The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 16, 1941

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Emergency" explains the truistic quality of the Lindbergh statement at an America First rally in Des Moines, blaming the stirring of war sentiment on the British, the "Jewish", and Roosevelt. As the piece points out, such was true in the sense of stirring the will to fight the Nazi horde, each with self-preservatory interests as incentive. But, as for being the prime mover toward war in the first instance, Lindbergh conveniently omitted from his statement Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini. His sympathies wouldn't let him betray his Axis benefactors.

The beating of the war drum certainly didn't originate with the British, Roosevelt campaigning in 1940 on the kept promise of not going to war save from a direct attack on U.S. soil, or Jews first herded into ghettoes, then by the wholesale being shipped away and placed in concentration camps in Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia, to labor for the Reich until extermination or starvation became the order of the day.

The argument might be made with a degree of plausibility that the appeasement policy of the Chamberlain Government at Munich in September, 1938 contributed substantially to Hitler's resolve that he could invade Poland a year later without the British declaring war, and thus in that respect, albeit inadvertently, stimulated war. Indeed, the wealthy and influential Cliveden Set, a prime publishing force promulgating what became the Chamberlain appeasement policy, were pro-Hitler from the start, thinking Hitler the answer to the threat of Communism, leading in part by that steerage class sentiment the British down the wavy ways which culminated in Munich, in another part based on the desire to avoid another war with Germany, with the memory of the trenches of twenty years earlier still too fresh.

But this argument was quite the converse of what Lindbergh had in mind; indeed, the appeasers were simpatico with his own rhetoric regarding the stabilization which he argued Hitler would bring to Europe with respect to the Communists. He was speaking of the present British Government under Churchill and Eden as the warmongers, not the former Chamberlain Government.

Lindbergh, while not intrinsically dumb on a common plane, neither was very well educated, and his exiguities in this regard showed more than he realized, except to the equally smart, those worshipping his celebrity for the sake of it without a little whit of understanding of the implications of his verbiage.

One could make the argument that the Firsters, with Lindbergh as its figurehead, cost huge numbers of American lives in the long run. For if America had entered the war directly, shortly after the Russian invasion, Germany might have been susceptible to being overrun with far less resistance than in 1944-45, when the cost in blood was high among the Allies, some 77,000 lost in the Battle of the Bulge, the merciless wintry triangle formed by the Meuse, the Mosel, and the Rhine.

Had the Allied assault instead come in 1941, assuming the unlikely notion that an AEF could have been physically assembled and adequately trained, sufficiently coordinated with the British, for such an expedition in such short order before winter weather, Hitler would have been forced to pull back large portions of his panzer divisions in Russia, with the consequence that the Soviet army might have pounded what was left to dust and pushed forward then into Germany from the east, creating a pincer on Berlin, not dissimilar to what transpired in spring, 1945?

And had that occurred in 1941, then most likely the attack on Pearl Harbor would never have come, as the Japanese would not have had the temerity, solely on their own initiative, without the goading of the Reich and its large coterie of spies by then in Tokyo, to undertake the move south in the Pacific? And thus no cause would have existed to hit Pearl Harbor?

One could plausibly make the arguments. But of course, those argument carry as assumption first that the attack on Pearl Harbor would have not come just as it did, if not sooner, had America entered the shooting war, say, in early July, 1941. For the Japanese did not move south and bomb Pearl solely on their own resolve, but as part of their commitment to the triplice with Germany and Italy, partly out of fear that the German move into Russia could end with the Reich taking over Japan, partly in repayment to Germany for invading Russia, always playing the Bear to Japan's Tiger, the one holding the other in check in the Pacific. The need of the Reich for the invasion in the Pacific to distract American and British interests would have been even greater had the Americans joined the effort of the British before Pearl Harbor.

Thus, one cannot easily stress one piece on the board apart from the others in assessing the impact of a delayed U.S. effort, and assume that all the other pieces would be thus held in the same position as they occurred without the others. Moreover, the argument assumes that it was primarily the Firsters who hamstrung the government commitment to war. The argument is far more plausible when their efforts are juxtaposed to delayed aid to Britain as opposed to actual troop commitment. The reluctance to enter a shooting war was obviously as great in 1938 in the U.S. as it was in Britain, and for the same reasons, not cowardice, but war weariness, plus the previous decade of economic weakness concomitantly fortifying resolve not to build war machines tending to encourage war by their very being with the lack of societal ability to do so. That plus the while remaining faithful to democratic ideals and the harsh remonstrances of the Founders against the maintenance of standing armies, had afforded the sufficient inertial influence against such a state, at least without bringing it to be on the same feudalistic model as Hitler and Japan had done, that of dragging all of society into a military array by dictatorial mandate--indeed, that of necessity which was starting to happen, albeit being dragged kicking and fighting against it, to both Britain and America by 1940-41.

