The Charlotte News

Friday, May 13, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: As we write, the first rains where we are, of any substantial weight so far for this spring of 2006, began to fall in great thunder claps.

And so it goes... When the rains come... And they run...

"Foolish Wedding" may not be by Cash, but probably is.

But one statement, at least, in it does not appear to square with either of his two reviews on Franz Boaz's theory of the non-existence of the concept of "race" to distinguish human kindred. (See "Study of Man", July 4, 1937 and the pieces cited in the note accompanying it.) But, whether by Cash or else, just why the editorial distinguished this particular marriage and why it exerts any print to suggest that there is some sort of inherent "profound mental and physical differences" between black and white, we don't exactly know; of physical characteristics there are obvious differences, but so too, genetically, are there between many who are otherwise deemed Caucasian, whether blonde, black, red, or brown. So...

So that argument goes exactly nowhere, today--only working as a signature of where the particular part of the species developed by the vicissitudinous process of natural selection and the imperatives of the physical environment operating on that particular part through the millenia and centuries and decades and annual cycles of time.

Whatever the case, while the editorial comes around to view the marriage in question as not one to be deplored but one which would be likely deplored by others, as it would have likely been at that time, whether in the North or South, as it was even into the early 1960's, and so of questionable wisdom, at that time, the race must start somewhere to understand itself and such, boldly, is one way.

Who is to question the bonds of matrimony chosen by two people?

We would also have to question again, if it is by Cash, whether he did not come back to the Boaz view yet again more strongly, after a drift with the rain. For in March, 1941, upon his visit to Old Screamer Mountain in Clayton, Georgia, to have an afternoon, that which he told his wife Mary was the best afternoon of his life, with Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling, editors together of the North Georgia Review, he told Ms. Smith, upon reading a chapter from the draft of her novel, Strange Fruit, later published in 1944, about the travails encountered by a couple in an inter-racial marriage in a small Georgia town, that it was "moving stuff" and that he thought it first-rate, to be finished "at all costs".

And when one reads again an editorial, probably by Cash, such as "Decision", June 23, 1940, praising a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals, holding it discriminatory to pay an African-American teacher less than a Caucasian for the same work, yet in the editorial also indicating as an aside that it clung to the view that separation of the races generally was a good concept, one is again perplexed on the latter notion coupled with the first, again assuming this piece also was by Cash.

Yet, such are the complexities of time and their concomitant effects on the people living in them, perhaps--or perhaps it is the reaction only of the sensitive writer to the understanding that his audience largely would be repelled by any other notion than these seeming concessions to the status quo, while also advancing the ball far beyond what many people of the time in the Southern white community, at least, would have been at face blush willing to accept at all, and willing to accept even without violent recrimination exerted toward those who supported such change as well, more fiercely and more strangely even, those engaged in it--and so to protect not the status quo ultimately, but rather the process and the ones choosing to participate in that process, to discharge the worst of the reaction to it--that process of utilizing all deliberate speed in changing and moving away from the inherent flaws and unfair results produced by that longstanding and thoroughly inculcated status quo.

Ah well, time and the rain, the cloud and the mist, and the wind...

And the turning of the seasons grant us life...

Choice of Texts*

In tracing a scriptural quotation to its source and its setting, we came across a perfectly swell text for a sermon against the relief policies and fiscal excesses of the present Federal administration. True, this text rather seems to denominate nearly all of us as the common enemies of us all, and to carry its warning that if this Government is ever upset, it will be the veterans, the farmers, the unemployed, the very old, the very young, and the politicians who will upset it. And that doesn't make much sense, since they, the chief beneficiaries of Federal largesse, would only be upsetting themselves.

Nevertheless, out of the ancient wisdom of Proverbs, this admonition:

The king by judgment establisheth the land; but he that receiveth gifts overthroweth it.

Here We Go*

The Tennessee Valley Authority and the City of Knoxville have made a joint offer of $7,500,000 for properties of the Tennessee Public Service Company. "This," says Mayor Walter Mynatt, "is our top figure, our final offer;" and the unconcealed threat to the company is that it has the alternative of selling out or being forced out.

