The Charlotte News

Monday, June 27, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Okay, so it was actually the printer's devil at work; 'twasn't "J. E. Hoover" at all who fought with the Confederacy, but rather J. M. Ah, well, at least presumably, J. M. did not have to be buried in a lead-lined casket so heavy that his pall bearers fainted dead away in the May-June heat while carrying it.

For more on how vagrancy laws, discussed in "The Circle Widens", were used to smite the unpopular, the perceived outside agitator, the stranger, (including at one time, William O. Douglas), to deny civil liberties to these and thus to chill out of step conduct in others, see the note accompanying "Work or Eat", September 22, 1940 re Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville.

We had a friend once with whom we used to go rambling around occasionally out in the wilderness of California around Yosemite. Our friend passed away in Washington, D.C. at a too early age about a year and half ago, from brain cancer. When out there rambling, we used to discuss, among other things, the law, its vagaries and vicissitudes; he wen to Berkeley, we to Chapel Hill, and so we often compared notes on whether there were vastly different teaching methods of the law in the two places. We discovered that there weren't.

Once during one of our rambles, since Justice Douglas liked rambling and we both admired Justice Douglas from our law school days, we discussed Papachristou. Our friend had read Go East, Young Man, just as we were going west from the East; and so, influenced by the book, our friend naturally enough went east from the West, and lived a good and decent life for a quarter century there in the District.

When our friend's obituary appeared in the Washington Post about seventeen months ago, below it was another obituary of a gentleman who had passed away in Montana, a fellow who had played in several bands in and around the District during the latter sixties; one of his bands was, naturally enough, The Vagrants.

From that, we gathered that our friend was probably off on another boundless ramble, probably discussing the law with someone, maybe even this time with Justice Douglas, himself, somewhere out there--beyond the sea.

By the way, the note on Papachristou and the associated editorials were uploaded to the site on January 25, 2005 at a time when we were not even aware of our friend's illness, so quick were its effects. As we put together that note, however, we had those old rambles in and around Yosemite completely in mind. Ten days later, we found out that our friend had passed away six days after we put that note on the site.

He was 97, this old Confederate Veteran John M. Hoover, who died Saturday night. That means that he was nineteen when the war ended, the age [indiscernible words] day, many a youth is just starting to college. This farm lad topped off his sketchy book learning in the grim school of a cause lost beyond any human redemption.

All honor to him, for he was of a breed that, having its faults, had a sustained heroism. And all honor to the five Confederate veterans remaining in Mecklenburg County, to Thomas N. Alexander, A. S. Beatty, C. W. Benson, D. W. Mayes and J. R. Paul. While they live we will cherish, protect and defend them.

There is a good deal of point to the objection of Senator King to the President's order placing under civil service most Federal employees not specifically exempted by law. It does, as he says, plainly mean that many thousands of jobholders, who got their places through politics and who have no special qualifications save political ones, have now been given a security of tenure which they do not deserve.

But, however true it may be in theory that these persons ought all to have been turned out and their places filled by examination, in practice the thing would have set off such an uproar and brought so much political pressure to bear that it couldn't have been done at all. It is characteristic of Mr. Roosevelt that when he eventually got around to doing what he has been promising to do for five years, and what the Democratic platform Bound him to do, he should have done it in a fashion that seriously impaired its immediate value. Yet it is to be said for him that, whether or no, he does have to take practical political exigencies into consideration. At least the thing is somehow done, and in the long pull the outright incompetents, at any rate, will probably be weeded out.

The National Labor Relations Board hauled a new rabbit out of the Wagner Act hat last week. In ruling that the CIO and not the AFL should be exclusive bargaining agency for the longshoremen and warehousemen of the Pacific Coast, it swept aside all consideration of the fact that the men are employed by numerous individual companies organized into six great associations, and made its order binding for the whole business from California to Washington. And to the AFL's protest that it couldn't do that, it retorted that in fact the Wagner Act empowers it to issue its orders on the basis of whatever unit it judges "most appropriate for collective bargaining purposes."

