The Charlotte News

Thursday, July 29, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Dorothy Thompson begins this day a series of reports from England. Her first effort tells of the enduring, indomitable British stiff upper lip in the face of the jagged remains of homes and shops and the contrary of what one would have expected to be blasted nerves after enduring between September and May the first Blitz. Things, she reported, were not chaotic, rather substantially normal.

For Ms. Thompson, the metaphor for the equanimity displayed amid the wreckage was in a sign stating that a doll hospital had moved to a new location.

Yesterday...and Today.

OPA, Mr. Nixon's soon-to-be initial government employer, said buy bonds, not a new car or washing machine. Both choices would by early 1942 be made for the consumer by the government, as steel and rubber consumption, not to mention gas rationing, had to cease for the duration down to bare essentials. All was devoted to military production. No more new cars, no more new washing machines. The rust buckets would have to suffice; the clothesline would be full after the washboard was resurrected from the cellar. But the blood would be hard to wash out for many whose sons and husbands didn't return.

It was that, the war footing of the society, that which characterized the enemy, which the Administration had dutifully and assiduously sought for the previous three years to avoid, but now could no longer, as events were with celerity pressing the issue by the day, arithmetically, becoming spectral in its increasing evidence of what would soon be.

As to the fifth of the five numbered, labeled Quislings, by the letter writer, Mr. Cheek, perhaps he should have held his tongue where his name implied it best placed. For it was the case, of course, that this fifth person would sacrifice mightily to the war, first, his first-born son, nearly his second-born son--and finally, in some sense of extension of time well beyond that which was the temporal limit of that War, but nevertheless by its extension through time, yet would also even his second and third-born sons.

We trust in that, thus, that there was sufficient sacrifice to make up for any perceived lack of ingenuity in that which resulted at Munich three years earlier--that which we have stated before could hardly be laid to the fifth man's hand in any event, any more, at least, than it could have been laid to President Roosevelt himself.

For ambassadors do not make policy. They only do their best to maintain diplomacy abroad. That is their duty.

Munich resulted only from the principals involved in the contract, Mr. Chamberlain and Hitler. That America could have intervened and dictated terms to Britain, that it should not accept cession of the Sudeten territory to Germany, should instead go to war to prevent it, to send their sons again to the fields of Central Europe only 20 years after the Armistice, was, of course, the imagining folly of idiots, then and later. For to so insist meant, perforce, that America would likewise immediately have to commit troops and armament, or else stand as an arrogant third party urging, "Let's you and them fight"; unworthy any longer of the moniker "ally", an arrogance to have been perceived as the logical equivalent of labeling the Brits once again Perf. Alb., an arrogance that might have destroyed the alliance so cautiously, but firmly, built since 1914, following at least a century and a half of profound distrust, even detestation for the former Mother.

And, of course, in 1938, America was on the verge of a second depression in five years, hardly able to feed its own, let alone an army and navy four thousand miles away. Morale in the country was at its ebb since the Depression; it would have not been improved by an announcement of another war with Germany.

It is never quite so simple as it might appear to the Monday morning quarterbacks, the armchair generals, focusing on one issue through a microscope.

Mr. Cheek had his right to criticize, of course, and, especially with regard to Mr. Lindbergh, had it nearly right, as Mr. Lindbergh used his fame born of flying an airplane across an ocean to stir up essentially pro-Nazi sentiment in the country through mass rallies formed only to hear his master's voice preach platitudes to the idiots, though his right to do also, and before swine or darlings alike. Whether he was a quisling, consciously so, or merely a wrong-headed, short-sighted, not-too-bright gent, who was best performing as an adventuresome pilot, rather thickheadedly ill-tailored to the role as an eloquent statesman, is a puzzle of history which cannot be thoroughly understood, as only Lindbergh himself perhaps could glean his true motives? But, given the way he came to notoriety, it is likely that he thrived on notoriety, and the flash of the fuzzy-poppers accompanying it, more than anything else.

But the fifth man on the supposed team was not a player with the other four certainly, was not seen at mass rallies, or touring the country providing anti-Administration rhetoric for self-interested political hay--which, had he so chosen the role in the spring of 1940, might have been available to him. One would have to look not only to the other four, but to the likes of New York lawyer, John Foster Dulles, for that fifth player in the game. Then, you shall be given ticket to understand Quemoy and Matsu.

Indeed, the fifth man, as labeled by Mr. Cheek, had pointed out to Congress in January that a "decent peace" could not be had with Nazi Germany. That was precisely contrary to the Lindbergh line.

As to "Sidelight": Q.E.D.

As to the alcoholic red tape not down to proper form up river, we should have to wonder why they needed to put molasses in the hold. Perhaps, the answer lies here.

After awhile, it all begins to appear as O'Hara's Harry, spinning 'round aimlessly in one big house of mirrors.

Yet, if you try, you may fairly sort it all out--and not die trying in a sewer, shot in the back by Captain Bligh, to exert fingers through the oppressively heavy grate which is history, through the lens of time.

For whatever we might say of that which we read, it is never the functional equivalent of the Kindlifresserbrunnen, though kindly it may be and a fresher brun may come of it.

We would send a message, even unto the hills of Hispaniola, that the bank building has been stolen, and the safe deposit box is locked.