The Charlotte News

Friday, October 21, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Regarding "After You, Alphonse!" up the level of the election a bit from that of a mere party nomination for a House seat, change the names of the principals, drop down on the map a little further south, and voila! It's 62 years plus 18 days later, and counting.

"Not His Game" is the first time the editorial page made mention of the role of the Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, re Munich. Cash does not attempt to lay any blame on the Ambassador but rather suggests he was out of his element in dealing with the likes of Nazis. Mr. Kennedy had been involved in banking, shipbuilding, (the latter when FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Secretary Josephus Daniels during the Wilson years), and film production before coming into government service in 1934 as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1936, he was made head of the Maritime Commission, and was appointed as Ambassador in late 1937. Having thus been Ambassador for only a few months when the Pact was signed on September 29, 1938, it is a gross stretch of history which is often made, gaining greater currency with the 1960 campaign for the presidency than in any great storm of controversy of the time of Munich and its immediate aftermath, to lay blame for Munich at the door of Ambassador Kennedy. It suggests a role for ambassadors which has never in the history of the country been enjoyed, a sort of quasi-secretary of state. Never is voiced any of the same sort of carping over the roles of Ambassador Bullitt to France or Hugh Wilson, Ambassador to Germany, or, for that matter, that of Anthony Biddle, (who married the Duke fortune), Ambassador to Poland at the time of the Danzig-Corridor crisis which immediately led to the war.

For the time, the Ambassador to Great Britain did occupy a central role in diplomatic affairs in Europe obviously, amplified by the facts that trans-oceanic travel was cumbersome and limited, and the virtual absence, save in the Office of Naval Intelligence and a small portion of the F.B.I, of any official foreign intelligence gathering agency at the time, thus according the diplomatic corps the role of eyes and ears abroad for Washington. Nevertheless, to raise the position to the level of policy-maker and inventor of Munich, or even of a kind of independent facilitator thereof, is to stretch--primarily to fit the wick of subsequent history's political machinators--the facts beyond all bounds of reason and actual history of the day.

The architects of Munich were primarily Chamberlain, Hitler, Daladier and Mussolini, Hitler driving the horsemen. Whether even Roosevelt himself could have done much to change the inertia of the time, with the principals who would bear the primary loss and responsibility in fighting an ensuing war having reached, however unsatisfactory, an agreement over the Sudeten question, is doubtful. Indeed, had FDR thought he could have been so effective, he certainly could have made the journey himself or sent Cordell Hull. Thus, to lay any blame for Munich on an American Ambassador borders on the idiotic. Kennedy could do little but play peacemaker in his role, acquiescing to the official desires of the Chamberlain Government, then attempting to preserve the status quo to the extent possible, obviously receiving instruction in that regard from the Administration itself. The same would be true of Bullitt and Wilson, of course.

Indeed, playing more Cassandra than any excessive optimist over the product of Munich, in 1939, Kennedy predicted repeatedly that war with Germany would come before the end of that year.

Footnote: The Orizaba, mentioned in the article above as a ship bound to bring the passengers of the Athenia home, was the same ship from which poet Hart Crane, coming home in 1932 from his year in Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship, leaped to his death. And, so, since, as someone once said, poetry cleanses...

By Hart Crane

In Charleston a couple of bagging plants employing 400 and 45 persons have shut down. Reason given, in part in one case and solely in the other, is the wage-hour law, which goes into operation Monday. The proprietors of the two companies say they simply can't pay bagging workers a minimum of 25 cents an hour for 44 hours a week.

Well, maybe they can't. We don't know enough about the bagging business to have any ideas either way. But $11 a week with no perquisites on the side is not by any stretch of the imagination an excessive wage in manufacturing. It's better than no wage at all, of course, which is what the workers will be getting with the plants closed down, and it may be that the wage-hour law will bring a series of such suspensions.

We hope not, for that would defeat its purpose. But if it should turn out that way, why, it would show conclusively that wages are lower and hours longer than anybody suspected, and that the vaunted American standard of living actually needed reinforcement by statute.

In the AP report on the Supreme Court findings yesterday occurred the following passage:

If that's the law, it is just another proof that the law is sometimes an ass, and that it cries to be changed. About the facts in this case we know nothing at all. Apparently the jury in lower court agreed unanimously that the man was guilty as charged, for the law requires that such juries must agree unanimously for a verdict to be rendered. But it is also one of the oldest of maxims in the English law that a man must be presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And certainly, when half the Supreme Court (made up, in the nature of the case, of men far abler to decide the questions of fact and law involved than the men who make up any petty jury) are not convinced that he has been proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt--then, he hasn't been, that's all.

Thus, Cash probably points out a bitter irony in fact as a 3-3 split over whether there was an error of the magnitude warranting reversal suggests a sufficiently close case that it cried out for decision by the highest court of the state one way or the other, especially with 25 to 30 years hanging in the balance for the defendant.

