakers and moccasins from Indonesia?

Or the lead in the camouflaged paint on that Mattel Army truck from China?

Lick 'em, kid...

Liberals, Not Reds, Are The Real Game Here

When Dave Clark inveighs against the University of North Carolina as being a hotbed of Communism, there is of course no reason for alarm. What Dave means by a Communist is plain enough from his constant quotation of Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling's "The Red Network" and other works of imagination. In brief, it is anybody who stands to the left of Dave and Lizzie, both of whom are some 400 degrees right of farthest right.

However, when Martin Dies teams up with Dave to go to work on the University, along with other American colleges, it is about time we began to recognize that we are in danger of getting an American Inquisition.

For all we know, there may be an occasional outright Communist on the faculties of some American colleges. But if so, they amount to little save in their own imagination--are outvoted a hundred to one by the most solidly conservative professors. And it is anything but true that Communism is spreading rapidly in this country at present; it is in fact more unpopular than at any time in its career.

But of course it is not the actual Communists who are the real game. Martin Dies has long ago demonstrated that his definition of a Communist is identical with that of Dave and Mrs. Dilling--has even lent himself to smearing Mrs. Roosevelt as a Red. And the idea here actually is to capitalize on the popular indignation against Communism for the purpose of making it impossible for a man of the slightest liberality of view to hold a job on the faculty of the University and other American colleges.

Site Ed. Note: While on the subject of Mr. Clark and his Textile Bulletin, (née Southern Textile Bulletin), we have not forgotten our promise in the summer of 2006 to provide his editorial in which he branded Cash, sub rosa, a Sub Rosa Commm-mu-nist, for his having acquired such credentials at the Red-Inspired Moscow-on-McCorkle, the well-known haven for all anti-Nazis to sheen and sparkle, hence pro-Commm-mun-istic pressured, wrath-boned napes, Chapel Hill o' feen and schnorkel, the thresher's bathyscape.

Of course, Cash didn't get his Redness there lawly, as he never attended the place in rawly. Instead, as we previously pointed out, he achieved his Pinkery from the so-called Baptist-affiliated, yet mere louts, a Front for the Commm-u-nist Party, Wake Forest-on-the-Volga, Rudersheimer sprouts, (after all, sporting the color Black as one of its two emblematic colors, implying thus, plainly, orientation with the Schwarzvold, duller mainly, and other like demonic imagery, in its supposed excuse for scholarship which merely instead acted as a convenient bulwark behind which Marxian studies could flourish, Exhibit A being of course the free market of Cash himself through which other Commies may themselves nourish).

Well, decide on your own, individualistically, not the least communistically, about old Dave and his sub rosa editorial.

We cannot help but note that he complains about the editor and letter writer not signing their work and then not only does not sign his own editorials but also refuses, sub silentio, even to identify the Charlotte News, (later, a learning ground, of course, for the likes of Charles Kuralt, who went on, as we know, to CBS, the Communist-Bolshevik System, remembering that NBC, not to be outdone, originally had not only a Blue, but also a Red network, until they got wise in the 1950's and hid behind the peacock's half-met cirque), as the Communist rag responsible for this Red propaganda wave.

We offer up below a couple more samples of the chef d'école of Dave, as well, to provide you with a broader view of his efforts at exposing those whom would this plaidoyer embold, that is the Red Elliptical Menace Spell within the University and all other Red Mystical denizens.

We don't know whether someone, putting the two samples we offer together, culled then the phrase from them "Don't Mess with Texas", but we've seen many things which toy far less with our incredulity to be terribly and miserably amazed were it so.

This sort of thing, of course, Dave's style, continued well into the 1960's and 1970's. The Speaker Ban Law, passed by the North Carolina Legislature in 1963, for instance, prohibited on state-supported campuses any Communist-affiliated speaker (which eventually included banning a concert by Mr. Dylan). To get around it, at the urging of the Red-conspiring University Administration, speakers were sent to the sidewalk adjoining Franklin Street, just beyond the rock wall, the campestral border, as the students gathered in McCorkle Place to listen, thus not violating the ban at all. (Look closely some day as you pass that wall, and you will notice a little brass plaque on which is stated that the cherry trees, cherry trees which, if there are any, don't bear fruit, by God's Will no doubt, and which is obviously a subliminally naughty reference to the insistently mum musketeer nearby, were planted by the Class of 1928--just a year and a few months after the graduation of which, you will note, the Marxist Conspiracy began to undermine Capitalism, thus clearly demonstrating that the University, in obvious sympathetic combo with Cash, was plainly instrumental in engineering this undermining.)

