The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 25, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

But, you may ask, by whom?

If anybody would like to know why there is dishonesty and downright fraud in elections, he may look no further for an explanation than the Grand Jury's report on irregularities in the second Mecklenburg primary.

The County Election Board had done a bang-up job of investigation, not only to determine the rightful winner of the nomination for County Recorder but to turn over its findings to the State's prosecutor for whatever action was wanted. The prosecutor, after a considerable delay, submitted the report to the Grand Jury, and the Grand Jury yesterday, after another considerable delay, washed its hands of the whole messy business and observed sententiously that "no good can come from pursuing the matter further." The County Commissioners acquiesced in a jiffy.

Okay. Intent to defraud, we concede, would be hard to pin on anybody. At the same time, to make no effort is to countenance such misconduct of elections as the County Election Board described in its report as this, in part:

These could have been unintentional mistakes, but even if they weren't, officialdom simply isn't interested.

Lord Halifax had just told his audience at Edinburgh that "Britain, France, Soviet Russia and their allies could not have saved Czechoslovakia from destruction by the German army if war had started in Central Europe."

That is to say, the German army, with a possible strength of about 5,000,000 men is so potent that it could have defied armies with three or four times as many men, not to say the British and French navies, and at the same time so concentrated its force against the Czechoslovakian army, with 2,000,000 of the best trained and best armed soldiers in the world, as to destroy it within a few weeks. And the German air force is so invincible that it could have destroyed the cities of Czechoslovakia without the allies being able to do anything to make Germany less ruthless.

Lord Halifax is arguing of course, to the end of justifying the policies of the English Cabinet, to which he belongs. But doesn't Lord Halifax prove a little too much? What lies implicit in his argument is the assertion that Hitler was so strong that nobody can beat him, and that the only way to avoid disaster was to make a pact with him on what terms he chose. But if that was so a month ago, it is far more so today when Hitler's empire has been doubled. And if Germany's military might is invincible and the only way out is to give her whatever she demands, isn't it a little silly to bother with further "rearming"?

In Richmond F Meredith Dietz and August Dietz Jr., the Dietz Press, are reviving the Southern Literary Messenger, the most famous magazine ever published in Dixie.

Founded in 1834, the magazine survived until 1864. And in those years, it counted for a good deal. Among its editors were Matthew Fontaine Maury, credited with being the real discoverer of the modern science of physical geography; Dr. George W. Bagby, and J. R. Thompson. In its pages, too, appeared much of the work of William Gilmore Simms, the Old South's one great novelist; not to say that of Ik Marvel, still remembered for the "Reveries of a Bachelor"; John Esten Cooke, author of many sentimental novels, of which the best-remembered is "Surrey of Eagle's Nest"; and Phillip Pendleton Cooke, author of "Florence Vane" and the man to whom a typical Southern gentleman of the day addressed the revealing remark, "Why, do you waste your time on a damned thing like poetry? There is work for a man of your background to do!" [Meaning politics.]

But the great glory of the old magazine was its connection with Edgar Allen Poe. He served it as assistant editor through 1835-36, and was discharged eventually because of his loose habits. But he published some of his most important work in its pages, and that fact more than anything else has kept its memory green.

Well, we shall be glad to see the attempt to revive it made. The South, with a strongly marked regional pattern, has need of a magazine primarily devoted to it and offering a wider appeal than is possible to give her university quarterlies or the little magazines.

A simple denial seems to have been enough to clear Messrs. Littlejohn and Price of the allegation, totally unsupported by any evidence brought out in court yesterday, of attempted extortion. Indeed, Chief Littlejohn's long cross-examination by Defense Attorney Taylor was concerned with a number of extraneous matters touched upon only in passing but nonetheless pregnantly.

There was, for instance, mention by Mr. Taylor of Littlejohn's "working on" the City Council and the City Attorney in connection with Keith Beaty and the dime taxis. There was mention of an affidavit, which Littlejohn called false, submitted by a firm of lawyers to their client to sign. There was mention of a former policeman's serving on the jury in a damage suit against the dime-taxi company, and testimony by Littlejohn that this man's automobile, which he had used as a taxi in Spartanburg, had been prepared for service as a unit of the defendant dime-taxi company.

There was, unmistakably, much that struggled to the surface of the examination only to be left hanging without substantiation, refutation, explanation, clarification. At one point, something being said about "affidavits" which Littlejohn had in his possession, the witness declared that the proper place for those affidavits to be introduced was "in open court."

We put that in the form of a motion. Messrs. Littlejohn and Taylor evidently know something which the rest of us don't know, and since it inferentially involves the courts and the City administration, the public is entitled to be a party to the proceedings.

In Yadkin County Constable Arthur Matthews chased a bootlegger, who had 100 gallons of liquor and two young women in his car, for a distance of ten miles at a speed described by the dispatches as 90 miles an hour, caught up with him, crashed into him, and overturned both cars. Constable Matthews is dead. The two young women are in the hospital. And the bootlegger, believed to be dangerously wounded, has taken it on the lam.

Chasing bootleggers over the Yadkin roads at such speeds seems to have been the regular practice of Constable Matthews. Nor, of course, is it only Constable Matthews. Police officers everywhere make a general practice of roaring over the roads and through the streets in pursuit of bootleggers at speeds that far outrun the legal speed limit, and which endanger the lives of the peaceful citizens going innocently about their business.

Yet nothing ought to be plainer than that the cops have no right to violate one law in order to enforce another. The courts themselves have pronounced the automobile a deadly weapon. And to operate a police car on the public highways at 90 miles an hour is quite as criminal as though the cops took to shooting indiscriminately on those roads--and far more dangerous to the safety and happiness of us all than a hundred assorted bootleggers.