Perhaps it was in the President's mind before he came into office that public utilities should be nationalized. But if it was, he did not say so. We have gone back over his campaign speech at Portland, Ore., in September of 1932, and find there stated the credo that, where power sites were governmentally developed,

"... private capital should be given the first opportunity to transmit and distribute power on the basis of the best service and the lowest rates to give a reasonable profit only."

This hypothetical situation is exactly analogous to the Knoxville situation, and if anybody knows of hearings having been held to determine the quality of the service furnished and the reasonableness of the rates charged by the Tennessee Public Service Company, let him speak up. Such hearings have not been held, of course. Indeed, TVA had hardly started operating until it was trying to buy up TPS. It made an offer in 1934 and TPS accepted, but litigation blocked the deal.

Nor do we find in the President's message proposing TVA to Congress any intimation of the nationalization of privately-owned utilities in this area. Quite the opposite. The President said specifically that the "potential public usefulness of the entire Tennessee River Valley--

"...transcends mere power development: it enters the wide field of flood control, soil erosion, efferentation, elimination from agricultural use of marginal lands and distribution and diversification of industry."

From the start, however, the accent of TVA has been first and last upon power production, upon the displacement of private utilities. Piece by piece it is gorging itself on private enterprise, almost while assuming such proportions as to make it a glaring example of that very bigness which the President detests in other than governmental organization.

And what has happened in the Tennessee Valley, can, and most probably will, happen elsewhere in other industries than power production. The President plainly says as much in his TVA message:

"If we are successful here we can march on, step by step, in a like development of other great natural territorial units within our borders."

And he professes to wonder why the power companies hesitate to make those two or three billions in capital improvements which would provide such a lift to the country in its present state of acute depression!

A Silent Man

In New Jersey Boss Frank Hague, ally of the New Deal and Vice-Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has set up an essentially fascist regime for Jersey City, planted his stooges in the State House at Trenton, in the United States Senate, and in the courts of the whole atate, all to the end of keeping in power his corrupt and predatory gang which last year ran governmental costs in Jersey City up to $26,000,000.

In Pennsylvania, George Earle, New Deal Governor running for the Senate with White House blessing, has been shown to have borrowed $20,000 from Matt McCloskey, Philadelphia contractor. And McCloskey, appointed to high WPA office through Earle, has been shown to have acquired $13,000,000 worth of WPA contracts. The Attorney General of Pennsylvania, and John Lewis & Co., have charged that Earle is deliberately using WPA funds to the end of electing himself and his candidate for Governor, a Mr. Jones of Pittsburgh, and that, worse, he is levying directly on WPA employees to raise more money to the same end. And Lewis and his stooge candidate for Governor have, in their turn, been accused of setting up an unprecedented slush fund.

In Florida, Mark Wilcox is charging to high heaven that the use of WPA money explains the overwhelming victory of the White-House-backed Claude Pepper for the Senate.

In Kentucky, Happy Chandler is charging that WPA funds are being used to re-elect Senator Alben Barkley, who runs with the White House blessing.

The man in the White House, as everyone knows, is the ardent champion of Great Ideals and Clean Government, and the avowed foe of fascism in Europe. But he has declared himself "neutral" on fascism in New Jersey, and opens not his mouth to denounce Boss Hague. And this year, for the first time since a time men have almost forgotten, there is no committee to inquire into charges of corruption in Senatorial and House races. And the President does not at all feel bound to suggest that there should be one. That would be dictating to Congress, you see.

The Rains Came

The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,

And drinks, and gapes for drink again;

The plants suck in the earth, and are

With constant drinking fresh and fair.

***

Something of this sort the trees were whispering to each other last night when the rain, the first of any quantity in weeks, began to fall. They had been expecting it. The winged creatures whose homes they are had told them so, had told them that in the far South, whence Spring rains come, water had fallen at last, fallen in such driving sheets that the poor parched earth was unequal to the absorption of it, so that much of it, instead of being stored away, had run off into the streams.

But to this blessed area, notable for moderation in all natural things, came the "gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath," and then "a mist and a weeping rain." And--

"The mist and cloud will turn to rain,

The rain to mist and cloud again,"

and the age-old cycle, which is sometimes irregular but has never failed as yet, will repeat itself, and we all shall talk about the weather as indeed we should, since it gives us the seasons and the seasons give us life.

