The Charlotte News

Thursday, June 15, 1939

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Although "John Williams" is very likely not by Cash, we include it to underscore a contrast we have all encountered, a contrast likely more prevalent now than in 1939, that of human beings in any walk of life, be it doctor, lawyer, teacher, preacher, politician, ambassador, salesman, tradesman, what have you. There are those who are the "fleeting" types--those who barely accord you the significance of a handshake, a smile, a recognition of your common humanity with them--and those who obviously wake up in the morning with a primary goal of serving humanity, only secondarily ingratiating to you their product or service, opinion or advice.

We knew one such person, of the latter type, who Cash also knew, and who later became a traveling sales person of the type Cash mentions. This friend of ours passed away about three years ago at age 92, having traveled until he was 90, and left behind the same immanent sense of his life which is described of Mr. Williams. This person was first and foremost a teacher--of history, art, ethics, even transcendence of the moment--only secondarily a sales person.

Many regard 1939 as a simpler time, the good ol' days. Yet, even then, such simplicity as described in the editorial was thought old-fashioned, obviously. Perhaps, because it is so rare, and so often displayed only by the middle-aged and elderly, it offers itself naturally to every generation therefore as old-fashioned. Certainly in 1939, the world could have made use of far more such old-fashioned notions.

And to demonstrate that Cash was not alone in his dislike for the new music, jazz, we print the following brief on the matter, appearing on this day's editorial page. We disagree with Cash and the writer, but our ears came of age in a different time, too, than the relative quietude of Gaffney, S.C. in the early 1900's when Model T's were scarcely in evidence and the hurly-burly mostly confined to the occasional careening horse, gone mad by a bur in its shoe. Also, as we have pointed out before, 1939 78's were woefully inferior to what came later with hi-fi and stereo and eventually, by 1983, laser-read digitization as a means of sound reproduction. The horns sounded tinny, (making car horns beside them seem sonorous), the drums, like a herd of buffalo, the voices like someone trapped at the bottom of a well. The better endowed orchestral performers generally had better means to procure the best available recording equipment and more of it than the run of the muck band musicians. So, perhaps, the music was less to blame than the quality of reproduction, the limit of what most people heard.

And as to the Kentucky farmers to whom Dr. Cooke refers, if memory serves, we think we encountered him once, out on one of the horse farms it was, playing in between Chopin and Sibelius that remarkable bit of classical poesy, "When I get out of this here jail, my mama's gonna love me more 'cause I'm bringing home the Bible daddy stole from her 'fore he went into the cell crossed from mine for stealing chickens from crossed the road down a piece," sung to orchestral accompaniment, featuring the Hole Holler String Quartet. Anyway, maybe the farmers in Kentucky and the Peruvian natives where the Orinoco flows didn't like jazz in 1939. Notwithstanding, according to Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Percy Heath, and Thelonious Monk, some folks did, over the Blue Ridge in North Carolina's piedmont and sandy bottom.

Dr. James Francis Cooke in Etude

There has somehow been circulated the idea that jazz is the normal music of the common people. On the contrary, it is highly artificial, the result of a cultivated musical depravity.

A few years ago, an explorer took a field radio on an expedition to the jungles of the Orinoco River. The white man almost invariably demanded jazz; the Indians, who had never been out of the jungles, who had never heard any white man's music, went into raptures over grand opera and symphony concerts.

When Kentucky mountaineers travel 20 to 30 miles by wagon and by mule-back just to hear a program at a "listening broadcast station," they show a curious disdain for jazz. They are instantly delighted by the better music and the symphonic programs, but hold their ears when the noise of the Harlem bedlamites is turned on. Their natural taste has never been perverted.

That Men Who Urge Freedom For Beal Automatically Become Reds

One hears some curious things these days in connection with Fred Beal's case. Frank A. Graham, Jonathan Daniels, Paul Green, Phillips Russell--these and others do not believe that Beal is guilty of the crime for which he is in State's prison. They remember that he was not present at the scene to the killing of Police Chief Aderholt at all. They remember that the evidence for his having conspired for that killing was plainly weak. They observe that the killing of Aderholt was the last thing that Beal could reasonably have wanted--since anybody in his senses must have known that it would mean just what it did mean, the utter collapse of the cause Beal led. And they remember that the trial was very largely taken up with the question of Beal's political, social, and religious beliefs. And so they conclude that the passions of the time and not the evidence convicted the fellow.

