The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 18, 1939

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "A Betrayal" reports on a problem still very much with us today, the uneasy relationship between the modern Jewish state of Israel and the Arab Muslims in Palestine, out of which its 8,000 square miles were carved in 1948. "Nobody can live with the Arab," asserts Cash. While obvious hyperbole, certainly the history of the last 65 years would not readily dispute the statement, at least in certain pockets of the Arab world. There are of course notable exceptions. States such as Jordan which have modernized their societies without despotism in the bargain beg the question as to why so many others continue to insist on destroying themselves in order to destroy their perceived enemy over proclaimed ancient rights to land--much as Hitler proclaimed in stomping through Europe.

But then there are some un-reconstructed Southerners who are still fighting the Civil War. So perhaps therein lies, if not the explanation, at least the trait which motivates. Fanaticism over anything, we hear it said and so believe, is a vice, not a virtue. For it leads to a closed mind which thus cannot see or hear or, ultimately, even feel.

Speaking of which, this comes to our desk in May, 2005. In the mountain community of Waynesville, N.C., a Baptist preacher has ordered all members of his church to support the current President or else be stricken from the church rolls. After a few were removed, to the credit of the flock, forty quit, and, we understand that another 55,949,907, or at least 144,000, are on their way out the door. This strikes us as a new version of separation of church and state: separate the church from any recognizable state of reality by proclaiming it an arm of the executive branch of the Federal government. Ah well, we all know that Jesus preached that anyone daring to criticize the rule of Augustus and Herod was to be banished to the wilderness. We read that somewhere. If memory serves, it may have been in the available-only-in-Philistinian-and-sanskrit Book of Mammon, a little known addition to the Apocrypha, discovered in 1860 by Hu Sez Weir Sein down in the coastal plain of South Carolina, around Folly Beach.

After A Long Delay, FDR Names A First-Rate Judge For South Carolina

For a year a live issue in South Carolina has been the appointment of the successor to the late Federal Judge J. Lyles Glenn. After the President had taken a hand in the Seceders' Senatorial primary--and a review of the file recalls what an astonishingly strong hand he took--and after the voters had burned his candidate down, it was freely predicted that he would console Governor Olin Johnston with the judgeship. Washington Merry-Go-Round, for example, reported last September that he was seriously considering it.

The nomination of Governor Johnston would undoubtedly have affronted a considerable number of South Carolinians, including many of his supporters who were bound to admit that he possessed neither the temperament nor the experience for so exalted a place. It would have convicted the President of playing politics with the Federal judiciary, and it would have estranged Senator Byrnes. What it would have done to Cotton Ed we fear even to imagine.

But, if such retaliation were in the President's mind, time and probably the influence of Attorney General Murphy have overcome it. To the Senate goes the name of Alva M. Lumpkin, a Columbia attorney, former president of the state bar, and apparently the sort of man who is all a judge should be.

In The Lewis Carroll Atmosphere Of The Cotton Situation We Discover One Certain Thing Only

The other day a report came out of Texas that a cotton broker down that way had contracted to import 5,000 bales of Brazilian cotton into these states, and that the stuff was already on the way. That naturally fluttered the dove-cotes considerably seeing that the United States Government has on hand in its warehouses nearly 12,000,000 bales of cotton on which it has made loans, and which it is desperately exercised about somehow getting rid of. And so we hear now that the cotton never really got into Galveston, after all, but somehow got "diverted." Still, pretty good rumor has it that the stuff was actually ordered and might have come through if the storm signals had not got up in time.

But why on earth should anybody be wanting to buy cotton from Brazil? For this reason: that there is very little "free cotton"--that is, cotton which may be purchased in the open market--available to meet the demand of the mills. Anyhow, that is the account of the case the buyers themselves give, and they bolster it by pointing to the fact that the mills of the South held in their warehouses at the end of April only 1,087,001 bales, with monthly consumption running to nearly half that figure.

And what about those nearly 12,000,000 bales, then? The cotton is frozen, as it were. The Government has made loans on it on the basis of 8.3 cents as a minimum "fair price." Yesterday the average spot price quoted by ten Southern markets was 9.15. But meantime the cotton deposited in the warehouses has run up carrying charges. So the farmers had developed no enthusiasm for selling. Only the luckless wight who for one reason or another has to sell seems to be taking that price. But now, to overcome that the mills have sometimes been paying a premium as high as 150 to 200 points over and above the quoted spot prices. And still there appears to be no developing rush on the part of the farmers to get their cotton out of hock and realize on it. Maybe because the proffered premium has merely sharpened their appetites--made them think cannily that if only they wait there will be more. Maybe because they still place great hopes on assorted medicine-makers in Washington. Maybe for some other reason.

Meantime, in Washington said medicine-makers busily cook up new magic brews for getting the stored cotton moving before the next crop comes roaring in to make matters worse. One scheme proposes an export subsidy, so as to get the cotton in the hands of foreign mills--and that, of course, is only a scheme to give part of the cotton away to those mills, and hence has the mills on this side terrified over the prospect of having to compete with imports so cheap that they can't possibly prevail against them. Then there is another scheme which proposes to swap off the cotton for rubber and tin from Britain, which isn't quite so bad but which certainly doesn't promise to raise cotton prices--which is presumably the end in view. As for raising those prices further, the mills are howling in anguish that at the very time they are already having to pay premiums to get cotton, the price of their goods are down to 1933 levels. And--yes--looking longingly at that Brazilian stuff.

It is all, you see, somewhat dizzying to look at. And for ourselves we are able to decide on only one thing positively. We always did wonder what realm that might be that King Cotton rules over. And we think we know now. Obviously it is Cloud-Cuckoo-Town.

England Sweeps Aside All Considerations Save Those Of Her Danger

The Jews in Palestine have good ground when they charge that England has betrayed them. The wisdom of the attempt to set up a Zionist state there has always been more than questionable. For the land had been under Mohameddan rule for more than twelve centuries, and it ought to have been manifest in the beginning that the only way it could possibly work was to remove the Arabs in toto--something England was very reasonably unwilling to undertake. Nobody can live with the Arab--one of the most unpleasant barbarians of the world, as anyone may see by reading Charles M. Doughty's "Arabia Deserta."

Nevertheless, the fact does remain that the thing was undertaken at the explicit invitation of Balfour, and was contemplated in the very terms of the mandate. And no pompous sophisms and "white papers" can change the fact that England has gone back on her promises, that the Jew has been led to enter Palestine in the expectation of protection and that now he is to be handed over to the tender mercies of a foe beside whom Adolf Hitler is a chivalrous gentleman.

Still, it is not impossible to feel sympathy for England in the case, too. The action is simply another confession of how uneasy--even terrified--the British Government now is: how thoroughly it understands the danger of destruction into which it has jockeyed the British Empire by its course during the last several years. We have seen many such confessions lately. The very presence of the King and Queen of England on American soil is one. The action in banning the listing of American stocks by London dealers, to the end of halting the flight of gold to America--an action which much more thoroughly violates English tradition than the President's gold embargo of 1933 violated American tradition--is another. For it is to admit that England feels the war is so imminent that she must at any cost keep her hands on every dollar which is needed at home.

And if England yesterday decided to brave the wrath of the Jews and the recriminations of the world for breaking her promises, she did it simply because she felt that her position is so precarious that it is imperative to do everything in her power, regardless of price, to conciliate the Moslem world, flinging eastward from Morocco and Algeria, to India and Malaya--to bind it to herself and France.