The Charlotte News

Friday March 1, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The Mr. Welles visiting Europe, mentioned in "Lebensraum", was Sumner Welles, Under-Secretary of State.

The Walter Scott of the last piece is not the writer of Scotland, but rather a local gentleman.

Also, brakes didn't get out of alignment, as suggested in "Compromise"; they got out of adjustment. You then had to use your screwdriver, place the tip through the little slot in the hub and turn the little star-wheel one way or the other to readjust them--on drum brakes, that is. (Disc brakes, which they didn't have yet in 1940, except in Germany, don't require adjustment. On cars since 1961, generally, excepting Volkswagens anyway, you just back up and stop.) Wheels, wheels get out of alignment, requiring adjustment of the alignment at the front struts, your camber and your toe angles. But assuming the piece was by Cash, the misnomination comes naturally enough as he never drove and consequently knew little more about cars than that they had loud horns which people took childlike delight in blowing whenever the slighest perturbance suggested the gesture.

It is handy to know these sorts of things, for when you are in your Kombi on your way to Kentucky and the engine blows up in Jellico, Tennessee on a hot Sunday afternoon, it is handy to know these sorts of things; especially when, two years later, in 1980, coming from California to North Carolina, towing your Kombi behind your little blue roadster, and the hitch breaks on a rain-soaked, freezing night in mid-December--two days after someone broke your passenger window on your unlocked little blue roadster to steal your cassette deck while you were asleep upstairs in Kentucky after having traveled 1,500 miles non-stop from Laramie, Wyo., and you haven't had time to replace the window yet, or the cassette deck--the hitch pin welded up for you in Reno, Nev., having just given up the ghost, at the very same exit for Jellico, Tenn., only going east this time rather than west, it is handy to know these sorts of things.

The rest of the page is here.

The Destination Of Most Of That Kentucky Hooch

North Carolina gets 60 per cent of Kentucky's liquor exports, according to Revenue Commissioner H. Clyde Reeves of the Blue Grass State.

Well, and do North Carolina's 27 wet counties explain that? It does not seem quite probable on the face of the matter. All the wet counties, save Durham, lie to the east of Raleigh. And all of them are so situated that their most obvious and easiest source of supply is the liquor-producing cities ranging northward from Baltimore along the Atlantic coast.

Nor is there any evidence that the Eastern Tar Heels are finicking souls who resolutely refuse to wet their whistles on anything but bourbon straight from the Dark and Bloody Ground.

On the other hand, the dry counties mainly lie in the western half of the state. And for them, Kentucky happens to be the nearest and easiest source of supply. And that is especially true of the dry counties of which Mecklenburg and the thriving town of Charlotte are the center. A short and perfectly legal ride across Tennessee, and there you are in the blooming land of prohibition with a load of the oh-be-joyful, presumably and quite legally headed for South Carolina until you draw up a few miles short of the border in Charlotte or Gastonia or Shelby or Concord.

And lest there be any doubt about it, Commissioner Reeves himself reveals that Kentucky's annual revenue from taxes on liquor shipped to dry territory comes to $460,000. Sixty per cent of $460,000 is $276,000.

It is a pretty fair indication of just how prohibition prohibits, and the staggering cost to North Carolina of attempting to maintain the pious fiction that it works.

Training Should Solve The Problem In Upper Levels

A recent story in The News on the Negro servant problem prompts Edward W. Brice, president of the Clinton College For Negroes--a normal and industrial school at Rock Hill operated on the same lines as the famous Tuskegee Institute in Alabama--to advise us that his institution has inaugurated a course for the training of domestic servants.

The servant problem in the South is not simple or easy of solution. That the general wage level is too low to furnish the Negroes engaged in the trade an adequate living is obvious. However, it is to be said also that many thousands--perhaps the majority--of Southern people who employ servants for full or part time belong to economic levels which in the North do all their own work. They make little money, and must take account of every extra dollar--employ servants precisely because wages are low.