Eventually, the ban was broken and, in consequence of that, predictably, all hell broke loose, bespoken, because when the whole country finally elects a Communist-sympathizer, what do you think you're going to get but Communists in every village and ville, even Hoboken?

And, so, after four years of that, finally, in 1972, the State turned away from its Red-leaning dins of iniquity's drat and chaos back to wholesomeness and high character, electing that great American, Jesse Helms, who led the State again to morality and high moral standards--and probably got the trains to run on time, also.

Whatever the case, Dave's publication lasted until 1971, when we ourselves matriculated into the Red bastion, eclipsed by the Sun, which, to hide its affiliation with Leningrad, had the audacity long ago to cull white and blue upon its various signs and insignias, no doubt, sub rosa, lasses and lads led, to imply, by omission, its true complement.

By omission, incidentally, we do not mean to leave, as if a fluke, lowly subsisting the Gothic intaglios of Duke, equally sneaky in darker blue, for its law school was where Mr. Iron but got some of his idées--the sharks were few, but sinister theirn cut. So, don't reeve slowly twisting loth trick imbroglios of cruke, but if you've ever had any anoint with alkalyzed Red Devil Lye, (rock it through a jamby), you will know why we choose to queue aside the mutcher curd and disappoint the Balkanized lead revile dry, (sock it to him, Sammy), a larder's fate in perversity--which is not the whole University to taint, by sed ferry land's ford, for it obtained eventually, rue straint, Red Terry Sanford.

In any event, we suspect that Dave ceased his publication, finally spent, only because his case was made conclusively at the time we entered, thus leaving him with nothing he need further argue on the matter to be finely, in his ague, centered.

To the Victor go the spoils.

Alas, poor Dave. We knew him well.

We are certain Dave was also quite well-pleased when he read, no doubt as floating on the seas which bled, in 1961 that President Kennedy had told the students at the University, gathering in Kenan to hear, that we would all neither be Red nor Dead in the world to come, looking upon it from the eyes of the seer.

Dave no doubt, in this, believed that the President had been reading Dave's own editorials, and from them achieved face and garnered his first wise proclamation of his young Presidency, thus making the point to the Red University, as it well deserved thusly to be put in its proper place as parted rune diversity.

Dave also probably cherished the notion, and felt from it great commonality, that he, like the President, had attended merely a small land grant college, and with finality, though perish the potion, for Dave preferred white cotton, not some bolled Crimson lokened, rather the pelt's summit rate of frugality, fat fee; Tantalus bends to drink of the fike's messy-rent rag, mended clearly 'spite the fall's fanned rant-effused rended spindlage cords in sheeted banality.

So here the editorial which begat it all from Dave, appearing June 30, 1938, printing for all to save, followed on by Cash's sub rosa July 3 reply, (see also "A Puzzled Fellow"), then Dave's July 14 rebuttal to that incautious eye, and, for special filler, his opining further on July 21, in fuzzled bellows, anent the CIO's democracy-killer, the brand of "Problem No. 1", and the University's Carol Septent Red-Cat Thriller Meadows, plus, for you students of history's pick compleat, last but least, his shilly, hum-dilly hyper-galactically perspicacious hand typing the August 11 one on Pappy's Victory via Hillbilly diaper-phylactically nurse-voracious Band Knick-Beat.

We may not like the attitude of Hitler and may think that we have a much better form of Government, but there is an old saying that "the proof of the pudding is the eating thereof."

We should be willing to face the facts and compare the accomplishments of Hitler plus Goering with those of Roosevelt plus Corcoran and Cohen.

The operating deficits of the six great powers since 1930 have been:

United States............................ $20,000,000,000
Great Britain................................ 2,500,000,000
Japan............................................ 2,000,000,000
France........................................... 2,000,000,000
Germany....................................... 1,500,000,000
Italy............................................... 1,000,000,000

Germany, operating with a deficit of $1,500,000,000, while the United States goes in the hole $20,000,000,000 and will add more this year, scores one for Hitler.

The unemployed in the United States are now estimated at 11,500,000, or slightly more than when Roosevelt began to spend immense funds as a sure cure for unemployment.

A recent report from Germany says:

We have built up a deficit of $20,000,000,000 and taught our people that the Government owes them a living.

Germany has spent $1,500,000,000 and finds so little unemployment and such a scarcity of workers that it is forced to enact a law under which it can draft labor and force the idle to work.

We may curse Hitler for some of the things he has done but it is embarrassing to compare progress in Germany under Hitler and Goering with progress in the United States under Roosevelt, Corcoran and Cohen.

Our editorial of June 30th entitled Hitler vs. Roosevelt brought forth two attacks, one in the form of an anonymous letter similar to many such letters we have received in the past, from persons who are unwilling to sign their names, and the other in the form of a long newspaper editorial written, we assume, by their subrosa editor, for, we are informed that they have such a person on their staff.

