The Charlotte News

Monday, March 6, 1939

SIX EDITORIALS

Mr. Johnson was a friend to Cash and often loaned him a few dollars and a night's lodging in Baltimore on Cash's return from occasional trips to New York to visit the Knopfs. Johnson, a fellow alumnist of Wake Forest, though older than Cash, held a natural empathy for Cash's ideals and philosophy, as indicated forcefully in the following piece.

Given that which happened as late as the Florida recount in 2000, where roving bands of imported Republicans, young lawyers in suits no less, reportedly sent south by their Beltway corporatista lawfirms, tried literally to bust down the doors of the Miami counting room on the eve of Thanksgiving, when vote-counting was crucial and at a premium for the arbitrary deadline announced by the Florida Secretary of State, (the Lady of Lake Katrine), the piece takes on special significance for our times, as well as those of 1939.

Mistake it not; it is the same thing, just as Johnson says, just as Daniels, Agar, and Cash said. Always has been there, probably so in every society with mixed racial, ethnic, religious and national backgrounds at its origins. It merely awaits the spark of every "jackass to bray", and thrives only when the police behave as enablers to the fascists, standing by, doing nothing, becoming as the Know Nothings. The braying jackasses qua copper who operate simply by the process of selective enforcement: allow the thug, the common divisor, dubbed Knights Knowing Katrine, to get away with the most outrageous authoritarian annulment of the law, extenuating every fanciful extremity of interpretation to them to frustrate the divided opposition, the while spouting "rule of law" to be exacted, under Cade's Rules, yet only on those who can in fact read and count with any discernment. Taken far enough, such a ruling order becomes little different, if at all, from that described below in "A Hard Choice". Witness the distinctions generated by the two methods described in "Fiorello vs. Martin", as warning of something becoming. Indeed, witness society now.

The only thought of Johnson with which we quibble is the one where he talks of the price of freedom being the making of the idiots free also. We quibble only because we believe, perhaps naively, that idiots may, too, be educated over time, to one degree or another, to acceptance of certain basic premises about humanity, and thereon become something more than idiots, just as children become adults, apes became men--even if in obviously varying degrees of civilization, with meandering lines, per Spengler, as to what that latter achievement means.

It is not, we posit, being necessarily polite in the face of Nazis, Knights, and braying jackasses, or the ideals which made them famous. As to that we join Dorothy Thompson and Gerald Johnson and all the many who stood firm in the face of the Wallaces, Bilbos, Barnetts, Bulls, McCarthys, et al., in saying, "Bunk!", if not something a little more bullisht.

Gerald W. Johnson, in Baltimore Evening Sun

Well, the German-American Bund has held its great meeting in New York and given us an impressive demonstration of what it would mean for Nazism to dominate this country.

Nice, isn't it? If anybody laughs, throw him downstairs. If anybody answers your argument, bust him in the snoot. Big Bill Thompson is the hero. The Ku Klux Klan is the party. It isn't anything new. We have had that sort of thing in America always. But never before have we called it ideology. We have always called it swinishness.

Probably the meeting of the Bund was one of the best things that could have happened here. We have been hearing the Nazis described in terms that didn't quite register.

But now that we have seen them at close range, the unfamiliarity is dissipated. We know this outfit. It is nothing but the old Gas House Gang dressed up in fancy shirts. There is little perceptible difference between these fellows and the plug-uglies who used to raid the precinct polling places on election days, beat up the poll holders and throw the ballot boxes into the streets.

Ideology? Bunk! The only idea the ordinary Bundsman can entertain is the idea of slamming someone with a blackjack.

Had the populace been left to obey its natural impulses, the Bundsmen would have been strewn all over Manhattan Island and a lot of them would have wound up in the morgue. As it was, 1,500 policemen stood up manfully in defense of the constitutional right of every jackass to bray, and not a Nazi was killed.

It is, as yet, something of a rarity in this country for a sensible man to need protection of his right to speak his mind. It is the idiots who are constantly stirring up mob fury; but it is of prime importance that the idiots shall be protected, for if an idiot can be gagged, so can anybody. Human ingenuity has never been able to devise a system of guaranteeing freedom to the wise and honest except by guaranteeing freedom to all; and freedom for the wise is so supremely important that it is worth the price of making the silly free, too.

When all the speakers at a meeting are praising God and Abraham Lincoln, the police have nothing to do. It is the unpopular meeting that must be defended at all costs.

But while an American has no right to gag a Nazi, he has a right, which is now becoming a duty, to say what he thinks of him.

The fact must be admitted that these people constitute a very real danger. The danger lies in the fact that their crazy program makes a strong appeal to certain swinish instincts that Americans do possess.

The United States, not Germany, is the real cradle of Nazism. We never called it that, but we have had outbreaks of the same thing several times in our short national history. The latest occurrence was the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which was practically simon-pure Nazism. The Kluxers were preceded by the APA, the Know Nothings, and half a dozen small organizations, all of which flourished on chauvinism, race and religious hatred, and lawlessness.

The United States is so placed, geographically, that it can be defended with relative ease from foreign attacks. Therefore, if the American Nazis threaten no more than to release Hitler's bombers upon us, we can afford to laugh at them. But when they threaten to release, not foreign airmen, but our own innate impulse to resort to lynch law, the threat is serious. That they can do. If they are themselves torn to pieces in the first outburst, nevertheless, the damage will remain. Every mob murder sets back civilization: and the ground is regained only slowly and painfully.

Judge Gwynn's lenience we take to have been justified by circumstances which were not made public. Certainly a Negro who had served two sentences for knifing other Negroes, who had received a nolle-pros in another shooting case and who was convicted by a jury in still another case of manslaughter, would hardly appear to be a fit subject for judicial clemency, which he received in the form of a reduction of his sentence from 12-15 years to 10-12 years.

The Judge must have had his reasons, however, and in any case the prisoner got a lengthy sentence and will be engaged for awhile otherwise than in knife and gun play in defense of his life, as he invariably pleaded. The interim could be of advantage to the Crusaders, that organization of Negroes which wants to do something about crime and which, giving up adults as hopeless, is going to concentrate on the younger members of the race. With this one-man crime wave out of circulation for a spell, their task ought to be somewhat less complicated.

General Cazado lays himself open to the charges of promoting useless bloodshed when he seizes Negrin & Co. and balks their efforts to make peace with Franco and flee into Seville. Undoubtedly, he will be so charged by Chamberlain, Daladier, and their press in England and France. And certainly, it seems impossible that he can ever hope to win the war now.

Nevertheless, his action is understandable. Franco has made vague tokens about "charity" and "good will" which have fooled some people who were eager to think well of him. But he has always made it clear that he was talking about what he has many times called "charity with justice"--the justice part being the execution of all the leaders of those who have opposed him and the reduction of the rank and file to essential slavery for a long period of years. And that men should prefer dying in battle to being coldly butchered or turned into animals of burden for a regime they hate, is natural enough.

There is still ground for question, however. For, unfortunately, under the conditions of the kind of war Franco makes, it is not only fighting men who have to be considered. Continued resistance means the continued murder of women and babies from the air and the ground. A heart-breaking choice, anyway you look at it.