The Charlotte News

Friday, December 16, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Go Ahead, Wallingford!" provides more on Coster/Musica and his turn of the century excelsior for hair scheme, followed then in the thirties by his export-import business which showed huge profits on paper while doing nothing in reality but creating worthless paper for investors to provide him with lots of money with which to buy up drug wholesalers, sell drugs to individual drug stores, while promoting a shun of the chains, as on the side he politely built up a chain--until the FBI and SEC caught up with him, and, eventually, before going to prison, chose his pistol as the means of out, as the boys closed in.

Speaking of which, we received that book mentioned by Cash a couple of days back, The Strange Death of President Harding from the diary of Gaston B. Means, published 1930. We've started on it and will soon give you a full report.

Meanwhile, we can tell you that it's double-dip exciting. Replete with a Madam X, a soothsayer who predicted, a la Macheath, that is, you know who, that former newspaper publisher and later Senator Harding from Marion, Ohio, Pilgrim, would become, what else?--President--and so Mrs. Florence Harding continued contacting this sayer of sooth right on up into the White House, of course, for further prophecy. (We can already predict the moral of this mystery: Be careful of what you get soothed for.)

Then the President found out about it and, fearing the dogs of the press, forbade her presence. Not to be outdone, Mrs. Harding, says Means, concocted to communicate with the Madam through an intermediary, not a medium, however, just a runner, a woman, dubbed "Mrs. Whiteley", whose identity is closely guarded by this book seeking to preserve TRUTH and the American Way.

So, Mrs. Harding, fearing scandal, asks Means, a crack investigator for the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation, soon to be known as the FBI, then under the direction of W. J. Burns, (in whose footsteps followed who?), to retrieve from the mysterious lady these letters purloined so that the grave secret of communicating with Madam X, and hence the world of the other side, would not be made known to the ever-inquiring watchdog press.

Mrs. Harding told Means, "It was Harry Daugherty [A.G. whose investigations of Mr. Means helped to topple him and send him to prison intially for three years in 1925, as Mr. Means's investigations and testimony to the Congress re the A.G. helped to topple him and get him indicted for Teapot Dome shenanigans, you see] who really made him Lieutenant Governor of Ohio... Always in everything, Harry has been behind Warren--with his amazing political insight. He always said--that Warren looks like a President. To me--of course, he has the regal look of a King! I believe Mr. Daugherty put much store by Warren's handsome appearance. Once seen,--he could never be forgotten."

(Which may explain, of course, why he passed on within the haunted walls, where once Caruso stayed the night before he quaked too to sing, in April, 1906, of the Palace Hotel in St. Francis-co.)

Well, that's all in Chapter I. There's lots to go. It's engrossing stuff. Pure. Unadulterated. In fact, for all those who enjoyed the Ringo K. Galaxy Report of 1998, you are sure to enjoy this. Order it; we have no stock in it and so it, a totally unbiased recommendation.

We have yet even to scratch the surface, for instance, on how Mr. Means, according to testimony before the Senate, (under questioning by Senator Wheeler, yes, the same latter 1930's isolationist Burton of Montana, often mentioned without favor by Cash in these columns), in 1924 by Mr. Burns, came to suggest to Mr. Burns, circa 1915, that Mr. Means would, on behalf of the German government, for whom Mr. Means confessed to work, provide Mr. Burns a hundred grand--(the figure hath a familiar jingle vis à vis Mr. Means)--to work for the same; Mr. Burns, saying he was for the Allied cause, naturally declined. To which Mr. Means retorted that he, too, was for the Allies and a patriotic American, just not for England. (Which should, no doubt, have pleased immensely Mr. Wheeler, both being no doubt original patriots from the Revolution and descended from the daughters thereof.) But we get ahead of ourselves as that's all in an appendix at the back of the book.