Whether the majority of the employees of every company were CIO men, he didn't bother to say. It merely said that 9,557 of the 12,860 longshoremen and warehousemen on the whole coast had indicated preference for the CIO, and that therefore all of them, company or no company, would have to take it as their agent.

An astounding doctrine, surely. The AFL has continually charged that the NLRB is biased in favor of the CIO. Well, and suppose that it is true? Then, according to this ruling, the board has it entirely within its power to take a poll of, say, the whole body of Southern cotton mill workers, and, finding it ever so slightly favorable to the CIO, to order every mill in the section, scattered through thirteen states, to accept the CIO as sole bargaining agent and take the AFL completely out of the field, though the majority of the workers in many of the individual units might actually prefer the AFL and bitterly object to being run into CIO!

Signor Mussolini, said he, was not worried. Signor Mussolini would answer the bombing of Italian cities by utterly destroying Loyalist Spain.

And yet it was not improbable that Signor Mussolini was somewhat worried. Not much. He could guess that the Spanish Government was probably bluffing. That there was always the possibility--still is--that the madness of desperation might actually move it to do the thing it threatened. And if that happened--oh, yes, Signor Mussolini did have the power and the passion to do just exactly what he promised. But if he did that, he'd be perfectly certain to get off the big war. And Signor Mussolini is realist enough to know that when that war begins, the bombing of cities will not anymore be the exclusive privilege of himself and his little playmate, Hitler. He might bomb Valencia and Madrid out of existence, yes. He might even bomb Paris and London out of existence. But the swift and terrible price of that would be the bombing of Rome--and Berlin--out of existence.

And so Signor Mussolini was probably a little worried. For this kind of prospect is not one to his taste. Signor Mussolini tells the truth when he says he doesn't want war. He only wants the privilege of murdering where he pleases. And to have his way by perpetually threatening to set off the big war.

The order promulgated by President Roosevelt says that banks may now make long-term (over nine months) loans without incurring the disapproval of bank examiners, and they may invest in unlisted bonds, perhaps of small local businesses, provided the bonds are good and are payable at the rate of so much a year. But--lest some impetuous borrower go this very day to his banker and demand a six-year loan on the pretty gilt bonds of Local Enterprises, Inc.--it should be pointed out that the order does not say that the banks have to make such loans. They only may.

And the chances are that local banks, which we may take as typical banks, will continue to do business precisely as they have done it in the past. Standard procedure has been to make loans for more than nine months by the simple expedient of renewing them, within the discretion of the banker, every three or six months. In that respect, the revised code of bank examinations merely assents to such transactions. And as for unlisted bonds of local businesses--bonds are themselves no more than a promise to pay, backed by the hypothecation of stated assets. In a mechanical sense, this feature of the order will probably facilitate the capital financing of small businesses, but it will not change the basic requirements for obtaining credit. In sum, the new regulations liberalize banking procedure, but the final yes or no is still wholly within the authority of the man with the two glass eyes.

We observed last week that the danger about doing nothing to stop Hague is that it encourages others with minds like his own to adopt his methods--that the disease spreads. There was Woonsocket, in Rhode Island, we noted, already taking it up.

And now comes New Orleans. Saturday police there raided CIO headquarters and arrested 84 persons, including six women office workers, on a charge of vagrancy. Only basis for it was that most of the men were on strike against drayage firms in the city, and that New Orleans still clings to a relic of the infamous vagrancy and contract laws which had so much to do with bringing Reconstruction down upon the South, and under which vagrancy becomes whatever the officials want it to be. The cops argued, indeed, that some of the strikers had been stopping trucks illegally, but they did not lodge that charge against any of the prisoners. And as for vagrancy,--if men out on strike are vagrants subject to be arrested as such, then obviously nobody can go on a strike in the United States.

The whole business looks like a nasty attempt to break the strike and haze the CIO under the pretense of enforcing the summary laws--an attempt strictly in the Hague vein.