The subrosa editor in question acquired a leaning towards communism while at the University of North Carolina and naturally resented the suggestion that there was or could be anything good under Hitler.

We hold no brief for Hitler and condemn him for many of the things he has done, but to give "the devil his due" it does appear that, from an economic standpoint, Hitler and Goering have done better, in Germany, than Roosevelt, Corcoran and Cohen have in America.

The subrosa editor made no attempt to deny that our deficit of $20,000,000,000 since 1930 had not reduced the number of our employed [sic or not-sic?] or that we had taught a large group of people to depend upon Government assistance rather than upon themselves.

The subrosa editor contented himself with saying, although he took rather much space to say it, that maybe the German deficit was larger and conditions in Germany not as bad as published by Hitler.

We readily admit that such may be the case but if the German deficit since 1930 is ten times as much as represented and if the unemployed are ten times as numerous, the German picture is still much better than our own.

We are not defending Hitler or his practices but merely called attention to the fact that the extravagant waste of money in this country and the $20,000,000,000 deficit piled up since since [sic] 1930, have not greatly reduced unemployment.

Comparison are odious [sic], of course, and the one we made was especially odious to those persons who are inclined toward communism.

Site Ed. Note: Dave said that.

Say what thou willst, and if any measure of the public may deign to deem it true, then more likely than not, the cottoned frenzies will give you a shoe, or take them away to make you a shoeless wat; in which case kneel, for that to the temple which they shot, or the neck the rope behanged by sot, can scarce be felt, when thou art knelt in that which the lewis begot.

We said that.

We do not know who suggested to Franklin D. Roosevelt that he should declare the South to be Economic Problem No. 1 and appoint a commission to "make a report" nor do we know who suggested the appointment of Miss Lucy Mason, of the C. I. O, or President Frank Graham, of the University of North Carolina.

Some light, however, was thrown upon the subject when we noted that Lowell Mellett is director of the National Economic Conference which is to direct the work and, probably, the report of the Southern Economic Conference.

Lowell Mellett was editor of the Washington News, a Scripps-Howard newspaper with marked leanings toward communism and a habit of minimizing the radical activities of communists.

On October 19, 1929, in a rank and un-American editorial entitled "Courts, Communists and Common Sense," the Washington News said:

President Frank Graham was one of the sponsors of the Summer School of Moscow University in 1935 upon the grounds that a study of communism in Russia was a part of "academic freedom."

The next summer, however, he was one of forty educators who opposed permitting American athletes to attend the Olympic Games in Germany upon the grounds that, while there they might come in contact with the Nazis and learn something about that form of Government. President Graham lost his enthusiasm for academic freedom when it meant learning the beliefs of the enemies of communism.

With Lowell Mellett as director of the National Economic Council and Frank Graham as chairman of the subsidiary, the Southern Economic Council, and Miss Lucy Mason, of the Communistic C. I. O. as an assistant, the report can be written without the expense of any investigation.

The report upon the Economic Ills of the South will be written and filed away and the only good that it will ever do anyone will be to those who, in the future, wish to attack the South and cite as "Exhibit No. 1" or "Your Own Commission's Report" the document which has been laid away.

The report will be just about as truthful and fair as would be a Japanese report on need for the war in China.

Senator Logan, of Kentucky, although a Roosevelt supporter, said last week:

Much has been said in the press about the hillbilly band which accompanied Lee O'Daniel while a candidate for Governor of Texas, and credit for his defeating ten other candidates by receiving over half the votes in the first primary has been credited to the band.

The truth is that Lee O'Daniel won because he was not a demagogue and talked common sense.

"If I am elected Governor," he promised, "I shall call to Texas leading business men and successful men in all fields, including successful farmers and ranchmen, and I'll have them sit down around the table like a board of directors and work out a practical program for economic development for this great State, a program that will provide more jobs, and bring more wealth into existence in Texas."

"We can't legislate ourselves out of this depression," he declared. "We can only work our way out of it. Let's adopt a program of more and harder work in Texas, and maybe other States will get the idea."

It has been publicized throughout the country that he announced as his platform "the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule." That is true, but not in the sense that it has been generally interpreted. He did not put forward the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule as a program of legislation. What he said was that if he should be elected Governor he would take the Tend [sic] Commandments and the Golden Rule for his personal guidance in administering the affairs of the State Government and that he would apply sound business principles to the State's affairs, not the usual standards of the professional politician.

What he said in practically all his speeches was that what Texas needs is not a "division" of the wealth, but a "multiplication" of the wealth.