The Washington Merry-Go-Round, which by and large doesn't particularly care for career diplomats, neglected to mention it. But it chalked up a clear victory in its report yesterday that Joseph P. Kennedy, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, kept telegraphing the State Department during the Czechoslovakian crisis that Britain meant business--the while William Christian Bullitt, Ambassador to Paris, held steadfastly to the assertion that Britain and France had no notion of doing anything but selling Czechoslovakia out.

Mr. Kennedy is an able and hard-headed man. And he has a great deal of experience in taking the measure of horse-traders and outwitting them at their own game. But, those horse-traders were, after all, the relatively innocent horse-traders of American business. And the horse-traders Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Bullitt were dealing with in this game were the champion horse-traders of the earth and, no doubt, the starry universe into the bargain--men trained to control over their words, their emotions, and their [indiscernible words] which makes any of Mr. Kennedy's old Wall Street opponents, or even an old-fashioned Mississippi River gambler look like the Ritz brothers playing Nervous Nellie. But Mr. Bullitt has been around the State Department since 1917, and most of those years he has been in Europe learning to read the faces of just these diplomatic horse-traders. And so the able and hard-headed Mr. Kennedy was taken in, and the able and hard-headed Mr. Bullitt wasn't.

Poor Joe. It is hardly fair to put a man down to play stud poker who knows only setback.

MR. DEANE: I'm elected.

MR. BURGIN: T'aint so. I want a recount.

ORIGINAL DAVIDSON ELECTION BOARD: On recount, Mr. Burgin wins.

MR. DEANE: T'aint so. I want a recount by the State Board.

STATE BOARD: By our count, Mr. Deane wins.

ORIGINAL DAVIDSON BOARD: We won't play that way. Our count or nothing.

STATE BOARD: You'll do what we say, or we'll get a new Davidson Board. Mr. Deane wins, and that is that.

MR. BURGIN: You can't do that to me. I'll appeal to the courts.

JUDGE W. C. HARRIS: Mr. Burgin wins, and the Davidson Board's count is the only legal one.

MR. DEANE: You can't do that to me. I'll appeal to the Supreme Court.

SUPREME COURT: The State Election Board has the right to review the findings of county boards. But as to whether Mr. Burgin or Mr. Deane wins--let Judge Harris answer that one.

JUDGE HARRIS: Well, now, and well--.

MESSRS. BURGIN AND DEANE: We'll get the Supreme Court to decide.

SUPREME COURT: We laid down the law. Let Judge Harris decide it.

All of which leaves us betting that a lot of people--important people in the Democratic Party--would just love it if Mr. Burgin and Mr. Deane climbed in a balloon and just kept on going into outer space, so nobody ever would have to make this decision.

The cheek of those Japs! How they manage to keep a straight face and their urbanity while committing the most outrageous audacities, is beyond an Occidental's comprehension.

Their intentions toward China are, of course, perfectly honorable. Their armed forces are engaged at the moment, and have been for more than a year now, only in saving China from the Red menace. That this entails the overrunning of the land, major battles with the whole of China's military strength, the bombing of cities and the killing of thousands of non-combatants is truly regrettable. So sorry. But China has got to be made safe for--well, for China, they insist.

In what looks to be slightly premature anticipation of that accomplishment, the cheeky little devils have issued a Who's Who In Japan. A Tokyo publishing house has solicited our order for the volume, sending along a sample page of biographies. And there on that page with Japanese insurance tycoons, ministers and generals is--

The nerve of it, to put this stooge Chinese official of China's stooge Provisional Government in Japan's Who's Who! It would serve him right if, as a condition of his eminence, they made him buy a dozen copies.

Senator Guffey says he didn't authorize his signature to that letter soliciting Democratic campaign contributions which went out to 270,000 WPA workers in Pennsylvania, and the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee says it can't find any evidence that he did. All the same, the committee holds that whoever uses the name of a Federal employee in soliciting other Federal employees has broken the Civil Service law against that very practice.

So far, so good. But what the Senators are going to do about it they have neglected to say. The trail leads unmistakably to Pennsylvania's State Democratic Committee, and the last thing the Administration wants in that doubtful state is further embarrassment for the embattled Democrats there, already under fire for various high crimes and misdemeanors.

And if nothing is done, it will not be the first time that the High Idealism extolled by the New Deal has compromised with political expediency. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the indictment of 62 persons in New Mexico for a variety of crimes against WPA came about solely because of the initiative of a Federal district judge. It was common rumor, he told the grand jury, that grafting had been going on for some time. Apparently the report had not reached either Messer Harry Hopkins or the Department of Justice.

Site Ed. Note: Time fades away...in the Southern Cross...all along the Lee Shore...