The Charlotte News

Friday, May 6, 1938

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: ...And it's Barbaro in the stretch, followed by Bluegrass Cat and Steppenwolfer.

We cast no aspersions upon anyone for the choice of names for their horse, mind you, but if we were reproducing right now the editorials for the month of May, 1941, as we chanced to stray for at least one or two or three dates, three years ago this month, we would, beneath the rose, have to find it a little spooky. We ourselves rather favored Sharp Humor, A. P. Warrior, Cause to Believe, or Storm Treasure. But what's in a name? Besides, they were all fairly to greatly long odds.

What we should like to know is where were War Admiral and Seabiscuit.

In 1938, incidentally, the race was won by Lawrin, ridden by Eddie Arcaro; Dauber placed; Can't Wait showed. In attendance among the 60,000 were Postmaster General and right-hand man to the President, Jim Farley, as well as the President's son, Elliott.

War Admiral had won the previous year.

"Time to Act" gives us pause to consider whether the Nazi spy network chose, as part of their principal base of operations in this country, the state of New Jersey because of its government at the time, under the thumb of fellow traveler, Boss Hague. Many Americans of the time, and plenty of influential Brits as well, led by the Cliveden Set, with ample blueblood influence on Neville Chamberlain, considered the Nazis and Fascists to be a bulwark to defeat the spread of Bolshevism in Europe, with fears that it would spread to England. Whether some thought Fascism the lesser of two evils merely to counter-balance Communism in the hope that they would fight each other to their mutual death, or rather embraced the Fascist notions as insurance against class struggle and for the maintenance of wealth among the proper royal bluebloods over the ever-rising tide of discontented unionism and other such bothersome machinations promulgated among the proletarian vassals, we couldn't say. Though many gave lip service to the former cause, we strongly suspect the latter. Whatever the reason precisely for their insouciance to Fascism over the course of the previous five years, a world war resulted with the loss of fifty million lives. The battle to stop the inevitability of war in Europe was lost in this fateful year of 1938. It was time to act, but time wouldn't let them.

Anyhow, speaking of long shots and Sharp Humor, laissez-faire and trickle down economics, here's a good one about former President Hoover's plan for ending the depression.

Mr. Hoover's 11-point program for the cure of the depression may or may not be right in its philosophy. Most everybody will agree, indeed, that it is eminently desirable to balance the budget, and to arrange taxes so that they will have the least possible effect toward impeding economic recovery. But how it is to be done, or even if the first can be done, will be a matter of much dispute. And perhaps he has something, too, when he proposes a 25-man non-partisan board to take over the control of the Federal Reserve discount rate from the President, though it is not to be forgotten that, as President, he manipulated that rate to even more appalling results than President Roosevelt has reached. Again practically everybody will agree with Mr. Hoover that intelligent co-operation of Government, business, and labor, rather than class struggle, is the desirable thing.

But will Mr. Hoover's plan really serve to cure the depression, as he promises? We can't say. But we recall that he was President of the United States in the year the great depression, of which the current one is perhaps only another phase, began. And that for nearly four years, he not only utterly failed to cure it, but that things went swiftly from bad to worse--and almost worst. If he had the secret of its cure then, why didn't he apply it? And, if he did, why didn't it work? Or is he telling us that it has taken him all these nine years to work it out?

Senator Gerald P. Nye's course for the last year looks like a surrealist's idea of a man evidently progressing due east by due west.

The Hon. Gerald, as all good men should remember, is papa to the Neutrality Act, the brass-riveted, iron-bound law which, he said when he gave it to the world, was the nation's voicing of its irrevocable will to keep out of all disputes that might possibly lead to war, to stay at home and mind our own business, and with a fine impartiality to let the rest of the world take care of itself; the act which left the President almost no discretion about selling arms--though he has taken some in the case of China--and which was made to include even civil wars with a special view to Spain.

And now--the Hon. Gerald is sponsoring a resolution in the Senate to override the Neutrality Act and lift the ban on arms to the Spanish Government!

