The Charlotte News

Wednesday, January 18, 1939

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The piece on Mexico's official censorship of the American press leads one to wonder whether that program was continued in the next administration of the Cardenas hand-picked successor, Avila Camacho, who acceded to office at the end of 1940, and whether it might have been therefore that reason that the last piece written by Cash sometime in the last half of June, 1941, part of which was dryly, (albeit, under proper translation, wryly), critical of Mexico City's cops, never got into the mails. And whether it might have led to him being followed, and whether...

In the same mail, distastefully snuggling up to each other, came two letters, one from the Distilled Spirits Institute and the other from the Board of Temperance, Methodist Episcopal Church. Their printed content said, in which order one may easily guess,

Well, so it has been and so it is. But in this contrary Mecklenburg, now, we still have prohibition, with all its glaring evils, and we have a mighty drink bill, too, with no salvage of any profit for the relief of the taxpayers.

Hence, you see, our peculiar liquor system combines what is a bad feature according to the Distilled Spirits Institute and what is a bad feature according to be Methodists' Board of Temperance. And these two negatives make, we must concede, a positive--a positive paradise for the bootleggers.

Of all the million-and-six projects undertaken by the New Deal, the only two which Congress simply had to kill were Passamaquoddy and the Florida Ship Canal. A start was made on both of them, to be sure, by virtue of that temporary cession of Legislative authority to the Executive which has lasted now for some six years, but Congress finally got up the nerve to expressly eliminate these two from the blanket appropriation which it periodically hands over to administrative agencies.

Reasons, which seemed good enough to Congress after investigation and debate, were that a plant to make power from the enormous tidal flows at Passamaquoddy would have cost twice as much as a steam plant and had no market for its current anyhow, and that a canal across Florida would not have paid its way in fees or convenience and would have jeopardized the water supply which is vital to citrus-growing in the southern part of the state.

However, in a letter to the chairman of the House Rivers and Harbors Committee, the President has suggested the revival of these two projects, thus keeping immaculately clean the New Deal's record of never admitting a mistake.

The outlook for the Spanish Government is blacker today than it has ever been at any time in the past. The Italo-German-Insurgent forces are within 35 miles of Barcelona, the key industrial city of the land, with 500,000 trained soldiers against the Government's 400,000,--made up in part of untrained boys under eighteen--with artillery power (entirely Italian and German, of course) of six to one, and 800 Italian and German airplanes as against a mere handful for the Loyalists. And now France, at the insistence of Mr. Bumble who, for some inexplicable reason still seems to favor Italian-German victory, seems to have about decided to leave the Loyalists to their fate.

There is the possibility, of course, that Daladier may be overthrown and that a new French Government may yet act. And with the memory of the siege of Madrid before us, we cannot be absolutely certain that Franco will be able to take Barcelona for his masters. The position the Loyalists have now occupied lies in hilly and difficult country and behind fortifications that have been building for a year. Moreover, the men in these armies know that they may expect no mercy. Franco has explicitly promised to shoot all their leaders, and to force the rank-and-file "to cleanse themselves of their crimes" by long slavery in labor battalions. Therefore they may be expected to fight with grim determination, just as they fought at Madrid and are still fighting.

Nevertheless, the odds are plainly and overwhelmingly against them. Barcelona seems likely to fall--and if Barcelona falls--then that great noise, you hear, masters, is the rumbling of the beginning of the end of the British and French Empires. For it is as nearly certain as anything still locked in the future can be that if Barcelona falls, Spain will become merely a satrapy of the new Roman Empire. It is perfect nonsense, on the basis of the record, to suppose that Mussolini is going to get out of Spain once Franco is victorious. It is highly dubious to say, as is often said, that nobody can hold the Spaniards in subjection, that they will rebel and rebel and rebel. Fascism is a system cunningly devised to make rebellion virtually impossible, by concentrating overwhelming force in the hands of the governing group and using it unmercifully.

And with Spain in his hands, Mussolini, with the backing of Lord Hitler, will be absolute master of the Mediterranean. He will lie straight across France's road to Africa. And he will probably be able to block England out of the Mediterranean at will. And France cannot hold Africa under such conditions, as England cannot, in these days of rapid communication, hold her eastern empire if she has to go around by the Cape route to do it.

One thing that has characterized Governor Maybank of South Carolina as mayor of Charleston and chairman of South Carolina's TVA, the Santee-Cooper Authority, is a marvelous ability at getting great boons from the New Deal and an equally marvelous adaptability to the times of his own typically conservative policies. Charleston, for instance, got one of the first Federal slum-clearance projects, and it has got others since. Charleston's navy yard has echoed these many months to the sound of the riveting machines and the steel workers. (Remember that junket to Charleston at Azalea Festival Time of Vice-President Garner and a couple hundred other influential Washingtonians, all at Charleston's merry expanse?) Installment allotments by PWA to Santee-Cooper, while other projects had to await congressional appropriations, have brought the total sum available to $34,300,000, the full estimated cost of the undertaking.

Distinctly persona grata to the New Deal, Governor Maybank is going to be distinctly useful in that connection to his state. A sign of it is to be found in his inaugural address yesterday where he recommended to the Legislature that it wait to "see what Washington is going to do in the way of benefit payments" before it try to raise the money for the state public welfare needs.

Now it is Mexico which has joined the European Fascists and Communists in attempting to censor the press of the United States. All along the Governments of Russia, Germany and Italy have insisted on their right, not merely to regulate reports of facts sent out of their countries by American correspondents stationed there, but also to control the interpretation placed on those facts.

And now Mexico takes exactly the same position in giving Frank L. Kluckhorn of The New York Times 24 hours in which to leave the country. Kluckhorn's crime is simply that he has interpreted established facts about the seizure of American oil properties in a way the Mexican Government doesn't like.

Well, it is the right of the Mexican Government to send American newsmen out of Mexico if it likes, of course. But it isn't calculated to help relations between the two countries, at a time when the Cardenas regime is in desperate need of support from the United States. And, moreover, it won't at all achieve the end desired, as Mexico might see by glancing at the case of the Europeans. In the end, the American newsmen get the facts over all opposition. And all on earth the policy does is to discredit the position of the censoring government from the start--to brand every report issuing with its official approval as mere propaganda, and so to prejudice its case even when there might be some merit in it.

We have waked up to the content, other than the amount of money, of that relief appropriation bill the House has passed and sent over to the Senate. Besides reducing the damages by $150,000,000, it prohibits payment of relief to aliens, limits WPA wages in the various states and sections of the country to a 25 per cent differential, prohibits use of WPA funds for plants to compete with private industry, nullifies the President's order blanketing WPA's administrative employees under civil service, and, as a final flourish of sky-writing, forbids politics in relief.

This has the appearance of a real revolt against Executive dominance. Were the Senate to accept the views of the House and were the Congress to apply those views to other governmental agencies, the result probably would be:

1. The passage of the Reynolds-Starnes drastic anti-alien bill or one like it.

2. The curbing of Secretary Ickes in PWA and a flat reversal of the New Deal's competitive power policy.

3. The rejection of almost any reorganization bill proposed.

4. A fairly considerable reduction in the President's budget recommendations.

Verily, from this first sample of legislation, the Congressional mood would seem to be strongly self-assertive.