The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 26, 1937

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We provide each of the editorials separately for today's column, with the exception of "Free Ride" on deficit spending, a favorite bogey of the column long before Cash came aboard. It is likely each of these pieces, save perhaps "Purity Unregulated", was by Cash, certainly "What's the Difference?"

So, we again (and for the first time) note the poser: was this Cash's first day as Associate Editor? In any event, it was somewhere along in here.

The sharp differences between the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization have been typified to the country, of course, by the caustic utterances of Mr. John L. Lewis on the subject of Mr. William Green and the equally caustic utterances of Mr. William Green on the subject of Mr. John L. Lewis. Some of their dissertations on one another have been classics in vitriol. Though confining themselves to words polite enough to be printable in newspapers, they have shown that they had enough stuff on the bawl-out to put a top sergeant or a mule-skinner to shame.

Wherefore, now that tentative peace overtures between these two divergent labor movements have produced the conference in Washington, it is surprising to find neither President Green nor Headman Lewis present in person. And perhaps it is as well, for we know of no worse way to open a peace conference than to proceed to cuss out the other side. But, oh, the country's going to be denied some choice maledictions.

Sulfanilamide is probably going to be suspect in the public mind for a long time now. Which is a pity. For there is nothing dangerous about the drug itself. It is almost a specific for gonorrhea, and yesterday's dispatches carried a story of its having saved the lives of eleven victims of meningitis. The fatal "elixir" which has figured in the stories lately and which killed a number of persons, was fatal not because it contained sulfanilamide but because it contained other drugs which acted with sulfanilamide to produce toxic effects. The mistake was the mistake of the combining chemist.

Ultimately, however, everyone of these deaths from this "elixir" is due to a hole in the Pure Food and Drug Act. There is no requirement that untried combinations of new and perhaps dangerous drugs be submitted to test and thorough-going analysis before being offered to the public. It is a capital flaw in the statutes, one which seems well-nigh beyond comprehension in this day of grandiose Federal regulation.

Concord's civic organizations are up in arms over the proposal of the Highway Commission to route the Charlotte-Salisbury road around their city rather than through it.

Well, we can appreciate the sentiments of civic pride and interest which actuate them. They want their towns seen and they want what trade passing automobilists may do Concord merchants. Exactly the same sentiments come up in Charlotte when it is proposed to route the highways here around the city. Just the same---.

Such sentiments were right and proper when Charlotte and Concord were still sleepy villages and North Carolina's traffic problem was one of a few thousand automobiles strung out over hundreds of miles of bad roads. But Charlotte and Concord are no longer sleepy villages. They are most devilishly beset with traffic problems strictly of their own. And to pour in the vast army of automobiles which crowd the State highways seems something less than common sense for Concord or Charlotte--and certainly, something less than consideration for the automobilists on the highways. It simply means a continual traffic snarl, interminable delays, and frayed tempers--with the result that the itinerant not only doesn't stop and admire the town but often goes his halting way roundly cursing it for an unmitigated nuisance.

Signor Mussolini, by the constant confession of his speeches and his kept press and radio, is out to save an ungrateful world from the Red Menace. That, have no doubt of it, is why he is in Spain. And that, too, is why he must keep expanding his armament program. He must have it to establish fascism over the world as a bulwark against the beast of communism.

It is a moving spectacle. And yet, somehow, it is not difficult to understand why such decadent democracies as Great Britain and France, to say nothing of our own soft, crass land, do remain less than properly grateful for his disinterested passion in their behalf. It seems to them, of course, that the Red Menace is after all simply the menace of collectivism--a form of society or organization they don't like. And it is the irony of Signor Mussolini's great anti-Red passion that in order to raise money in semi-bankrupt Italy, he has already had to nationalize the banks and major industries. And that now he has just laid a ten per cent levy on all capital in Italy.

To be saved from collectivism under a Red piece of bunting by collectivism under the fasces seems, after all, a somewhat barren boon.

Efforts to brand the whole American labor movement as a plain racket whereunder cunning leaders fatten their pocketbooks by deluding their followers, command little respect from unbiased men. Nevertheless, there is a grave weakness in the labor union set-up which ought not to be blinked--a weakness which plainly lays the way wide open to the development of profit-sharing on the part of the leaders. We refer to the fact that labor unions make practically no reports of their expenditures and receipts, and leave not only the public but the individual member completely in the dark as to what is done with his money.

The American Federation of Labor does, indeed, make a report--the current one showing that it collected $1,184,478.99 and paid out for expenses $1,167,317.57 during the last fiscal year. Some of the vast subsidiaries which in fact make up the strength of the AFL, as the International Typographical Union, also make reports. But as for the CIO, there are no reports of any kind. George E. Sokolsky, in The Commentator for September, estimates the actual take of the United Mine Workers, John Lewis's own union, at more than seven million dollars in a twelve months' period. And if one allows for the fact that Mr. Sokolsky obviously doesn't care for the unions and cuts the estimate half in two, the remainder is still an enormous sum to collect from 400,000 mine workers.

We confess to some little native curiosity as to what the take of the unions is, and to what purposes they put it. But that is curiosity only. What is more important is that in common self-interest the individual member of the union is entitled to know. And--assuming the absence of any racketeering--it is obvious that the way to gag this charge once and for all is to make the figures public.