Site Ed. Note: "Pass the Biscuits" Pappy had learned from being a flour salesman that the business of government is business, you see. Just play the working man a few common tunes, let him know that you, too, are a Man of Constant Sorrow, and all would be well out on the range, as you plot to hold down his wages to 20 cents change, rather than the absurd minimum being sought by those radical Senators and Congressmen of the New Deal, 40 cents, 12 1/2 for a finny comely strange, against whom and which Dave would inveigh contemporaneously as a communist assault on the mill owners of the South's cud array.

Just sit 'em all down like a board of directors and dictate the resulting policy to the understrappers who voted on the basis of good banjo work, jingle-jangle clappers. Let the Golden Rule be done; as long as you don't kill, steal, or commit adultery, 'neath Apollo's Sun, or whether or not, having it ascribed to ye, in doing it, why, who's to complain?

Pass the biscuits...

Mmm-mmm. Goooo-ood.

This Nazi Argument Has A Glaring Flaw In It

Thus ran one of the arguments in the Nazi bellow against Mr. Roosevelt yesterday. It is, of course, a play to the more rabid isolationists, who have hitherto shown themselves more than eager to grab arguments offered by the Nazis.

But there is a sad and obvious hole in this one. The Nazi claim attempts to create the impression that Germany needs the lands around it for the same reason that America needed the lands taken from Mexico. That happens to have been in the colonization of the excess population in the older American states.

For that purpose, however, the United States seized only lands which had been very friendly or not at all populated until the American colonists came in, and then only after the Mexican Government had grossly broken faith with them.

The lands Hitler is seizing happened to be already populated by the densest population they can possibly support. And if they are to be made available for German colonization, then the Poles, the Norwegians, the Czechs, and so on must be slaughtered by the millions with the survivors being reduced to slavery. That this is exactly what Adolf Hitler is already in process of carrying out in Poland and Czechoslovakia we know. That he would carry it out in Norway, if he wins there, is to be confidently expected.

The two cases have this difference (which no doubt seems slight to Nazis but which will scarcely seem so to "fair-minded Americans"): that the United States has never set out to murder and enslave a neighboring population by way of taking its lands for Americans.

Figures Do Not Bear Out Charges Against Chains

Representative Poage, Democrat of Texas, tells the House Ways & Means Committee that "eventual governmental control of chain stores systems is inevitable if they are not curbed by such legislation as the Patman Bill"--a scheme, quite simply, to tax them out of business. He conceded, however, that chain stores reduced food prices to consumers and sometimes paid farmers more for their products, but warned that the "benefit is temporary" and would last only so long as the chain had competition in the form of the independent retail merchants.

That is to say, the chains ought to be destroyed because they threaten to get a monopoly of retail trade in the nation. But how real is that threat? Not real at all. Look at these figures (latest available) on the number of independent retail establishments and chain units in the United States.

In the first year noted, the proportion of the independent to chains was nearly ten to one. That proportion was maintained through the worst of the depression, by 1935 had grown to be well over ten to one. In the long pull, the number of independents was mounting, the number of chain units steadily falling.

Well, and how about sales? Here are the figures:

The independents, you observe, lost a greater proportion of sales in the Depression than the chains. But that was almost certainly less due to competition than to the fact that thousands of independents were too poorly financed to survive a time when credit was being rapidly constricted. And--in 1935 the independents were recovering their sales at a far more swift pace than the chains.

It looks a good deal less than a threat of monopoly to us.

While Tobacco Languishes, General Economy Profits

If the war in Europe has brought grief to the tobacco growers of the United States, by cutting off their English market, it has done the exact opposite for the cotton farmers and exports as a whole.

Cotton sales to Europe are up 135 per cent for the first six months of the war as compared with the same period a year ago. The United Kingdom took 14 per cent more than in the comparable period last year. And France took twice as much.

Altogether, cotton exports to Europe in the six months come to 23,500,000 bales, more than the total sales for the year which preceded the outbreak of war.

As for exports to Europe in general, they have increased 33 per cent in the six months. Besides cotton, aircraft, iron and steel, non-ferrous metals (copper, etc.), and lubricants have shown increases. Aircraft exports show the greatest increase, of course--having nearly tripled. And besides tobacco, grain, fruits, and automobiles have suffered a decline in shipments abroad.

Exports to Germany sank from $72,000,000 in the six months before war to $700,000, over a thousand per cent loss. But the increase in buying by England and France heavily outbalance it.

To sum up, the national economy as a whole is better off because of the war, for the present at least. The cotton farmer is a great deal better off. Worse off are the farmers of the middle West, the orchardists everywhere, the tobacco farmers of the South, Detroit.

Site Ed. Note: ...You've got to come in at the door."