Concluding that, they go to the Governor and exercise the right of petition that belongs to every citizen, urge him to free the man, point out that the State is in danger of having a Mooney case on its hands. And for that Frank Graham, Jonathan Daniels, Paul Green, Phillips Russell, all the rest, are immediately denounced as Reds. It is a dangerous doctrine, that one--that to stand up for what one believes to be simple justice is equivalent to Communism. If it were generally adopted, then to be called a Communist would become a very high honor. And what makes it doubly absurd is that the Reds are the last people who want Beal freed. Since his apostasy to the Moscow revelation, they have not lifted a finger in his behalf--on the contrary have bitterly scourged him--clearly want him kept in jail, regardless of guilt, as eagerly as the most bitter people on the very far Right.

The Czechland, But One Which Is Hard To Hold

It becomes increasingly plain that, while it may be no more than a little cinnamon bear in size, Czecho-Slovakia was an uncommonly bad one for Mr. Hitler to grasp by the tail. He ought to have known better, anyhow. The tale of Syrovy, Jan the One-Eyed, whose marvelous track all around the earth to bring his soldiers to France after the collapse of the Eastern front, made Xenophon look like a piker with his march of the Ten Thousand Greeks, should have told him that these people never would submit quietly to the role assigned them in "Mein Kampf" and the Wilhelmshaven speech--that of unwilling slaves for the building of the "superior" Nazi "civilization." And for that matter, so ought their whole story under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

All the news that comes out of the little country is ominous for him. But the most ominous dispatch yet is that which is concerned with the rise of a Czech Legion in Poland. On May 28, General Vladislav Prchola, who led the Czech fight against the Hungarians in the Carpatho-Ukraine, escaped to the Polish land. And since that time 18,000 Czech youths have already gathered around him, and hundreds of others are slipping out of Prague, Bruenn, and other towns daily. And now, Votja Benes, brother of Edouard Benes, former President of the republic, has slipped over the border, after living, apparently in hiding, in Bohemia for some months, though he was supposed to be in the United States.

They can do nothing, of course, unless war comes, but if it does--we can think of a lot of things we had rather be than the Storm Trooper set in front of that aggregation. Mr. Hitler may have disarmed the Czechs, but it does not look as though he had succeeded in removing them from the ranks of his effective enemies. For if war comes, what is now going on will probably grow overnight to wholesale proportions.

Site Ed. Note: Desiring not to contribute to the spreading of propaganda, even old propaganda, we have heretofore refrained from quoting anything from Mein Kampf. Since, except in Germany, it's plentifully available anyway, and without much specific critical analysis, we will make an exception and quote the opening passage from his Chapter 11, "Race and People", not only because of its juicily asinine premises but also because its basic subjective has served, and did before Hitler wrote it down, as paradigm for the feelings which have pervaded some of this country's emotive perspective on race and ethnicity over the course of time, especially in the South, especially with regard to the simplex which produced slavery--a desire and perceived need for cheap manual labor to work the fields in the summer humidity to produce crops for food and cotton for clothing and the consequent rationalization of conscience by subjugating to status of inferior a group of people readily identifiable as distinct, as a means of supplying that cheap labor class.

It is notable that, as with most such ramblings of the insane, Hitler's premise starts with two seemingly simple, "common" observations, neither of which however obtains in reality to prove his ultimate conclusion.

The Columbus Egg to which he refers is the old apocryphalory from Benzoni about Columbus standing an egg on end to make the point that a thing seeming impossible can be done with facility once demonstrated. European across the ocean by ship, American across the ocean by airplane, Russians and Americans in orbit outside the atmosphere, all of course readily confirm the Egg. The only problem of course is that Columbus first had to crack the basal end of the shell to get it to work. Thus, as with most simple metaphors and aphorisms, when applied to encompass all human endeavor, including that which counters the survival of other humans, that for which Hitler used it, the Egg eventually topples. Thus, as poetry would often pre-determine a conclusion falsely premised, the fellow who fired the first shot at Sumter and Hitler both eventually put bullets through their own carapaces.

Hitler's understanding of zoology also appeared frail as his examples of lack of cross-species mixing first failed to account for Equus asinus. Too, animals of different pigment, whether of eyes, fur or skin coloration, though of the same species, do mate successfully without doing disservice to the population in general. Much as with the Bedsheet hiders reading Spots, such silly analogies of humans to the broader animal kingdom rarely hold even when the analogues bear some reasonable, comparable relationship, much less so when even the analogy sententiously assumes facts untrue ab initio anent the animals. Red foxes, for instance, are often black, silver, or gray and interbreed successfully. They remain, nevertheless, Vulpes vulpes. And Homo sapiens is still, too, so, despite Mr. Hitler and his ravings, and those in symbiosis with them, about supposedly self-evident "truths".

