The Charlotte News

Monday, August 29, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The letter to the editor, the subject of "Any More Opinions?", and the other frozen in mid-air memories of the day are here.

Herbert Agar, the subject of the letter, would be scheduled, but for a snowstorm in Louisville, to speak at the posthumous presentation of the Mayflower Society Literary Cup to Cash for The Mind of the South on December 5, 1941 in Raleigh, the inclement weather prompting Agar's being replaced at the last minute by Josephus Daniels, newly retired Ambassador to Mexico.

Just why it was, incidentally, that Heywood Broun, whose opinions for the most part appear simpatico or at least complementary to those of Cash, irritated so, we don't know. Just why he applied to Broun the moniker "the pink walrus" we have also thus far failed to determine; perhaps there will be a clue later. But there it is. Mr. Broun, incidentally, would die of pneumonia December 18, 1939 at age 51. Of the regular syndicated columnists appearing in The News, we ourselves find him the most regularly engaging. Perhaps, that makes us pink, or at least given to enjoy oysters, Balkanized or not.

Within the book, Cash would expand on the same general opinion set forth in "Well, Virginia?":

But on the higher level the South had men whose integrity, by their lights, was not open to doubt, or but little open to doubt--men of ability. Such men as Carter Glass and Harry Byrd, of Virginia, and Josiah William Bailey, of North Carolina, for example. But neither Glass nor Byrd showed much interest in the fundamental problems of the South, even as they affected their own state. Both called themselves Jeffersonians, but they were clearly far from actually believing in the ideas of the "leveling" Mr. Jefferson. What they believed in, if one is to judge by the record, was a system of state aid to the wealthier classes which should not go quite so far as the high-tariff Republicans wanted to carry it, and which would show more regard for large landowners. As I have indicated, both have bitterly fought all proposals to repeal the poll tax in Virginia, which disfranchises about sixty per cent of the white people of the state in general elections, and with success. Senator Glass grandly ignores the question of tenantry and sharecropping and unemployment altogether. And so far as I am aware, Senator Byrd's sole approach to them is to insist that $1.25 a day is quite adequate pay for the men who pick the apples on his plantations.

In fine, two honest and able examples of the sort of mind which takes it for granted that the interests of the classes to which they belong are the only ones which need to be taken into account in making dispositions for the nation and the South--the kind of mind I have portrayed as being generally bred by the conditions of the South among the upper orders of the region.

Bailey is a somewhat different case. In North Carolina he is generally called a "scholar." He is in fact something less than that, but he is a man with a better background than is usual in a Southern senator. He is much more aware of the fundamental problems of the South than the Glasses and the Byrds. But he is quite as conservative as either of the Virginians when it comes to remedies. Eager to hold power, he plays the Democratic hierarchical game for all it is worth, and directs his efforts mainly to pleasing the conservative large landowners and the industrial and commercial interests in North Carolina. And, fancying himself as a constitutional lawyer, he is always more interested in legalisms than in realities.

(The Mind of the South, Book Three, Chap. III, "Of the Great Blight--and New Quandaries", Section 22, pp. 420-21)

For a subsequent opinion re "No Hard and Fast Rule", on the Los Angeles Times contempt conviction, after its affirmance by the California Supreme Court, before that opinion was reversed by the United States Supreme Court in an opinion delivered by Justice Black, issued December 8, 1941, see "Contempt", February 4, 1940. (The Hauptmann trial to which incidental reference is made in the piece is of course that of Bruno, the alleged, convicted and executed Lindbergh child kidnaper of 1932. Grave concerns have often been raised as to the reality of his guilt and whether or not the extant fiery vigilante mise en scène surrounding his trial, as fanned by the yellow papers, together with his being German, did not fuel his being tried and convicted long before the twelve sat in deliberation--chief evidence against him having been unreliable eyewitnesses to his having been in the vicinity of the Lindbergh home, a ransom note of his putative but questionable authorship, and his having in his possession some of the alleged ransom money and a hand-crafted wooden ladder used to grab the baby from its second floor room; but ladders are ladders and wood is wood, of a pretty common variety, one would naturally assume; and, speaking of third degree tactics, later accounts suggested the planting of the bulk of the physical evidence and beating of Hauptmann to draw a confession. In any event, he died ignominiously in 1936, proclaiming his innocence to the end, in the midst of a societal circus in Boss Hague's New Jersey.)

That's about all we can say 'bout all that.

Well, Virginia?

Absolutely unpardonable were Secretary Ickes' gratuitous and insulting smears at Tacoma Saturday about Senator Glass of Virginia. Nobody in his senses would call Carter Glass a political hypocrite. He is one of the few completely honest and honorable men in Washington today.

That he is far from being a progressive of the Ickes variety or any other, even his closest friends will concede. He is Old School both in his personality and his philosophy of government. But he has that essential cornerstone of character which many public men today consider secondary to their turgid social impulses. That is, he has integrity. It has never been questioned before, and if there is anything his associates and his state can do about it, they ought not to allow it to be questioned with impunity now.

So This Is Progress*

That Senator Cotton Ed Smith is one who thinks in terms of the past, as the President characterized him yesterday, is, at 74, altogether natural. Cotton Ed's platform reads like an item from the 100-year-ago column in the ancient Charleston News & Courier. The astounding part of it is that one of the planks of old wood in Cotton Ed's platform--the correction of tariff inequalities--is still unattended to even in this sixth year of the New Deal.

And that Olin Johnston, his 41-year-old opponent, thinks, as the President said he did, in terms of 1938, is as plain as day. It so happens that 1938 is a Senatorial election year, and Olin is like any other politician in wanting the worst way to be elected. It means everything to him.

