The Charlotte News

Monday, September 22, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Raymond Clapper's piece of this date suggests that many of the isolationists were beginning to modify their positions and at least favor increased aid to Britain as the President now sought to add six billion dollars for Lend-Lease to the already appropriated seven billion in March. Among those named was then Congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois, future minority leader in the Senate in the 1960's. (We are reminded, too, from Dorothy Thompson's piece of Friday to make correction to our former assumption that the suggested policy of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, instead of offering aid to Britain or Russia, came from Senator Bennett Champ Clark; its champion was instead Senator D. Worth Clark, another isolationist.)

A letter to the editor follows up on a letter written a few days earlier by arch-Firster Nell Dixon Russell of Clement Avenue, a regular letter writer to The News since at least the spring, incessantly in praise of Lindbergh, who wrote this time that the highest illiteracy in the country, that of the South, seemed to correlate with the most gung-ho militarism. The responsive letter of this date takes the attitude that if stupidity equates with being opposed to Hitler, then more stupidity was needed.

We think it not to have been very stupid to have opposed the aggression of the Axis by late 1941 and thus to have favored complete intervention to stop it; yet Lindbergh continued to draw large crowds of enthusiasts to his solidly intellectual and erudite denunciation of war, that the "Jewish", among others, were behind the war cry. Perhaps he meant what he said, in an adjectival sense, that is, that it wasn't that such a great number of the interventionists were necessarily actually Jews but rather that they were Jewish by virtue of their being interventionists.

In any event, we don't think more stupidity or more bellicose attitudes are needed in the South or anywhere else. But in 1941, the sensible thing to do was to fight or be vanquished by the Nazi storm. The world, however, has not been confronted by any such scenario since--except arguably during the mid to late October days of 1962. Then, to avoid the fight to end all fights, a middle ground of active diplomacy, diplomacy with teeth, was adopted. Sometimes since, we have forgotten the lessons of that time.

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