We wonder, too, as to why, when venturing his "common sense" opinions on virtually everything else, he never once proposed to resolve the conflict between anthropologists who believe that Heidelberg Man was properly classified Homo erectus, believed to have originally evolved in Africa from Homo habilis, before spreading to Europe and Asia, and those who believe he was early Homo sapiens who evolved from Homo erectus. Nor does he explain why Homo neandertalensis devolved in Germany.

But who could possibly want more from a man who told stories like this?

And one might note that it is true, among the many laws of Nature, that a species generally does not kill its own, except in one glaring instance, ironically, the one where consciousness, and therefore conscience, exist. Thus, we might actually find a high degree of truth--proved ultimately by the author, himself--in those last two sentences.

This, too, is indubitably true, based on common experience: Dogs are more moral than people, precisely because they rarely kill each other. But do we therefore charge a dog with the responsibility of governing us?

Besides The Numbers And The Ponies There Is This One

In the case of the young man who appeared in court yesterday charged with giving seventeen bad checks in pursuit of fortune through betting on the ponies in the local establishment, Judge Burgwyn observed that the butter and eggs racket was a mere amateur in comparison with the race-track racket. But another one he touched on in passing is no piker either. We mean the use the magistrates' courts as collection agencies.

No part of the criminal law contemplates the reimbursement of the immediate victim of crime. All such offenses, including the issuing bad checks, are conceived to be offenses against the general peace and order of the State and to be punishable as such regardless of whether or not the victim is compensated. To hale a man into court on such a charge and free him after exacting payment--plus the magistrate's own private cut in the shape of costs--is simply to compound the crime. What makes the case even worse is that in many instances these checks are post-dated checks secured from the giver under promise of holding them until he raises the money to pay them off. And what is worse still the magistrates in a good many cases is an inside party to the whole shabby performance.

The last Legislature was supposed to do something about cleaning up the magistrate mess in the State. It did nothing. On the contrary, it created a lot of new ones--with license to prey on the public. But perhaps we are just wasting our breath in protesting it. A people usually gets the kind of government it demands and deserves.

His Death Will Grieve A Wide Circle Of Friends

The death of John F. Williams will grieve a lot of people all over the Southeast. The firm which his brother, the late Charles A. Williams, headed, was the mainstay of many merchants in the country and the smaller towns, particularly back in the horse and buggy and Model T days. And it was primarily through Mr. Williams that these merchants knew the firm. In those days, a traveling salesman was something more than the brisk, more or less impersonal and highly fleeting fellow of these times--a friend and a visitor welcomed with personal pleasure by those on whom he called--a man to be pressed to come to dinner or to stay all night, and who would have given grave offense if he had not settled down before the stove for a long chat. And Mr. Williams was one of the best liked of them all.

Simple, kindly, pleasant, and modest, he was an old-fashioned man in the best sense of the term. And he played his part in the world with dignity and grace--leaves behind him only respect and affection.

They Now Flourish More In the East Than In The South

It was very curious to read in the stories of the Ku Klux Klan "klonvocation" in Atlanta, that "informed sources said the principal strength of the Klan now lay in the industrial states of the East."

The bedsheeters were, as everyone knows, originally formed as a Southern organization, devoted to peddling hate against the Negro, the Catholic, the Jew, the alien, and indeed almost everything and everybody else in sight. It quickly spread beyond the borders of Dixie, but in its heyday its great strength always lay in the South and in the agricultural states of the Middle West, such as Indiana. And on the other hand, the East was the center of the greatest opposition to it. In the Democratic Convention of 1924, Oscar Underwood, an obviously indicated Presidential nominee, couldn't get to first base because, to his everlasting honor, he had courageously denounced the Klan in his native South. And on the other hand, McAdoo couldn't grab the prize because of the solid opposition of the East, on the score that he was tarred with the Klan brush.

It is pleasant at least, to think that Dixie has been largely weaned from the thing. But what explains its growth in the East? Perhaps the answer is this. The industrial East, of course, is the area in which unemployment is most widespread--and in which uncertainty and fear of the future is greatest. Which is to say that it is the area which most yearns for scapegoats on which to unload its bitterness and frustration and terror. Moreover, it is the area in which the Jew and the alien are most numerous--and hence the obviously indicated candidates for scapegoats. And it is precisely Anti-Semitism and alien-baiting that the Klan now seems to be mainly devoting itself.