The Charlotte News

Tuesday, February 8, 1938

SEVEN EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Liquidating Niemoeller" makes a prediction at its end which would come true, though for many other reasons than the imprisonment of the Reverend Niemoeller in a concentration camp--as at the conclusion, there was no one left to speak out for Hitler other than his own Luger.

As to "Two Kill Themselves", many things could be said and read into it. Instead, we simply say again: Goo goo goo-joob.

It has been a long time, almost since this "recession" (we hope) started, that any report has been made here on the position of the Treasury. For a while we reported nearly every day, first under the caption, "How Long?"and after that under "Hold On, Everybody!"

But finally, fearing the repetition would become monotonous, we held off. The Treasury, however, kept right on. It had to. Congress was appropriating the money, and the Treasury had to supply it. So far this fiscal year, the Treasury has had to supply $935,835,136.11 in excess of revenue to support the New Deal in the style to which it early became accustomed. The figure represents the deficit for the year, but it is hoped that income tax payments on March 15 will bring it down.

As for the national debt, it, with the substitution of social security taxes for borrowings, is about holding its own. The last accounting puts it at $37,514,176,888.11, which is about $300 for every man, woman and child in America. It isn't going up very fast, but it isn't coming down at all.

A man named O'Neill--Mr. John F. O'Neill, of Jersey City, in Hagueland,--yesterday told a committee of the New Jersey Legislature that:

That seems natural enough, coming from a bagman for His Majesty Frank (I am the Works) Hague. There is no doubt that the rule in Hagueland is not to "obey the law strictly." Wholly apart from the fact that in his domain the whole Bill of Rights has been abolished, there is the matter of the $400,000 banked by His Majesty during eight years when his total salary came only to $56,000.

But if it may be conceded that once that Mr. O'Neill admirably sets forth the practice of Hagueland, we they may still be permitted to doubt the conclusion he draws--that it is all "for the best interests of the people." For last year the cost of running the government of Jersey City, under Mayor Hague's rule, was $27,000,000--four times the budgets of Kansas City and New Orleans, each of which has 100,000 more people than Jersey City, and each of which is dominated by a notoriously corrupt and wasteful political machine.

The action of the American Federation of Labor in expelling the United Mine Workers, the Mine, Mill, & Smelter Workers, and the Flat Glass Workers, does not, we opine, completely close the door to eventual reconciliation between the federation and the CIO. For there is indubitably much strong sentiment among the rank and file of both sides for a united front.

Nevertheless, it does, of course, leave them a good deal further apart than before, and there begins to be a much stronger possibility that we shall permanently have two big labor bodies in the country, the one embracing the old-fashioned craftsmen and skilled mechanics, and the other the workers in mass production industries where little craftsmanship or mechanical skill is required. Perhaps, indeed, and though there are many reasons why labor would be better off united, that is the logic of the case. For craftsmen and skilled mechanics are naturally jealous of the advantages which their craftsmanship and skill give them. And on the other hand, the men in the main production industries are just as naturally impatient of them. It is hard for two such groups, with interests that often must conflict, to act together.

Two resolutions recently adopted in the city were,

(1). By the Ministerial Association, stating emphatically that their opposition to an open Sunday, by which was meant the legalization of "sports and entertainment for which admission is charged and for the carrying on of which people will be forced to work on the Lord's day;"

(2). By the Charlotte Typographical Union, advocating repeal of the Blue Laws.

Now, there's a come-off. The ministers are prepared to go down the line to preserve inviolate the working man's day off, and the working man himself, as represented by the printing trade, wants that day opened up. Another paradox is that many of this particular group of working men have only a vestige of what the ministers choose to call the "civil Sabbath" remaining to them. They have to work until 2 or 3 o'clock Sunday morning, and some of them have to go back to work Sunday afternoon. And still another paradox is that it is this very group, which wants an open Sunday, that Councilman Albea, a stanch Blue Law advocate, is supposed to speak for in Council.

We can't make heads or tails of it. The ministers insist upon saving the working man, and the working man insists upon not being saved. Councilman Albea, labor's representative, votes Nay to opening up, whereas a body of his constituents resolve Yea. But somewhere in this disorderly division there must be an explanation of it. We think we know what the nub of it is. It all comes down to this simple question: shall the people of the city be allowed to play golf and tennis and go to baseball games on Sunday?

Adolf Hitler, having finally brought the army and the Junkers to heel, now turns to the "liquidating" of Dr. Niemoeller, about the only opposition to the Nazi dispensation left in Germany. It seems a set-up. One man. With no other weapons than his words, his conscience, and his willingness to go to jail in vindication of his right to his words and his conscience. And against that, well, Adolph has his detention camps, his storm troopers skilled in the art of beating up recalcitrants, and, if necessary, the headsman with his axe.

But maybe Adolf had better not be too sure about liquidating Dr. Niemoeller. Indeed, he may even find that every time he liquidates Dr. Niemoeller, the doctor will pop back whole and bigger than life.

Men are strange creatures. And they have believed for many centuries now that such men as Dr. Niemoeller are admirable. They hold the memory of such fellows in reverence, treasure up their words and sayings, and sometimes make up their minds themselves to go out and fight for their ideas. Let Adolf look to himself. The man whose liquidation he is preparing may turn out to be no other than Adolf Hitler.

In Chicago young John L. Kellogg, grandson of old W. W. Kellogg, the cereal king at Battle Creek, is found dead with a shotgun by his side--obviously a suicide. And over at High Point a 48-year-old cotton mill worker hangs himself.

The latter might seem more or less explicable. The man was poor, and he was getting on in years. But how to explain the case of Kellogg? He was rich. He had youth. He appears to have been in good health. And he had not been long married to a wife with whom he seems to have been on good terms. In short, he apparently had every reason to like life. Yet he goes into his office, apparently, in cheerful humor, calmly writes a note announcing his intention, and proceeds to blow out his brains.

But suicide is like that. Probably the mill worker did not kill himself for the reasons we have noted. According to the psychiatrists, men almost never do kill themselves for major reasons. They kill themselves for slight disappointments and to escape small problems.

Cincinnati University archeologists, digging in the great hill of Hisarlik, found that there are no bones of horses to be found in any of the nine "cities of Troy" below the sixth one, which is just below the one that Homer sang. From which they deduce that the Trojans and Asia Minor in general did not have horses until a fairly late date--say, somewhere about 1500 B. C.

That is contrary to what has generally been believed. The place of the origin of the horse is still by no means certain. Sometimes he is made to have come from the great steppes of Mongolia. Again, from the country around the Caspian. And still again, from Libya. One thing is certain, though: he didn't come from Arabia, as popular tradition has it. And another thing, which seems fairly certain is that he did get into Europe long before 1500 B. C. As a little, wild shaggy fellow, much like the wild ponies in modern Russia, he was known to Aurignacian man and to all the Neolithic tribes who, after him, dwelt in what is now Southern France. They did not appear to domesticate him until late, and for many years he was simply a favorite form of game. Great piles of his bones have been unearthed about prehistoric camp sites in the basin of the Rhone.

But how came it about that he stayed in Europe perhaps ten thousand years without ever getting over into Greece and Asia Minor? Perhaps the great mountain barriers of the Alps and the Balkans explain it.