The Charlotte News

Thursday, October 2, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Dorothy Thompson's column of the day, her last for a month as she departed for vacation, exhorted the country to face the tough issue of whether it should go to war in Europe, but counseled that the decision should resolve itself on ideological differences with Nazi Germany, not emotion generated over what she terms "incidents". She contrasts the Lindbergh line of creating essentially a United States governed on Nazi lines with the unrealistic but nevertheless dissimilar view of isolation which Herbert Hoover held, that the British and Russians, together with the Free French and other dissenting forces within the Nazi-occupied and conquered countries and possessions of Europe, would rise to the task of defeating Hitler without the direct involvement of the United States.

Was it better to fight then, while the battlefield was still "over there", or wait and risk the annihilation of the last democracies over there, until the fight was over here, not so much necessarily waged on a battlefield by then, but on the less tangible road of ideological and tendentious Big Lie propaganda, the war waged from within, utilizing to its fullest extent our most prescious freedom to accomplish it in order to boot-stomp it to death?

Before her return to the prints, the most critical incident yet involving U.S. military personnel would occur on the high seas off Iceland--the sinking of a destroyer of which you may have heard. More on that on the last day of October.

But yet, demonstrating the restraint of Job, the country would not go to war even then. The luxury of time to permit greater preparation for war, however, was fast running through the glass.

We shall dedicate October 1941 therefore to the patient, even as they fell, and, most especially, to the hundred, those who perished there in the dark on that cold and watery night.

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