Written just like a detective mystery, too. Sir Arthur couldn't have fixed it up better. (Mr. Means, to be fair, didn't actually draft it; he told his story to a Mrs. May Dixon Thacker, (whether ken to Tommy Dixon we couldn't tell you, but, given her use a couple of times of "negro", spelt just so, wouldn't come as a surprise, (not to mention Mrs. Means's residing in Concord, N.C., Predestined Towel King capital up the road just a piece from Charlotte and Shelby, during Mr. Means's incarceration in the Atlanta Pen). (Remember that rumor which circulated that Warren, himself, was a negro?))) Not to say it all isn't of the utmost intense verity imaginable, for, as Mr. Means tells us, he has been trained at dissimulation and dissimulation at truth as a detective, he says, as he learned early in his career, is not the same thing as a lie.

Speaking of Coster/Musica and Watergate...

Foreman Joe Garibaldi and his Grand Jury put the finishing touches to an active year yesterday by recommending a batch of economies which today he claimed would reduce the County tax rate from 88 to 50 cents. This, as any child who has got as far as common fractions could tell you, would be a whale of a saving. It would be something of a feat in fiscal magic, too, inasmuch as the County, to begin with, has to fix a tax rate of 30.5 cents for debt service, which would leave only 19.5 cents for all its manifold activities. Relief and Social Security alone cost 28.32 cents.

But if the Grand Jury has over-estimated its economies, who is to say that there are not many economies to be made? Not the Grand Jury at any rate. That body is convinced that the County has several pet rat holes down which it pours thousands of dollars. For the County Home and farm, $62,000 looks excessive. For the Industrial Home, with only a few inmates, $8,700 works out to more per inmate per year than many a man earns in twelve months of steady employment.

If the Grand Jury causes the County to re-examine these expenditures, it may have rendered a service in spite of failing to bring about the length and breadth of tax reduction which it thought possible.

The case of Mr. Philip Musica, alias F. Donald Coster, president of the $87,000,000 McKesson and Robbins drug firm, is one for the story books, all right. But his case is also an admirable illustration of what all too often happens to the polite criminal in this country. Let a hungry Negro steal $2 worth of chickens, and he goes to the roads for two years. Let a common nobody spend a year in the penitentiary, and the cops hang upon his heels ever thereafter. But Musica, alias Coster--look at the record.

In 1906, when he was still no great shakes in the financial world, he was convicted of grand larceny and sentenced to a year in jail and to pay a fine of $5,000. Apparently, he served that term and paid up.

In 1913, he was again convicted of grand larceny in connection with the million-dollar (note that figure) failure of his United States Hair Co. And this time, and despite his previous record, he got off with a suspended sentence.

In 1920 he was indicted for perjury, but as often happens in our courts, where big-shots or people with a little political influence are concerned, was never tried.

For two convictions and a third indictment on felony charges, the man served just one year and paid $5,000! And after all that he went ahead to promote a small hair tonic outfit into a vast drug company, whose stocks were listed on the exchange and bought by thousands of innocent and trusting persons--to turn up now short $18,000,000 in his accounts! And so little trouble had been taken to keep track of him, a twice-convicted swindler, that nobody knew who he was until he was caught red-handed!

Site Ed. Note: A looper, a toper, James Fenimore Cooper? And strange though it may seem, twenty years on to the day from that when President Harding passed away, did a Bloke from Boston stroke to save his mates by a fait whilst being shark bait, out there in the Pacific stream, and twenty years on, and twenty years on, and twenty years...

A straight dry road in the country. More men died in traffic accidents under those conditions in the month of November than under any others, according to the report of the North Carolina Safety Division. Nearly a third of the month's total of 79. The finding coincides exactly with the result of other more extensive studies already made by the safety division, the traffic authorities in Maryland, New York and elsewhere. And once more points straight to the worst actor in the whole traffic scene--argues eloquently that that man who tells you, "Aw, 80 miles an hour is all right, provided you know when to use it," is more than a little foolish in the head.

