The Charlotte News

Saturday, November 12, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The Nazis claimed 22 Viennese Jews committed suicide on Kristallnacht.

No doubt, just as did good Antonio attempt it in Merchant of Venice?

No doubt, just as W. J. Cash accomplished it in Mexico City?

And, when considered, "Graying Wildcats" gets a bit spooky when juxtaposed to our October 31 entry from our Caribbean correspondent who in fact authored that text in October, 1991, as well as that printed in the note accompanying November 2, without reading any of these editorials, any at all of these editorials herein contained at this site, with the possible exception, he admits, of those eight or so contained in Professor Morrison's 1967 biography of Cash. And, we have it on good authority, that you don't yet know even the tenth of it in terms of such coincidences. We look forward to finding out more from our ascetic correspondent, later. He writes us only sporadically and usually confines himself to one or two choice words, always, however, packed with meaning.

Net revenue of ABC stores in the 27 wet counties in North Carolina, in the fiscal year ending June 30, was one million and a quarter dollars. This goes to the counties. In addition, the seven per cent tax on liquor sales produced for the State nearly $500,000.

It's all highly shameful, we suppose, trafficking in the demon rum like this. Liquor money is tainted money, prohibitionists insist. And yet.

Yessir, and yet Mecklenburg could use some of that revenue. Mecklenburg never has stopped drinking as much as it wanted. It drank all through state prohibition and national prohibition, and it is drinking now, more politely because of national repeal and repeal in South Carolina. But it is still drinking.

And the to chief effects of its drinking wet and voting dry are: (1) that South Carolina gets the revenue that belongs to Mecklenburg; and (2) that the system nurtures big time bootleggers, disrespect for law and corruption and the agencies of the law.

It is too bad, but it is the truth. And there isn't a single solitary thing to be done about it.

They are getting along, those men of the Wildcat division who gathered for a reunion here. Those who were thirty the morning of November 11, 1918, are fifty now, and even the striplings who were twenty are men of forty. Most of them are family men these days, husbands and fathers, devoted to the dull business of earning a living. They run to paunches and gray hair and baldness, and there are wrinkles at their eyes and about their mouths. And their gaiety is awkward, as though they had lost the knack.

The old fundamental common ground of the army is gone, too. They are all sorts and conditions of men now, with the most diverse of interests. And yet, something of it does remain. In every one of those brains is locked a memory. Long ago and far away there were names like Baucourt and Grimcourt and Verdun and Metz they all remember vividly. And in the bearing of everyone of them is the consciousness of an experience that sets them apart from men who have not known it--the knowledge that once they stood under fire and somehow found it in themselves not only not to run away but to go forward in the face of death.

We have heard somewhere that no woman is complete until she has borne a child, and that no man is complete until he is made certain of courage in battle. By that standard, these men are complete.

With 260,000 members, enviably solvent, an accepted fixture in the selling trade, International Ladies Garment Workers Union, hereinafter to be known by the short title of ILGWU, is no mere pawn in the labor chess game between AFL and CIO. By its oblique moves between the two, it would seem to classify itself as a bishop, but by the directness of its approach toward CIO in the beginning and the directness of its departure at this stage, ILGWU may deserve castle status.

Further than that, ILGWU is a bulwark of the American Labor Party, which holds the balance of power in New York State politics. That balance has been seriously threatened by dissension in union circles, and in Pennsylvania, where the Garment Workers are strong, a tiff in the Democratic primary between CIO and AFL factions have a lot to do with throwing the whole election to the Republicans. Hence, rather then line up with either of them, ILGWU's president has does decided to remain independent of both of them.

John L. Lewis professes not to be disturbed, and, to be sure, with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, United Mine Workers, United Automobile Workers, Steel Workers and Textile Workers, not to mention the West Coast maritime workers, he still controls a vast segment of labor. But UAW shows signs of splitting in two, while TWOC is as yet new to the habits of organization and untested. Chances are the ILGWU will be missed, and that its withdrawal from CIO will have a chastening effect upon Mr. Lewis and hasten the reconciliation with AFL.

That is the way the man who makes the thoughts of the new hoodlum Germany, Dr. Goebbels, spoke to Germany when, oh, very softly, he called on it to desist from further assaults on the Jews, after twelve solid hours of burning, looting, beating, and probably murder (who believes the 22Vienna Jews actually committed suicide?)

What lay behind the killing at Paris, as all the world knows, was five years of robbery, beating, insults, murder suffered by the Jews at the hands of German thugs, sicked on by this Dr. Goebbels and his psychopathic superior, Hitler.

But ah, you see, it is not cowardly to murder Jews, to hound them to death in concentration camps, to rob them, to lie about them, deter mobs which outnumber them a hundred to one loose on them, to kick and spit upon them. It is not justifiable for a poor little 17-year-old boy to feel anger against it, and to kill a man who subscribed to this Jew-baiting as a good Nazi. It is only cowardly to kill such a Nazi. And to start up and sick great throngs of hoodlums (and they were hoodlums though their names go back a thousand years) into assaults on people who had no part in the killing--that alone is justifiable indignation.

Such, precisely, is the shape and substance of the new definitions the Nazis make in the world.

Site Ed. Note: The 24th Amendment, ratified in 1962, abolished the poll tax in Federal elections, an effort begun in 1939. (See also note accompanying editorials of January 30, 1941.)

One of the things that got buried under in the election returns is that Arkansas rejected an amendment to repeal the provision in the State constitution which makes the payment of poll taxes a prerequisite to voting.

That leaves eight states which still hang on to such constitutional provisions or statutes--all of them Southern: Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

The argument ordinarily put forward in defense of such requirements is that they keep the Negro from voting. But, in fact, North Carolina, which has no poll tax law, has a smaller Negro vote, in proportion to the total vote cast, than does Virginia. Another argument is that it keeps down the rise of demagogues. But it is South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, not North Carolina, which have the Bleases and Heflins and Vardamans and Hoke Smiths and Tom Watsons and Huey Longs and Man Bilbos.

On the other hand, the requirement is going to greatly cripple the states that cling to it, in the next Democratic Party convention. For when the two-thirds rule was abolished at Philadelphia, it was agreed that the South should have a bonus in delegates on the basis of the Democratic vote in the states. And under that rule, North Carolina will have nearly three times as many delegates as Virginia. For in 1936, North Carolina, without a poll tax law, cast 616,000 Democratic votes, whereas Virginia had only about 234,000.

There has been a good deal a speculation on what Secretary Wallace would do about corn loans. The Secretary, understandably, was reluctant for the Government to make loans at a price in excess of the market, particularly as the impounded corn would have an adverse effect on next year's price. But the law was plain, as well as the Secretary's duty. It all depended on the official November crop estimate and the Secretary's estimate of domestic and export needs. If the crop exceeded needs, loans had to be made.

Made they will be, to the tune of 57 cents (within certain areas) on corn now bringing between 48 and 52 cents a bushel. There may be, with better business and rising markets, some chance that the loan will serve to jack up the price of corn, in which case everybody would be happy. But more likely not, which would require the Government to put out some $170,000,000 in addition to the $400,000,000 already outstanding on crop loans, mostly for cotton. And what ultimate disposition is going to be made of all that cotton, plus all this corn, nobody has the slightest idea.