Foolish Wedding

Mary Bradford Dawes, of old New England white family, perhaps imagines she has been very broad-minded and superior in marrying a Negro. And possibly the Negro, graduate of Harvard and once director of the Robert Gould Shaw settlement, feels that he has struck a very telling blow toward ending racial discrimination.

But we don't believe a word of it. Whether race exists as a fact we don't positively know. The celebrated anthropologist, Franz Boaz, says it doesn't. But the statement rests at last only on the fact that it is difficult to say where one "race" leaves off and another begins. More recent anthropological opinion has begun to swing back to the view that the term "race" does mean something in terms of profound physical and mental differences. And to us it seems on the whole the more rational view.

But whether race exists or not, public opinion exists. And one of the most strongly held tenets of public opinion in the United States, including Boston, for that matter, is that Negroes and whites must not intermarry. That may not be strictly logical. It isn't, under the Boaz theory. And it is hard to fit with the fact that extra-legal miscegenation has been and is fairly common. But it does have behind it the logic of nearly universal instinct among white men, and perhaps also among Negroes--the will to project the type essentially unchanged into the future. And Mary Dawes' marriage will not in the least avail to change that will. It will only serve to exacerbate racial feeling a little. And--, to bring down on the head of Mary Dawes and her husband such an avalanche of social disapproval and contempt as promises to make the future happiness of either impossible.

Site Ed. Note: Here again, the rest of the editorial page for the day. The letter to the editor, incidentally, from R. L. Godwin, to which the letter to the editor of this date responds ruefully, and which we almost reproduced for you on May 6, but chose to set aside in favor of something else, for ultimately we had much the same reaction to the letter as did the editors following Mr. Smart's response, went thusly:

Movies Breed Crime Among Boys, He Says

Flickers Wreck Many Young Lives And Should Not Be Allowed Even On Week Days

Dear Sir:

The stage is bad enough but the screen is far worse in its effects. Not only does it reach many times more people, since picture shows are everywhere, but it makes many more criminals. It reaches millions of children and youth in their impressionable and formative years, and gives them twisted, degrading and criminal ideas of life before they have a chance to form correct moral judgments.

By the very nature of its influence, crime is the chief contribution of the picture show to American life. The most reliable statistics show that two-thirds of the crime and lawlessness of the nation can be traced directly to the moving picture theaters. Unsound, faulty and useless theories of education have contributed largely to this high record of crime, lawlessness and imprisonment. The standardization method, without regard to talents or aptitudes, plays a great part.

In 1908, the average age of the criminal in this country was 32 years. By 1916 it had come down to 22 years. Now it has reached the later 'teens, with the most atrocious crimes committed by boys not yet twenty years old. The first six months of 1933, the largest number of arrests were of 19-year-old boys. And these farms and propagation plants of hell are allowed to thrive on the Sabbath day. The chief culprit in this terrible wreckage of young life--which leads directly from modern schools with their unsound education to the criminal courts and prisons--is the picture show.

In a recent survey running across four years, which was both thorough and impartial as to the effect of the picture show, it was found that pictures, according to this report, "exert a profound influence on the habits and behavior of children." The New York World-Telegram said: "Thousands of cases of crime and vice can be traced to the morbid and demoralizing influence of the picture show."

R. L. GODWIN.

 Dunn.

Well, hell, what about radio? Come to think of it, yawning broadly tends to crack one's skull sort of sometimes with that excruciating, crackingly painful scrunch, so that too should be looked into most thoroughly as probably a principal contributor to rampant crime. And, no doubt, soda drinks, and popcorn, baseball, peanuts, Easter candy, also. Letters to the editors?

As to more on Mr. Godwin, see "One More Law", March 9, 1939.

Whether the letter bears any kinship to that piece on the grocery store keeper, Mr. W. D. Dunn, down there in Alabama, or the one on the Charlotte motoring News carrier, Mr. W. A. Dunn, who had his tire flamingly blasted out by the pursuing petulant deputies seeking rapturously and rapaciously his inordinate attention, we haven't the foggiest. Whatever the case, you can see how things do get done.

Anyhow, we'll go ahead and just give you the whole editorial page of May 6, while we're about it, too, as bon enfant bonus and Pavlovian reward for putting you to reading so much.


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