But in staking the New Deal to so weak a reed as Governor Johnston, the President pulls both a boner politically and at the same time brings the perspective of his own thinking into question. Cotton Ed's luster may have dimmed with the years, but Olin never had any. If it is with such instruments that the New Deal operation is to be performed, the patient would do well to let Nature take his course.

No Hard and Fast Rule

Most newspapers like nothing better than to be hauled into court about something they consider within their rights. It always makes lively reading and puts them in a light that they consider at least heroic. In all probability, the Los Angeles Times, a Hearst paper which last week was fined on five counts for contempt of court, didn't mind at all, since its differences with the court were over editorials it had printed deliberately while various cases were in process of adjudication. But it is plain to see that the court minded, and what the court deplores, it can sock.

This question of the propriety of commenting on court cases before they are finally settled is one that the English, either by law or custom, we don't know which, had answered in the negative. It isn't done. But the American press, pushed on by enormous vigor and impatience with the deliberate processes of the law, refuses to acknowledge any such restraint. During the Hauptmann trial, for instance, many American editors, convinced they had it all figured out, were chanting a daily bloody chorus of fe-fi-fo-fum. Special writers were reaching special verdicts at every stage of the trial, and if the Hauptmann jurors read their special writings, it is a wonder that they took so long to find him guilty.

But this one instance is not enough to serve as the basis of a rule against the practice. Nor, for that matter, is the British press to be held up as a model, for American readers would never tolerate its unobtrusiveness. We suspect that perhaps the best policy for this country is that which is exemplified in the Los Angeles affair. If newspapers seek to prejudice a court case or in any way to show contempt for a court, let them stand the consequences.

It All Depends

The Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee has put the kibosh on David Lasser's little scheme for raising $30,000 from WPA workers for a political hope chest. Senator McKellar has notified him to drop it--not because WPAers shall not spend their money as they please, but because it may be against the law. Many of the officials of Lasser's Workers Alliance are on relief, and the law makes it a crime for persons receiving Federal compensation to solicit political contributions from other Federal employees.

Whether relief clients are employees is something for the lawyers to figure out. Senator McKellar, however, has proceeded on the confident assumption that they are. But a fellow committeeman, Senator Sheppard, expressed an exactly contrary opinion--under, to be sure, a different set of circumstances. To be sure.

To the 270,000 WPA workers in Pennsylvania, a letter soliciting campaign contributions went out over the signature of Pennsylvania's Senator Guffey, the gent of Allen Property Custodian bad name. That Senator Guffey, who is in Europe, authorized his signature, is yet to be established; but without waiting for this information, Senator Sheppard proceeded to say:

"At first blush, I can't see where this comes under our resolution."

The Senator should blush again, for apparently he and Senator McKellar between them have laid down the rule that what David Lasser does is very much the Senate Campaign Expenditures Committee's business, whereas what another member of the lodge may have done is none of their affair.

Any More Opinions?

The remarks of a correspondent in today's letter column about the relative merits of The News' editorial page columnists are most interesting to us. The opinions of the dear little readers about the printed words here spread out for their enlightenment and edification are difficult to obtain. This gentleman, now--for all his complimentary approach, it is dislike rather than the opposite that moves him to put pen to paper, and it is Agar he dislikes. Johnson and Thompson and our own poor editorials he has a kind word for.

But about Agar. He is not, frankly, our choice of all the world's political commentators. But he presents a view that very much needs presenting in newspapers these days, if the other side of the argument is to be covered at all. He is boldly pro-New Deal, and what is better, he is in dead earnest. We satisfied ourselves on that score before we hired him.

His theme--and sometimes it freezes our thoughts in mid-air, so to speak, as though he might be uttering judgments--is that Roosevelt is in reality the champion of the ungrateful conservatives, the last left hope of a capitalistic society. Agar believes that. And anyhow, he doesn't make us mad the way Heywood Broun does.

The Third Degree

Writing in the current issue of the United States Law Review, Mr. Henry Kutz concludes that the third degree methods of the police are inexcusable not only because they are brutal but also because they fail utterly to accomplish their purpose.

"The victims thinks only of relief from the present agony; he will say anything to obtain that; the result is consequently merely a matter of chance--the truth is irrelevant."

So much ought to go without the saying for anybody that has any familiarity with the history of torture in criminal cases in the past. Contrary to popular beliefs, such torture was not a heritage from savagery. Some savages, or rather barbarians, like the Iroquois Indians, sometimes practiced torture but only for sadistic delight in the thing itself and not as a supposed means of getting at the truth. That was left for medieval stupidity to invent, and the record of medieval times and of the Spanish Inquisition is full of cases where, under torture, men, women and children solemnly confessed to all sorts of crimes, such as witchcraft, which have no actual existence.

Maybe Mr. Kutz overlooks something. The cops are, after all, men with jobs which they want to keep. And if they fail to produce men on whom crimes can be pinned, they are very likely to be fired as inefficient. Nobody supposes that many of them would be willing to pin a crime on a man they thought innocent. But they invariably begin by assuming that the man they have seized is probably guilty, and so set themselves busily to work to make him admit it, and so make their own position safe. To be sure, as Mr. Kutz points out, it is not their business to determine guilt, but the courts'. But not many American cops are aware of that distinction or can even make it.

Site Ed. Note: Incidentally, if you were thinking that perhaps we either deliberately tailored that note from June, 2002 to fit this day's print, or that we looked at this day's print before writing that back in 2002, you'd be wrong--dead wrong. Go figure. Nothing, after all, to get hung up about.

So you say you want to change the Constitution? Maybe you could trouble to ask us first there, sparky.


Framed Edition
[Return to Links-Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News--Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.