The Charlotte News

Wednesday, February 19, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

"Hon. Game" and "A Handicap" amply demonstrate, when considered, why it is such an absurd notion, which ultra-revisionist historians belabor still, that somehow Roosevelt deliberately left Pearl Harbor vulnerable in hopes that the Japanese would attack and that American public opinion would be thereby galvanized to action. If Roosevelt had wanted to stimulate aggression by either Nazi Germany or Japan, or both, he would not have needed to leave American forces anywhere vulnerable. There were plenty of opportunities to undertake action which could have stimulated counter-action. But Roosevelt had promised in 1940 that he would not commit American forces to battle short of direct attack on the United States or its territories. It is evident from history that he genuinely did not want to commit the country to war.

What Cash, no hawk himself, had trouble with, and indeed, what the Administration had trouble with, was not so much that the isolationists in Congress were opposed to committing troops to Europe and the Pacific in support of the Allies, but rather the fact that the isolationists were hell-bent on maintaining a see no evil, hear no evil approach to international relations, a strict neutrality, without providing aid, or providing insufficient aid, to Great Britain, which would have virtually assured in time a Nazi victory, the idea that they had no quarrel with Hitler and saw his victory in Europe as inconsequential to the United States.

But as to Roosevelt having allowed Pearl Harbor to occur, or in some way to have provoked it, it is so absurd in the premises as to be little worthy of consideration. Analysis of historical events as they transpired in 1941, renders the notion patently illogical. For starters, had the entire fleet been wiped out at Pearl, which could have happened but for fortuities that morning, fortuities well beyond the control of Roosevelt, the country would have been in perilous straits indeed. Insuring its immediate defeat would not have been a sound way to drag the country into war.

They Emulate the Quality That Caused France's Fall

If you want to locate almost any past president of the national or state Young Democrats, all you've got to do is to scan the governmental pay roll. Ever since Tyre Taylor, Max Gardner's secretary, cut himself up this organization of the imitative and aspiring politicians, held together not by the idealism of youth but by an appetite for pap, high office in it has been a springboard to a paying job.

Tyre showed the way.

The boys caught on, and as time passes they are becoming even more aggressive in demanding their full share of spoils for political services rendered. In substantiation there is reproduced below an excerpt from a letter written by Ralph Gardner, state president of the YD's, to all U.S. Senators and Representatives in Congress and to Governor Broughton

That's pretty bold. And for the prospects of a democracy whose festering sore is plain old pork politics with its pap and perquisites, it's pretty bad. France fell because in part it was a nation made vulnerable by the corruption of its politicians, and while there is nothing essentially corrupt about this bid of the Young Democrats for jobs, it discloses somewhat the same attitude toward political service. An attitude, that is, of what's in it for us?

But Mitchell's Views Were Far From Wholly Right

The resolution of Representative McCormick, Democrat of Massachusetts, to exonerate the late Col. Billy Mitchell is, in one aspect, simple justice.

It would, however, be exceedingly unfortunate if exoneration at this time could be taken by the public as a complete endorsement of his views. He was everlastingly right when he insisted that the United States was perilously neglecting air power. But he was as wrong as wrong could be when he said, on Armistice Day in 1921, that airplanes costing no more than one destroyer could destroy any battleship which threatened us.

Like all air zealots, including Lindbergh, he failed utterly to comprehend the meaning of sea power. And the failure to understand it is responsible for the deadly isolationist fallacy which divides the Republic today.

The South understand these things better than the rest of the nation, for Vicksburg is a far more significant name in the downfall of the Confederacy than Gettysburg, and it was the blockade which made Sherman's March eventually possible. The Middle Western mind seems unable to grasp that or any of the implications of sea power at all. It would be a tragedy if the vindication of Mitchell gave impetus to its belief that control of the sea lanes doesn't really matter.

For Which The Hon. Suckers Will Not Be Lacking

The wily little Japanese brown man has discovered the current Axis game with respect to the United States and has taken it up with enthusiasm. It is, of course, the playing of the isolationist-appeasement sentiment with unctuous arguments and the furnishings of the Burton Wheelers with ammunition.

Thus we find Koh Ishii, director of the Cabinet Information Bureau, complaining in a sad and suffering voice that Japan is upset about the warlike preparations of Britain and the United States.

He neglects to say that these warlike preparations consist of Britain's mining the entrance of her own possession of Singapore and closing the harbors of her own possession, Borneo, to Japanese ships, and the overhauling of United States warships at the United States' own base at Pearl Harbor, 4,000 miles away from Japan.

And he neglects to say also that the reason for all that is precisely that Japan is concentrating a battle fleet at Saigon, in obvious preparation for an attempt to seize British Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.

Final reductio ad absurdum is his plaint that his country has been encircled by the Dutch East Indies, Britain, Australia, and the United States! Neither Australia nor the Indies has any navy worth speaking of. Britain has only a few cruisers at Singapore. The United States fleet could never get into striking range of the Japanese Fleet unless that fleet entered upon the proposed aggression.

Which Robs Warnings From Washington of Their Force

Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles sums up the whole absurdity of the Japanese cackle in saying that the United States would judge the purposes of nations by their deeds rather than by words.

The speech is undoubtedly meant as a warning as the Far Eastern case grows more menacing and the Australian soldiers pour into Singapore to take up the defense of the Malay Peninsula, by which overland route Japan may attack simultaneously with her attack from the sea.

But it is one of the weaknesses of our form of government that the warning must be largely ineffective. There is only one warning which could be really convincing to the Japs--a flat announcement that if she moves upon Singapore and the Dutch East Indies she will have to fight the United States Navy, coupled with the Navy's taking up position for action.

If that could be given, it is virtually certain that she would not move, for the cool heads in Tokyo and afloat know that the odds are long they would mean the destruction of Japan's power.

In theory such a warning can be given even within the strict frame of the Constitution--through a joint resolution of Congress authorizing the President to make it. In practice what would happen would be an exhibition by Burt Wheeler, Ham Fish & Co. which would tear the country wide open and delay the decision until it was too late.

The only practical way for the warning to be issued is for the President to take the bull by the horns and do it on his own account as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy. But if he did, the uproar in Congress and the nation would dwarf anything we have yet seen, might actually beget an attempt to impeach him--would certainly give every encouragement to the Japanese to go right ahead.

It is a handicap under which no other important government in the world has to operate. It has cost us blood and treasure and tears before now. And it may yet be fatal to us.