And any general wage increase would certainly drive many of them to doing without servants--thus decreasing employment.

What the solution may be, we do not know. But the Clinton College plan seems a sensible approach to at least one angle of the case. Employers in the upper economic brackets can afford to pay wages better than the average have generally paid them even for half-efficient servants. And given an opportunity to secure fully trained and efficient servants, many of them will certainly be willing to pay in proportion.

S. C. House Yields To Uproar Of Motorists

South Carolina's Legislature is exercised over a law passed at the last session, which provides for the safety inspection of automobiles. One member of the House told the Roads, Bridges, and Ferries Committee of that body that if he didn't get the law repealed, he'd have to move out of his county. Disgruntled motorists made it impossible for him to move from place to place, he said. Inspectors were tough, and the automobile-owners didn't like it.

The committee proceeded to approve a House resolution to ask the cops to relax the strict enforcement of the statute. It seems to us that they had better have repealed it outright and been done with it. A law which, by invitation of the law-making body, is not to be enforced, is worse than no law at all.

Legislatures everywhere may as well make up their minds that if they have any serious intention of controlling the prevailing traffic anarchy and reducing the appalling toll of human life annually taken by it, they are going to have to ignore the roars of many motorists.

Traffic experts are universally agreed that the two worst factors in the situation are: (1) speed, and (2) the fact that 75 per cent of the automobiles are constantly in such condition as to constitute a menace. But the average motorist will not admit it.

Oh, yes, it may be dangerous for somebody else to push a car over the road at 80 miles an hour, but not for an expert like himself. Oh, yes, his brakes may be a little worn and out of alignment, but his hands and eyes are quicker than most people's, and he knows a lot of ingenious little tricks most people don't know. And he has been doing this so long that he considers it a gross violation of his rights if you attempt to stop him.

But if there is to be any safety on the roads, he will have to be stopped soon or late.

Our Mr. Welles' Visit Is Likely To Obscure Facts

The Welles visit to Europe promises to have the single result of affording Adolf Hitler a chance to sound off and pose as a bleeding martyr--to the conviction of a great many pussyheads in America and elsewhere.

Already the Hitler cohorts have begun to shout that all they want is lebensraum. And what is lebensraum? According to the gentle Nazis, it is:

But by the record, it is something a little different from that, to-wit:

That Middle European region occupied by the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Croats, the Slovenes, the Serbs, the Rumanians, the Greeks, etc. in which Nazi Germany claims the rights--

(1) To destroy their autonomous and native culture and replace it with the new barbarism with which it has already replaced the old highly developed cultures of Germany and Austria:

(2) to set up the doctrine that the Germans are by blood a master race and that it is the business of other peoples humbly to obey and serve them;

(3) systematically to exterminate intellectual leaders of these people;

(4) to confiscate the property of these people and give it to Germans;

(5) to humiliate these people by such devices as making them tip their hats to Germans, stand out of the streets for Germans, wait calmly to be served after Germans, wear yellow crosses on their backs, etc.;

(6) to cow these people by mass murders, concentration camps and devilish tortures; and

(7) finally to enslave the whole lot of the survivors for the enrichment of Germans.

People of the city read with sorrow yesterday of the deaths of three of its well-known, esteemed men: Howard Payne Conway, Walter Scott, David B. Smith. Though they varied in ages and interests and associations, the three had in common one striking quality. They set store by fellowship.

And to their fellowships they brought, each of them, charm and wit and good spirits which made them the most delightful companions. Conway of the inimitable stories, Scott of the keen humor, Smith the conversationalist--they were welcome to any gathering.

One thing more they had in common, and that was ability. In its expression, this varied: and each of the three was not to be distracted from the main business of life, which they saw as living. But ability they had, and it carried them to success in their endeavors.

Yet the dominant characteristic of these three to whom death came at once was always that good fellowship. They contributed to the enjoyment and the gaiety and the understanding of their friends, and that is a heritage which any man would be proud to leave.