The Charlotte News

Saturday, July 2, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Here, the second day's account of Gettysburg.

A lot of cynical things have been said about Son Jimmy Roosevelt and his insurance business. Westbrook Pegler has let him have two or three broadsides of sarcasm, and Republicans in Congress, almost every time anything was said about investigating this, that or the other, have suggested investigating Son Jimmy.

Undoubtedly Jimmy is getting ahead financially. A lawyer by training, he gave up the profession for the insurance business when his father became Governor of New York. Jimmy found his father's position valuable then, and it certainly has not decreased in value since the Governor became President. At 30, Jimmy is estimated to be worth a cool half-million, and still it rolls in.

However, there seems to be nothing that can be done about it, not even if it is proved in the hearings in Boston that the National Shawmut Bank switched its insurance from one agency to Jimmy's agency in order, hopefully, to get in good with the administration; not even if it should develop that the Federal Reserve Banks themselves are placing their insurance with Jimmy. The National Shawmut Bank may favor whom it pleases with its patronage. There is a law against trading with the enemy but no law against the enemy's trading with you.

County Commissioner Wearn spoke out in open-meeting about jaypee justice and the practice of paying constables by the arrest. What brought the subject up was the operations of a constable out on the Salisbury Road. He was said to have been arresting motorists for minor violations of the law (whatever minor violations may be), and at first he brought them to County Recorder's Court getting 75 cents per conviction. Soon, however, he switched to a magistrate's court, where the constable's fee is $2.00.

Mr. Wearn thought that officers of the law ought not to work on the fee basis. He said that it creates an incentive to make money out of crime. (Which it does, and worse. It creates an incentive to make crime in order to make money.) He thought the Legislature ought to change the method of pay, and so, begorra, do we.

But it's a funny thing about the Legislature and the jaypee-constable system. Between sessions there is always a lot of talk and apparently a well-defined will to reorganize this outpost of justice. But when sessions are over, again nothing has been done about it. Quite the contrary, the legislators themselves nominate some thousand justices of the peace and legislatorial courtesy sees to it that they are confirmed.

It is a very old controversy, that renewed yesterday between General O. R. Gillette, Confederate veteran in New Orleans, and Mrs. Helen Dortch Longstreet, widow of General James Longstreet, Lee's second in command after the death of Stonewall Jackson. General Gillette charges that Longstreet was responsible for the loss of Gettysburg by waiting until one o'clock to order Pickett's charge when he should have ordered it at eight in the morning. And Mrs. Longstreet retorts that it was General Lee himself who couldn't decide where to make the charge, that Longstreet executed his orders as quickly as he got them, and that there was no breath of criticism of his military record until after 1870.

Longstreet's most recent biographer inclines to side with the lady. Certainly, Lee himself never gave any support to this criticism of Longstreet or the companion charge that he ought to have reached Chancellorsville before the battle was over. General Longstreet, a West Point man and a close personal friend of Grant's, turned Republican in New Orleans after the war and supported the much hated regimes of the carpetbag Governor of Louisiana, Henry C. Warmoth, and the Negro Governor, Pinckney B. S. Pinchback. That was held, throughout the South, to be unforgivable treason in a Confederate officer, and it may very well be that the charges made against him arose purely from later bitterness. On the whole, he seems really less open to criticism than Ewell and Stuart who were off gasconading in useless cavalry forays when they ought to have been at hand.

But it doesn't matter now. The Confederacy's doom was already sealed at Vicksburg, and, eventually, not even the great genius of Lee could have won the Northern campaign and the war.

To do Messer Harry Hopkins full justice, we believe that he despises political coercion of relief workers. We believe, in short, that if it were within his power, a Republican could get on relief as easily as a Democrat, and stay there, without having to answer to anybody for how he voted. But, alas, Messer Harry is only a sort of absentee proprietor.

Relief brims over in Washington and trickles down by successive levels to the men with shovels and the women at sewing machines. And on each of those levels there is stationed to direct the flow an under-official of some kind or another, an under-official invariably chosen because he had political endorsements. That's the way, the only way, they get their jobs, and the only way they keep them is to continue to do whatever political favors their patrons may require of them.

Since these are Federal jobs, it is Federal politicians who have the disposal of them. Which means, in fine, that Senators and Representatives have authority over the distribution of relief in the field, and which means that Congressional committees set up to prevent the use of relief money for political purposes are committees of Congressmen to deter other Congressmen from doing what nearly all Congressmen consider it their inalienable privilege to do.

And that, mates, may be why the Senate Campaign Funds Committee has decided NOT to go into Kentucky, where it is freely charged that the popular Senator "Dear Alben" Barkley is playing the relief prodigal, but to listen out for any utterances that smack of politics from the head men in Washington--where relief, comparatively speaking, is uprightly administered.

Our ubiquitous dramatic department, which has been up in New York looking at the shows, brings word of a musical play called "Pins and Needles." It seems that the Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, with time on its hands because of the new 35-hour week, has organized a musical which, to everybody's amazement, has become a smash hit. A lot of talent was discovered among the hemmers, the stitchers and the corsetmakers, and an amusing travesty has been fitted out on a strictly amateur basis.

This seems a very happy notion and a wonderful relief, for goodness knows, what with John L. Lewis glowering at all of us, Labor has been very un-funny these past few years, scarcely musical. We were inclined to approve the report on "Pins and Needles" as, perhaps, a sort of sophisticated handclasp of palship between the classes, until we heard about a song. It's called "Sing a Song of Social Significance," and is performed by a CIO glamour girl. She says phooey on romance and bids her lovers croon in terms of economies, headlines and world events. Well, we'll have none of that, if you please. It's too realistic, too remindful of the female gazing "with bright and horrible eyes" while men sweat and make a mess of things trying to support her. It smacks of old Barney Shaw, whose women are always factual sirens seeking to devour a man. Indeed, 80 per cent of all the wealth of the nation is today in the hands of women, and it hardly seems necessary to encourage them.

For their part, the editors of The News, such of them as are unencumbered, will continue to go about town these lovely moon-brightened evenings singing sweet lullabies and close-harmonizing pretty sentiments under their girlfriends' windows. We shall sing a song of biological significance, and we dare to hope it will fall on pleased pink ears.