The Charlotte News

Saturday, June 24, 1939

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The below editorial from the Baltimore Evening Sun may actually be by Cash as he sometimes contributed to the Sun, because of the presence of both his old mentor H. L. Mencken and his old friend Gerald W. Johnson, the latter of whom he would occasionally stop off to see on his way back from New York after meeting occasionally with the Knopfs. (As Johnson later affectionately related to Joseph Morrison in the sixties, Cash would not only bum a night's lodging but also, at least prior to his regular editorship at The News beginning in fall, 1937, a few bucks for the train fare back to North Carolina.)

It is worth reflection that it was through the rhetoric of men like Reynolds keeping public opinion against raising immigration quotas from Germany which not only sent the ill-fated St. Louis back to Europe in June, 1939 and many of its 892 passengers, receiving sanctuary temporarily in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, consequently to their ultimate deaths in ghettoes and concentration camps after Germany overran these countries in the spring of 1940, but also prevented many more from escaping Hitler's nightmare before the steel door was finally shut on emigration by the Nazis in early 1942.

Baltimore Evening Sun

In a radio address the other day, Senator Reynolds of North Carolina, gave expression to a frequently heard but not very enlightening view of the refugee question. Senator Reynolds said that "our house is full," that we have not yet been able to solve our economic problem and that, because we are supporting millions on work relief projects, it would be foolish to admit more people to complicate the problem. The assumption is that all refugees would immediately go on relief and become public charges--at any rate, that is the view, except when it is predicted that the refugees would all get jobs and add to the unemployment of Americans.

What are the facts about refugees? In the first place, the number of refugees who could possibly enter this country is not large enough to have much bearing on the relief or employment problems. From July 1, 1932, until Dec. 31, 1938, the total German immigration was 65,404, distributed over the years as follows:

But during the same period 22,362 immigrants returned to Germany. Thus the net gain in immigrants from Germany in six and a half years has been 43,042, an average of 6,662 a year. Under present immigration quotas the number of persons who could enter the United States from Germany, Austria, Czecho-Slovakia and Memel is 30,630 a year.

The almost unprecedented fact about this migration of refugees is the large proportion of skilled and intelligent men and women who are more likely to add to the opportunities for employment than to throw Americans out of work. The American Friends Service Committee cites cases of refugees who established businesses and industries which have given employment to many. The new Bat'a shoe factory in Maryland is not being built by refugees, but this industry probably would not have come to this country at all were it not for the situation in Czecho-Slovakia which accounts for the migrations from Central Europe. In Great Britain, the committee reports a German-Jewish refugee whose furnishing materials factory provides employment for more than 175 Englishmen.

It is a commonplace that among our refugees are, Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, and the rolls of American medicine now include men who have been honored in their own country and can be expected to give to us their skill and learning. After all, Senator Reynolds' suggestion that a refugee, regardless of his standing or achievements in the past, is just another mouth to feed is rather superficial. It is also a superfluous defeatism to conclude that "our house is full." Doubtless some refugees will have to be moved away from areas in which jobs in their trades are scarce, and there will be plenty of opportunity for discretion and judgment. All in all, however, it is fantastic to suggest that the admission of refugees as it is now being considered would swamp either the labor market or the relief rolls. If the experience up to now is typical, we stand to gain rather than lose from the exercise of a generous policy to accord with our traditions.

Senator Ellender Plays The Game The Way Huey Taught It To Him

Senator Ellender of Louisiana got his training and statesmanship as floor leader of the Louisiana House of Representatives during the administration of the late and unlamented Huey Long. Which is to say that he not only helped to railroad Huey's outrageous legislation but also signed up not to impeach that grand rascal, no matter what charges were made and proved against him.

This background seems to characterize Senator Ellender so that there is no mistaking what manner of man he is. Whose bread he eats, his song he sings, no matter how bawdy the verses. And that he is still playing the political game according to the traditions of the school in which he learned it, is evidenced by his behavior upon receipt of the news that Richard Leche had resigned as Governor of Louisiana as a Federal investigation closed around him. What did Ellender do?

Why, he sat down and wrote to Leche renewing his offer of a Federal judgeship!

God help America--he will have to--as long as it has Governors of states to become involved in corruption and Senators of the United States to soften the blow with offers of an ermine robe!

