The Charlotte News

Friday, October 28, 1938

FOUR EDITORIALS

Also from the page today:

(Roanoke Times)

Helen Claire, Alabama-born and an alumna of Randolph-Macon Women's College (according to The New York World-Telegram) is employing her Southern accent to advantage in her current role in the new Broadway hit, "Kiss the Boys Goodbye." Asked by an interviewer to express her opinion of Southern men, Miss Claire replied, "There were a couple of Southern boys up here a few weeks ago and, oh, they were so polite. A girl couldn't open the door for herself. It was wonderful--for a couple of hours. And then I realized that they weren't talking about anything interesting. It's great being carried around on a silver platter, but after a while it gets to be a bore."

There's real meat in that comment, it seems to us. Southern men may not care particularly for the implication that their conversation isn't interesting to an intelligent young woman but they should be honest enough to ask themselves whether the statement isn't a true one. The manners of the young men of the South are probably several points above those of Northern young men. When it comes to chivalrous deportment in the presence of women, your true Southerner is in a class all by himself. But "being carried around on a silver platter," as Miss Claire expresses it, although highly enjoyable at first, is apt to become boring after awhile.

It pleases the girls to have the men open doors for them and take off their hats in an elevator when a woman enters. But if the men can't discuss questions of the day in an interesting manner, it is just a matter of time until a smart girl has difficulty in repressing an inclination to yawn. Think it over, fellows.

And seeming to answer Miss Claire and the writer, from yesterday's News, this from Billy Arthur, well-known from his days as a U.N.C. cheerleader, before becoming a newspaperman, sometime writer, sometime photo-journalist, eventual owner of a newspaper near Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C., as the troops went to war:

(Billy Arthur, New Bern Tribune)

There was a suspicious looking bottle atop Sheriff R. B. Lane's desk in the Courthouse yesterday.

The bottle was filled with a brown fluid and was labeled. Several times I inquired what it was, but the sheriff never got around to telling me.

Finally I asked why it was up there, and he replied:

Someday, we may think of an answer ourselves for the Alabama-born lassie and the writer, but just now, we have some doors to open, have to remove our hat, snuff our cigar, and primp a little, and thus haven't the time or curious inclination to think of anything at all the least little bit interesting to say. Besides, having become so caught up in the lady's deep thoughts on the subject, we got lost and befuddled. Besides, we got to go clean our monkey wrench set. Got six different sizes, all nicely chromed, fifty-three sockets for the ratchet, too. And, well, watching someone yawn in your face is always very interesting of itself, don't ye think? Besides, ye seem to be talking to several men at once anyway and therefore your hands appear to be mighty full. Ya'll take care, now. And, hey: Roll Tide!

Now, on second thought, before you go, we did think of something mighty interesting to say, here. Wait just a minute, till we get the gumption to say it the way we mean to say it. Let's see now, how did it go? Oh, yeah. When we were in college back there aways ourselves, there was a fella who lived on our dorm hall, away way up on the fourth floor. It was an old dorm, with dormer windas. Nice fella he was, too. Well, one of our fella dorm fellas had a roommate from up in the mountains, way on up there, who was, shall we say, a little effeminate. Started getting on everyone's nerves, he was so effeminate. Felt like you had to kind of turn your back in certain locales, if you know what we mean. Well, this nice fella there, he decided to have himself a little fun. So, he took the effeminate fella's wine bottle, emptied that whole bottle right out. He then replaced its contents. And, he sat back and he waited a few days. A few days later, all that rich wine replacement--well it was all drunk up and gone. We all had the best laugh. Thank ye, now, ma'am. Oh, let me get that door for ye.

There is positively no chance that the indictment could be made Tuesday, but if we were old folks in California who had supported Mr. Sheridan Downey for the Democratic Senatorial nomination in consideration of his promise to give us $30 Every Thursday, and if Mr. Sheridan Downey then made his peace with the New Deal, whose proprietor had placed $30 Every Thursday in the "lunatic fringe," thus unmistakably indicating that he was preparing to junk the glittering scheme that had got him nominated, why, we would prosecute Mr. Sheridan Downey for obtaining votes under false pretense.

It would serve him exactly right. It would serve him righter still if the $30-Every-Thursday man was snowed under on the preceding Tuesday.

It wasn't the interest rate, though 2.07% was a record low, which chiefly distinguished the sale of $4,620,000 in North Carolina bonds yesterday. It was that for the first time in the history of the state a major issue was taken in its entirety by a North Carolina securities house and placed in its entirety with ten North Carolina banks, two of them in Charlotte.

