The Charlotte News

Thursday, April 21, 1938

SEVEN EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The "quick figuring" recommended by "More Figures" omits, probably to the encouragement of algebraic x-ing, the necessary figuring factor, which we shall make thus easier for you, that cotton bales in 1939 apparently weighed about 525 lbs. apiece, (now uniformly set at 500). So, jump down, turn around, and get to your weekend arithmetic problem.

As we have pointed out before, through the 1960's, such Federal prosecutions in the South against Klansmen, usually to supplant the inaction of local authorities, typically wound up with disproportionately light sentences, even when the more serious charges, as advocated here by Cash, were brought.

Being a prime latter-era exemplar of this lawless state of affairs, the brutal murders in June, 1964 of the four civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, not prosecuted at the time under state law, and so left to the Federal authorities to prosecute for violations of civil rights, exposed the perpetrators to sentences of only ten years each. Indicative however of changing standards of Southern justice--though changes still tempered by the sloth of time and generational passing of attitudes bound in the archaic practices and beliefs of old stubborn, sleepy towns--the organizer of that expedition, "Preacher" Edgar Ray Killen, finally received a 60-year prison sentence for his four manslaughter convictions by a state jury in June, 2005.

The old ways were made the more ironic by the fact that behind the masks of this specie of cowardly criminal, was usually a person loudly calling for greater "law and order" in society, that is as long as the order was of their own traditional notions and the law being so moved was that of their peculiarly like-inclined pol and judge.

On April 18, the Treasury--

Took In........................ $19,127,190.02

Paid Out..........................43,107,874.57

This was a worse day than usual, but all the days of this fiscal year, good and bad, add up to a deficit of $1,152,297,851.94. On the face of it, that's an unlikely-looking starting place for a new spending program.

An official of the Commodity Credit Corporation told the Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday that the Government had about 14 cents a pound invested in some 1,500,000 bales of cotton on which it had lent farmers 12 cents a pound three years and more ago. Warehouse charges account for the increase in the cost.

With cotton selling today for around 9 cents, a little figuring will show that the Government is facing a loss on this transaction of about $40,000,000--and still has the cotton, which will depress prices on the new crop as much as though it were a part of that crop.

Over at Marietta, in North Georgia, a judge named J. Harold Hawkins, and described as "an ardent prohibitionist," has charged a grand jury to seek indictments of men and women who "play bridge for money." Says he:

J. Harold's argument is sounder than his syntax. But it is a good deal less than entirely sound if, as it appears, he thinks it adds up to the proposition that these laws can and ought to be enforced. What it really adds up to is something entirely different. The number of the violators of such laws in a town no bigger than Marietta runs literally into the thousands. To enforce them, Marietta would have to support a police force of at least 500 coppers devoted to that alone. Worse, the citizenry of Marietta would have to submit to having cops gumshoeing all over their premises, snooping into back windows and hiding under sofas to collect evidence. Worse yet, they would be laid wide open to lying information lodged by the nosy and vindictive neighbors. And perhaps worst of all, spying and tattling would be encouraged as positive virtues.

In short, J. Harold's argument adds up to a gaudy reductio ad absurdum of such laws. The remedy they contemplate is infinitely worse than the disease.

The United States District Court of Appeals at Greenville, S. C., yesterday, upheld the conviction of two of the three Easley Ku Kluckers charged with conspiring to intimidate witnesses. It is a pity that it hasn't the power to do something about the sentences too. Marchbanks, the head of the Easley Klan, will serve only one year, and John Genier, one of his accomplices, will serve only six months.

That, we believe, is not at all the maximum which could be given them for the crime with which they stood formally charged. And certainly they had the maximum sentences coming to them. For what they did was actually a good deal more than appears from the charge. In Klan regalia, they went to the home of one Frank Peahuff in the company of a number of other unidentified Kluckers, with the purpose of giving him and his wife, Ella Peahuff, a beating, invited him out, and when he declined and emphasized his disinclination with a blast from his shotgun, fired upon him in return. There was ample evidence to charge them with assault with intent to kill in addition to the charge actually made. And it is clear that they were guilty of conspiring to violate the whole Bill of Rights.