The Hugh Johnson piece mentions, by way of instructing on dissimilarities between 1941 and Lincoln's attempt via suspension of habeas corpus to silence Southern-sympathizers who encouraged desertion among the Federals during the Civil War, the Vallandigham case on which we recently commented, along with Vallandigham's sister, In re Merryman, in conjunction with "Old Stuff", September 8, 1940. As mentioned, the Supreme Court side-stepped in Vallandigham the issue of the authority of the President, rather than Congress, to suspend habeas corpus, by ruling that the Court had no right, based on the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789, to review the verdict of a military tribunal.

The earlier case in 1861 of Merryman, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney--the same of 1857 Dred Scott infamy, upholding fugitive slave laws mandating the return of runaways to their Southern masters even though found in free territory, holding slaves essentially to be chattel as any other common personalty and thus not entitled to protections of the Bill of Rights as citizens in the usual sense but rather protected as property of slaveowners under Fifth Amendment Due Process--had held that the Congress had exclusive right to suspend habeas corpus, as the power is found in Section 9 of Article I of the Constitution, the Article dealing exclusively with Congressional powers, albeit those expressed as exclusive powers being enumerated only in Section 8.

Nevertheless, Lincoln successfully argued directly to Congress in the wake of Merryman that he had inherent emergency power, with Congress out of session and a plain case at hand of rebellion imperiling the public safety, to invoke in April, 1861 Section 9, silent as to its rightful invocation by either the Congress or the Executive, viz., "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Johnson distinguishes this perilous state of affairs during the outbreak of the Civil War and that extant in 1941 in the country, with the regular America First rallies being led by Lindbergh and his Bundist cohorts. He blames instead in part Secretary of War Stimson and the Administration generally for flagging morale among aimless army recruits.

Johnson, a lawyer as well as professional soldier by training, was a firm believer in the First Amendment, and on that point we wholly join him always. But the heart of the morale problem was likely not what had become his old nemesis from having worked too closely within in the early days of the New Deal, that of what he considered a new-school and haphazard approach of the the Administration to building armies, but rather that which always besets a democracy whose citizens are being suddenly and involuntarily plucked from the relative comfort of family and job or school into the grindery to be trained as sharp-sword soldiers, to learn to fight or die for country and honor. It is a difficult concept to sell in any time, as pointed out by Johnson, even during the Civil War itself, when men were dying by the thousands in the civilian backyards of the countryside throughout Virginia and into Maryland, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia.

War itself, we posit, is the cause of low morale in the country when it rears its ugly head. Nothing more, nothing less.

But did Lindbergh contribute to the low morale and urge it on, slowing the war effort, especially with regard to aid to Britain, costing thereby tens of thousands of American lives? It is only a point for debate. The 50 million lives, all gone during World War II at the behest ultimately of Hitler and his Nazi chieftains, cannot be returned. Undoubtedly, however, a part of the sloth in supplying full aid to Britain was the result of intransigent beliefs on the part of some Americans that not only did Hitler act as a bulwark to Communism, but also in a not always silent support for his anti-Semitic policies.

Incidentally, returning to yesterday a moment, we are reminded of the gent who plummeted, circa 1979, the complete length from the top of the elevator shaft, some 55 stories, inside the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco--and lived to tell about it. He wasn't, in his case, searching out a restroom, as Mr. Huey in Charlotte; rather, he told the rescue workers that he thought he could fly. Since he survived with only two broken legs, perhaps he was right.

In any event we are further reminded by "Shogun Trove" of yesterday that Ka is the spirit part of the human being, according to ancient Egyptian conceptualizations. So, perhaps Hidemori Kawhara was either made up as a ghostly shade of pale meant to turn cartwheels across the floor and worry the daylights out of the American press to shuttlecock the government into giving into renewed trade, without Chinese and Indochinese concessions, all before Hidemori could strike gold from the straight shot through the left eye of the ivory Bessop hostel on Sullivan's Island, by means of the Scarabaeus dangling plumb from the seventh branch, and thereby restore the Japanese treasury to a state of runneth overflow; or, perhaps Hidemori misrelied on his grandfather's tall tales of treasure hidden in hell. Whatever the case, the fliers' and diggers' deeds through skeletal remains for national reserve, we think it wise to avoid, at least in any literal sense.

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