Site Ed. Note: Another pretty fair prediction by Cash, this time as to when Hitler would begin the putsch into Poland, 47 days off.

Chamberlain & Co. Go On Hoping For "Appeasement"

The Facts Here Ought To Be Established Objectively

The argument over costs at the Sanatorium is beginning to border on the comic. Would be comic, if it were not intimately bound up with tragedy, both private and public. First the Public Weal presents figures to show that the total per capita annual cost of the four items of food, heat, light, and laundry, is $325.66 at the Huntersville institution, whereas it is only $213.21 at the North Carolina Sanatorium and $209.10 at the Western North Carolina Sanatorium at Black Mountain.

But now comes Guy Carswell, chairman of the citizens' committee which is supporting the proposed levy for the Sanatorium, to say that it is all in error, and that in fact the average daily per capita cost at the Mecklenburg institution is only $1.89 as compared with $2.28 for 48 other representative sanatoriums throughout the nation, and from $1.88 to $2.30 for the Black Mountain institution--the first figure being that for last month's operations and the second for the first full year's operation. Mr. Carswell grants that the costs for heat, laundry, and light are little higher at the Mecklenburg Sanatorium than at the State institutions, but explains that it is due to the facts (1) that the State sanatoriums own their own lighting plants; (2) that they are heated by central heating plants, whereas the Mecklenburg Sanatorium has four separate heating plants; and (3) that patients at the State institutions pay most of their laundry costs whereas the Mecklenburg Sanatorium is forced to assume most of the burden itself, because of the poverty of the majority of the patients.

Who is right in this controversy we haven't any notion. Meantime, however, there is no reason, under any view of the matter, to vote against the levy Tuesday. The Sanatorium itself is not responsible for the cost, be they high or low. And it badly needs the new facilities asked for and can get them in no other way.

But Why It Ever Balked In The First Place Is A Puzzle

The decision of the National Labor Relations Board to reverse its ruling that only labor unions can petition for labor election in a plant, and to allow the employer the same privilege under certain conditions, is obviously a grudging one--taken only in the fear of having Congress largely strip it of its discretionary powers. But why it should have clung to the old ruling so long remains a curiosity. It plainly had no sense in it.

The excuse offered, of course, is that many employers would attempt to use the right to petition for election as a means of defeating unionism among their employees--by calling for the election as soon as the union began to attempt to organize these employees and before it had had a fair chance to sign up the majority of them. But the board has ample power to investigate and to refuse actions that are not requested in good faith, and the fact that the Supreme Court has upheld the NLRB more often than it has reversed it is ample proof that it had nothing to fear from the courts, so long as its use of its power was reasonable.

On the other hand, the rule has created no end of trouble. It is mainly under it that the jurisdictional fights between rival CIO and AFL unions have had a chance to develop in many plants--with the result that even the most amiably disposed employer found himself with more trouble on his hands than the worst labor-baiter. Moreover, it is precisely this ruling which has served more than any other one thing to create suspicion and distrust of the intentions of the NLRB, and to arouse militant opposition. The human mind, masters, is sometimes a wonderful thing to contemplate.

Japan's Anti-British Campaign In North China Has Its Cunning

In yesterday's dispatches from Japan appear the following interesting report:

But why should Japan bother with such activities in Peiping, which she already owns lock, stock, and barrel, and which is the seat of the puppet "Chinese" government she has set up for Northern China (also hers, lock, stock and barrel) and which has no great foreign concessions, anyhow? In part, of course, to grab as much as possible of the trade Britain enjoys there. In part, in the hope of scaring the British with the prospect of boycott extending through Northern China. But also perhaps for something much more ominous.

Japan, as everyone knows, has been having a great deal of trouble in securing the loyalty of the Northern Chinese, for the puppet government. What she needs sadly is an idea powerful enough to make them forget their dislike of the Japanese and their greater dislike of something else. And--Northern China is the home of the Boxer rebellion of 1900, Peiping (Peking) the place where it reached its greatest intensity. Moreover, the hatred for the white man has never ceased to burn there. And it is the British who are the chief butts of that hatred. If Japan could revive the old Boxer spirit, turn it against the British and afterwards against all the foreigners from the evening lands, she might well succeed in doing what all her bayonets can't do, and win the Chinese to submit willingly to her rule.