We are not arguing that it oughtn't to be lifted. It is difficult to see why it shouldn't be. We are selling China arms, and there is just as good reason for selling the Spanish Government. Like the Chinese Government, it is a legitimate one arrived at by democratic methods. And like the Chinese Government, it is being destroyed by foreign invaders, though there is the difference that these foreigners are led by a particularly murderous native. And we haven't much doubt that the great body of the American people want Spain to win, just as keenly as they want China to win--and just as ardently as the Senator wants it.

But that is the comedy. The hon. gentleman and--so far as he spoke for them--the people, were merely kidding themselves when they yelled that they wanted neutrality at any price. None of us ever really wanted any such preposterous thing. We wanted--and want--peace, certainly. But also we hotly want our side to win.

The Hague revolution in New Jersey has now reached the point where the administration in Washington can no longer blink the fact that it constitutes an open challenge to the American system of government and the sovereignty of the United States. The Constitution, Article IV, Section 4, says flatly,

And that republican government no longer exists in New Jersey is as plain as the nose on your face. In Jersey City Hague has sent a man to jail for six months for exercising the right of free speech guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of New Jersey. In Jersey City last Sunday, Mayor Hague's police denied the eminently respectable Norman Thomas the right of free speech, seized his person and that of his wife, gave him the third degree, and hustled him out of the state to New York. And last night in Jersey City a mass meeting of war veterans was held in Jersey City for the explicit purpose of frightening two Congressmen of the United States out of exercising the right of free speech in Haguetown. At the prompting of their leaders, Hague's stooges, the veterans adopted a resolution, stating,

The "Reds" are the Congressmen. Their effort to destroy Jersey City consists in their will to exercise the fundamental American privilege of free speech in it. And what is meant by "orderly manner" you may judge from the warning of Mister Charles Brophy, chieftain of the Catholic War Veterans, that if the Congressmen tried to speak, he'd have 800 at his men there in uniform, "each with two feet of rubber hose."

But, after all, this is only local to Jersey City? It is no such thing. The man who called that veterans meeting in Jersey City last night was the secretary of the Governor of New Jersey, A. Harry Moore, a stooge of Hague's who owes his present job, as he owed the Senate seat he formerly held, to "I am that Works." Nor is there any recourse in the courts of New Jersey. Not only in Haguetown, but over the whole state they appear to be packed with the Hague stooges. And the Legislature, which was the only governmental agency not completely dominated by Hague has been defeated and rendered impotent.

What we have here, in short, is a fascist regime extending through a state and completely suspending all republican processes of government. It is not primarily an ideological fascism, though it appeals to the fanaticism of imbeciles who imagine that the way to preserve Americanism is to begin by destroying all rights which make Americanism. At bottom, however, it is a fascism devoted to the end of keeping one of the most corrupt gangs which has ever disgraced American politics in the public trough.

And so, the issue is now clearly up to the administration in Washington. Boss Hague's vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his gang is very useful to Jim Farley and the President in New Jersey, for all of its members give lip service to the New Deal. This is quite probably the reason the administration has blinked the emergence of fascism in New Jersey up to this point. But if it blinks it any further, it will surrender every claim to the respect and confidence of the American people.

The Mecklenburg grand jury did an excellent day's work yesterday when it took steps to have the legislative representatives of the county initiate a law requiring that all venereally diseased prostitutes taken by the cops be held until cured.

Everybody deplores prostitution. But that it can be suppressed assumes a very dubious proposition. Certainly, it has never been successfully suppressed anywhere in the past, not even when the death penalty was assessed against it.

But if it cannot be suppressed it is certainly desirable to do something about its practitioners as a menace to public health. As matters stand at present, prostitutes are the chief source of gonorrhea and syphilis. Perhaps it is not true, as is sometimes said, that they are all diseased, but an astonishingly great portion of them are. And if it were possible to round them all up periodically, it might be possible almost wholly to eliminate these diseases from among our population. That, however, inevitably contemplates some sort of licensing system, and that is too repugnant to American ideas to ever have a chance of being adopted. But the proposal of the grand jury promises to go a considerable way toward achieving the same result. Prostitutes, and particularly the sort which is most likely to be infected with the venereal diseases, fall into the hands of the police pretty often. And if it were the rule that they could not go free again until they were cured, the general incidence of disease among them ought to be notably lowered.