In yesterday's News, properly front-paged, was a digest of an article in the current Fortune which called the South the nation's No. 1 Economic Opportunity, in contradistinction to the President's interest in it as the No. 1 Economic Problem. Fortune cited statistics to show that industrially the South had been gaining on the rest of the nation, North Carolina most rapidly of all. But what Fortune didn't say was that most of the South's recent industrial expansion was contrived by--

1. Outside capital

2. Outside technologists

There is a difference, of course, between financing industry and financing governments, but there is a similarity, too, in that both take money. And if North Carolina capital has finally expanded to the point where it can finance its State Government, why, that represents progress, and may mean that the state is closing up the gap between the two descriptions of it as opportunity and problem.

There is small comfort for friends of civil liberty in the opinion of Federal Judge William Clark delivered at Newark, New Jersey, yesterday. On the contrary, it looks like one of the worst attacks yet made by any American court on those liberties. It did, indeed, declare that the CIO had a perfect right to enter Boss Hague's private preserve of Jersey City. But it went on and

Apply that principle in Jersey City, and you simply give Hague a perfectly free hand. For it is a part of his methods that no speaker to whom he objects ever does appear in Jersey without "resulting disturbances." Boss Hague and his gang see to that. Before the coming of a speaker like Norman Thomas or Representative O'Connor or any CIO leader, mass meetings are held, gangs of hoodlums are organized and got ready precisely for the creating of "resulting disturbances."

Inciting to riot when there is imminent and real prospect of riot is an abuse of free speech which may reasonably be curbed--though even the prohibition of that is often flagrantly abused. But there is no excuse for any other restriction. And whoever proposes it is in fact, and regardless of what he himself may think, proposing exactly to destroy free speech--which, in the nature of the case, must be genuinely free, or cease to exist.

The American note to Japan may serve to keep the record straight, but that it is going to have any practical effect is highly improbable. The simple fact is that it is almost certainly too late for that. Had the United States and Great Britain made plain in the beginning that they would take a firm stand if China were invaded, it is possible that the conquest would not have been undertaken. On the other hand, it is possible that it would have been, for Japan was well aware of Britain's troubles in Europe. And the United States is known for its isolation.

In any case, Japan has taken China now, so far as controlling her ports and industrial areas goes. And there is no use for us to keep pretending. If we could not deter Japan a year ago, we have infinitely less chance of doing so now that she has acquired the resources of China. She is reported as preparing to "play a strong hand" and tell us, along with Britain and France, that all her privileges and concessions in China have been abolished, and that hereafter that country is to be purely a Japanese preserve. And even if she temperizes and still gives us polite assurances, the practical result is the same.

The Americans, the British, and the French are washed up in China, and the quicker we write it off and turn our attention to more pressing concerns closer home, the better it will be all around.

One of those concerns nearer home is the news that Mexico has contracted with Italy for the sale of the oil from the expropriated properties of American and British companies. For this probably heralds an intensive drive on the part of the Fascist powers to bring our next door neighbor definitely within the Berlin-Rome orbit.

What it is more, that effort probably stands a good chance of succeeding. Mexico in its present phase is usually described as Communistic, or at least as moving toward Communism. But it is not Soviet Russian Communism which is growing up there, but the old primitive Communism of the Aztecs and the Mayas. That is to say, it is a Communism which has none of the ideological hatred of Fascism that distinguishes Soviet Communism. And between the Communistic pattern as such and the Fascist pattern as such, there is little fundamental difference.

The Mexican masses have never been fully civilized; and they have the tribal docility of barbarians; and they love barbaric show. And all that fits exactly with the Fascist pattern. More still, there are already powerful Fascist elements in the country to serve as a nucleus for the putsch.

It is a prospect which is alarming enough, in all truth. And it is time we stop the policy of dilly-dallying and temperizing, recognized the danger openly, and proceeded energetically to combat it.

Way back yonder in 1936, charges were brought by the union against the North Carolina cotton mill that it fired eight employees for union activity. After a time, the National Labor Relations Board heard the evidence and found against the mill, ordering the men to be reinstated. The mill appealed, and again after time the Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the board's findings with respect to four of the men. The status of the others it remanded to the labor board to determine if the mill should have to rehire them, paying them two years' back wages, or if in fact they had enjoyed in that period substantially equivalent employment, whatever that may mean.

What it means is beside the point of this argument, which is that labor litigation is too expensive and takes too long a time. After more than two years, hearings are still going on. It has cost the mill a wad in attorneys fees and the Government probably a greater amount in administrative costs. Onus for the whole transaction falls on the mill, to be sure, since it was found guilty and chose to resist the original reinstatement order; and of course it is the law of the land that employees not be fired for union activity, and the law must be enforced no matter what the cost.

All the same, labor litigation is too costly and takes too long a time. It could work around into a situation where it would be cheaper for employers to admit all claims, regardless of their demerit, than to go to court about them; and that would be a temptation to labor to capitalize on nuisance.