There is entirely too much lenience in many courts in dealing with such cattle. For in the snide philosophy upon which they act lies the seed of the destruction not only of democracy but of all civilized order.

The President, anxious to get the industrial machine clipping along once more, yesterday discussed with Messrs. Jones of the RFC and Douglas and Hanes of the SEC the possibility of making loans to the utilities. Some time ago, the utilities declared that the industry could profitably undertake capital improvements totaling $3,000,000,000, which would be a great lift to the whole economy of the nation at this juncture.

And what, pray, keeps utilities from pitching into this expansion and improvement program? Lack of money? In a way, yes, for investors are shying off from their securities just now. But even if the utilities could raise the money, they wouldn't dare convert it into productive facilities. If the President doesn't know why, he is one of the few people in the country so innocent.

What has backed up expansion in this industry is, in a word, uncertainty. With one TVA actively making miserable the life of private utilities in its area, and with continual talk of seven more TVA's in seven other areas pretty well blanketing the country, and with Mr. Ickes making gifts to states and municipalities that they may build power plants of their own, only the most foolhardy utilities would send good money after scared money.

The jig is obviously up for the Spanish Government, and its leaders may as well recognize the inevitable and save useless slaughter. There will undoubtedly be wholesale murder for a while after Franco comes fully into power, but that will happen in any case. And the continued hopeless resistance only means additional loss of human life.

There is a kind of grim irony in the fate of this government. The incessant propaganda of the fascist powers has convinced many people that it is and was Red. And that it has flirted strongly with communism at times since the beginning of the Italo-Germano-Morisco invasion there can be no doubt. Autonomous Catalonia, indeed, has been pretty decisively Red. Nevertheless, that the general government is not today communist and that at the outset of the struggle it was largely democratic, we have the word of many disinterested observers, ranging from the Dean of Canterbury to Dr. Charles A. Beard and Professor James Shotwell.

Yet the destruction of this government is, in the last analysis, partly the work of the two great opponents of democracy--Britain and the United States. The Spanish Government had, and has, ample supplies of gold abroad. And if it could have used that gold to buy arms, it probably would have won, since it had the backing of the overwhelming majority of Spaniards. But Britain, which is always yelling about the sacredness of international law, deprived it of its rights under that law with the grotesque non-intervention agreement, and made it impossible for it to secure adequate arms in Europe. And the United States made the block tighter with its own silly Neutrality Law.

Republicans in Congress have hitherto almost unanimously opposed a wage and hour bill. Indeed, they formed the great nucleus of the opposition that killed the bill proposed last Fall. But now there are rumors in Washington that they are about to do a volte-face and aid in jamming one through.

But shades of Herbert Hoover! However could that happen? This, you comprehend, is the traditional party of Big Business and the Economic Royalists. The party of Rugged Individualism and laissez-faire--or at least laissez-faire for everybody but Big Business, whose prosperity, being the source of all good to the nation, is properly the concern of the Government. All of which, of course, is utterly incompatible with the wage and hour bill theory.

Still, there are reasons for this extraordinary change of front:

1--Most of the Republicans in Congress are Northerners and a very great part of them come from New England area and in recent years the North and especially New England has been increasingly alarmed by the movement of industry to the South. And the theory is that if a wage and hour bill can be passed, and particularly a wage and hour bill without a differential in favor of the South, this movement can be stopped.

2--These Republicans fear that Labor somehow doesn't care for their party. And if they could go to Labor come next election and say: "See, this fellow Roosevelt couldn't do what he promised you. Those Southern Democrats ran out on him. And it was us, with our own little bow and arrow, who had to do it for you"--why, that, they think, might very well come to achieve for them the first good of all politicians: the return of their whole lodge to power.