Another interesting thing about the report is that 32 out of the 79 persons killed were pedestrians. That corresponds with the experience of the nation. In North Carolina and the country over, the total number of traffic fatalities shows a sharp decline this year, but the number of pedestrian deaths is going up. Most of these of course occur in the cities. Many of the pedestrians have only their own carelessness to blame. But not all the care in the world can protect them from the motorist who rushes to beat the red light at 45 miles an hour or that one who races his motor and whips around the corner as the light begins to change in an effort to beat the pedestrian stream.

Uncle Danny Roper, who has finally quit the Cabinet, had a hopelessly hard job. Scorned by what General Johnson calls the White House Janizariat for his friendliness towards Big Business, he was scorned by Big Business in turn for his connection with Big Government. As for Commerce, of which he was Secretary, there wasn't much to speak of. And as for the two tremendously important jobs of overseeing safety at sea and safety along the air lanes, Uncle Danny's department simply wasn't equal to the responsibility.

In another administration of less extraordinary tendencies, Mr. Roper might have got by. But no amount of respect for his mannerliness and political importance and his nativity--he was born in Marlboro County, S.C.--or his connections--he was father-in-law of the late David R. Coker of Hartsville--can suppress the observation that here in a high place was one whose chief qualification for Cabinet status was that he knew the political ropes. He was a functionary who neither championed it nor resisted the Administration of which he was, at least nominally, a part.

If there is anything to this talk of the better understanding between the Government and Business, the appointment of Harry Hopkins to take Roper's place as Secretary of Commerce would have the greatest possible adverse effect upon it. The President is represented as being keen to build up Hopkins for his successor in 1940 and to that end to be desirous of giving him a stretch in Commerce to show the business interests of the country that he is no horned Red who "breakfasts every morning on grilled millionaire."

What Mr. Hopkins does breakfast on is relatively unimportant beside the circumstance that he has breakfasted, his whole adult life, at the public expense. His business experience consists, therefore, of cashing his paycheck and supervising expenditure of other people's money in unlimited amount. To business men generally he typifies the worst in the New Deal. He is committed "lock, stock and barrel" to several radical theories which six years of experimentation have shown to be fallacious and extremely costly. He is cordially disliked by conservative Democrats and Republicans both, and even New Dealers in Congress have no great relish for defending him.

As yet it is only reported, on no authority, that the President may appoint Hopkins to Commerce. But if it is discord and outrage and sheer resentment that he wants to engender, no better choice can be made.

The speaker was no friend of Mr. Stalin's, but a White Russian, the intimate of the young Grand Duke Vladimir, pretender to the throne of the czars, who is pooh-pooing the rumor that the Grand Duke has gone to Berlin to become the stalking-horse of Mr. Hitler in his ambition to detach the Ukraine from Russia and make it a Nazi dependency.

The fellow is right, of course. Mr. Stalin is likely to have plenty to say, for the Ukraine is the richest portion of his domain--its great wheat and mineral reservoir. And as far what he can say: he has the largest army in the world: and the new Weyer's Naval Handbook, issued at Berlin, says he has three 40,000-ton, 16-inch battleships building, with cruisers, airplane carriers, etc., in proportion, and that he is steadily going forward with plans for the largest navy in the world. As to the efficiency of his army and as to how many effective bombing planes he may have, there are conflicting reports. But, on the whole, it is probable that he will be able to speak, very loudly indeed.

There is a possibility that the two regimes may get together in a common front. But barring that, Mr. Hitler's scheme to grab the Ukraine is likely to eventuate in the most terrible armed struggle the world has known. What might come out of such a struggle is not clear, of course. Speculation commonly envisages three possible results: (1) that Germany would win and emerge so powerful that she can completely dominate the Western world; (2) that Russia would win and do exactly the same thing; and (3) that both would emerge completely exhausted and rendered impotent for 50 years to come. But there is a fourth and more comforting possibility: that the peoples of both nations would speedily tire of the senseless slaughter and heave both despotic regimes and their slave-making ideologies into oblivion.