The Charlotte News

Monday, September 25, 1939

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The reference in "Millard Returns" to "the great man's visit to Charlotte's Green Pastures" refers not to Millard Tydings but to Roosevelt's December, 1938 swing through North Carolina which included speeches both in Charlotte and in Woollen Gymnasium on the campus of the University in Chapel Hill. In 1965, Cash's first biographer, Joseph Morrison, a professor of journalism and history at the University, took issue with Mary's, Cash's wife, recollections of attending a Roosevelt speech with Cash at a Charlotte ballpark from which she recounted that Cash had a rousing good time cheering the President. Morrison could find no record of the event, only that of an earlier speech by Roosevelt in Charlotte some time before Mary had met Cash in the spring of 1938. She was therefore forced to recant, assuming she had the event confused in her memory, and that it was someone else with whom she attended. Apparently, not so.

Incidentally, Tydings would later chair the Senate sub-committee which ultimately brought to censure and ruin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. A month before the censure in December, 1954, however, and three months after the Tydings sub-committee hearings which led to it, Tydings was defeated for re-election.

Roll over Beethoven…

Greek-Americans

They Make An Impressive Showing In Good Citizenship

Impressive is the word for that section in Sunday's News which was devoted to the Greek colonies in Charlotte and surrounding territory. It gave something of their immense history which slightly ante-dates that of the country of their adoption, their business successes, their religion, which they nurture: and their good citizenship.

A community within a community, the Greeks appear to have the quality of amalgamating themselves with the country of their adoption while retaining their own Graeco-American identity. They are seldom absorbed but rather combine in their own polite and whole-hearted way.

And since every last one of them was at some time or other an immigrant and an alien, we propose that the Greek section in Sunday's News be made required reading for Senator R. R. Reynolds, the man who makes political capital out of everything less than 100 per cent American.

Nazi Trap

Into Which The Aryan Myth Has Led Them

Among the chief victims of the Nazi pogroms have been the Jewish doctors. The "Aryan" medical gentry of Germany looked with great jealousy upon their success, claim that they were hogging the field--a claim which the figures disproved. "Aryan" medical students claimed Jewish students were crowding everybody else out of the medical schools--again in defiance of the figures.

So the Nazis closed them out, confiscated their property, hounded them into concentration camps to clean latrines, decreed that they could practice only by special permission, that Jewish students could study medicine only by special permission--which they never got. More than 3,000 of the Jewish doctors succeeded in fleeing the country.

Already before the war, Germany was beginning to feel the consequences. Disease was increasing, particularly syphilis, favored by the Nazi's encouragement of violation of the sex code in order to increase population. According to official figures, two-thirds of the men examined for the army last year were afflicted with it. Desperately, the Nazis sought to remedy the lack of doctors--by cutting the time spent in medical school half in two and by other such devices.

Then the war came. Last week the casualty trains were rolling into Berlin, each carrying 5,000 wounded. But only a corporal's guard of doctors and nurses was available for each train.

In Antwerp, Belgium, appeared an official German appeal, calling on "all doctors of German nationality regardless of race" to return at once to the Reich. All would be forgiven, their property would be restored to the last penny, etc., etc. But not a Jew moved to go back for there before their eyes was the plain record of the case of the Nazi word

German soldiers faced a grim prospect. Many thousands of the wounded who otherwise would get well were doomed to die for the lack of adequate medical attendants. And there was nothing the Nazis could do about it--nothing. For two years of training is not enough to make a doctor fit to cope with the wounds of modern war.

Long ago a Jew wrote it in an old book:

Vengeance is mine: sayeth the Lord.

Millard Returns

The Roosevelt Luck Brings Maryland Back To The Union

Senator Tydings' expostulations to a group of Maryland voters--mostly women and organize causists--who accosted him in a set Senate corridor and demanded that he vote against repeal of the arms embargo, were notable (1) as an illustration of the changes that come over politicians when foreign dangers threaten, and (2) for rich expression, probably colloquial to the Eastern Shore.

"I don't care for hell and a brown mule," the unpurged Maryland Senator shouted; "I'm going to do what I think is right. There are many things about President Roosevelt I don't like, but I'm not going out and talk about him on this issue."

So far as politics is concerned, the famed Roosevelt luck is still holding, as this little by-play shows. When the last Congress shut up shop and went home, it was plain to see that the President had lost the control which distinguished previous sessions. The tide had turned full against him. In the last year and a half of his term, he faced the anti-climactic disappointment that is the lot of most two-term Presidents.

But much as the rainbow broke through the clouds on the great man's visit to Charlotte's Green Pastures, so war repaired all breaches and soothed all wounds. Not, mind you, that he would have had it so under any circumstances, but only that destiny seems to be eternally watchful of its fair-haired child.

Wagner Man

An English Town Begins The Old Silly Round

In England it has already begun. At the old Channel town of Hastings, known to every schoolboy as the scene of the landing of William the Conqueror in 1066 and now a rather quiet watering place, the municipal orchestra has banned the works of Wagner from its programs for the season which opened this week.

The conductor confesses that "the wholesale banning of German music would be absurd," promises that Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn will be played. But, he says,

"Wagnerian music is a prototype of Nazi aggression. It is heavy and militant and reminds one of Hitler, who, incidentally, is a great admirer of Wagner."

But that also is absurd. In his life on this earth, Richard Wagner was about as unpleasant an animal as ever disgraced the human form. And from what is known of his ideas it is safe to say that if he were alive today, he'd be shouting in the van of the Nazi gang. But it was the ironic jest of the gods to endow this greasy fellow with a great genius which was over and beyond himself and all his dirty little notions. To say that Siegfried's Rhine Journey or Wotan's Farewell or the Magic Fire Music or that Siegfried Idyll or the great Preludes to the First and Third Acts of Lohengrin or the Venusburg or the Tannhauser Overture--to say that these and many others are the prototype of Nazism is to talk the veriest nonsense. They are the essence of all magnificence and all gloom. But if that makes them Nazi it makes the Third and Fifth Symphonies of great old Beethoven, who was a democrat when it was dangerous to be one, Nazi also.

If the German people have gone back into barbarism, that is a great tragedy for the world as well as the German people. But, however much it may be true that they must be dealt with as barbarians now, that does not at all constitute a reason why we should not continue to enjoy the great contributions that they have made to civilization--contributions of which the greatest is their music--and music in which Richard Wagner's by no means takes the least part--music so high and splendid that not even the admiration of Adolf Hitler can avail to sully it.


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