The Charlotte News

Thursday, June 5, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: This day's column appears to be one in transitional phase while the new editorial writer obtained the feel of the reins, the larger part of it relating to local matters.

Perhaps, the sudden dearth of editorials on the war itself suggested all of society's cautiously wary adjustment to the underlying notion conveyed by the President's speech of a week earlier, that war involving the United States was coming, that only emergent means were needed to afford time to build the competitive industrial resolve to achieve military capability to face it when finally it came.

The foreboding harbinger of self-destruction of which "Soldier Strike?" imagines would never occur, even with respect to private defense industry--which, after Pearl Harbor, encompassed most of the country's labor force, down to the truck gardener operating exclusively in his or her own backyard. By 1944, the President would brag in a September campaign speech before cheering Teamsters that less than one-half of one percent of all man-hours of labor since Pearl Harbor had been lost because of strikes. It was an admirable record of unity in a society resolved finally to defeat fascism, even if such unity had come at the price of a rude awakening struck by the foreigner who looked different while doing obeisance to the fascist model, not just the one who thought in fascist, empirical terms, the latter having inspired in resistance at best ambivalence, the easy dismissal of the conflict as being "over there". Yet, too, Hawaii was not yet a state, and a long way from the mainland of the United States, and so it even might also have been dismissed as "over there" but for the fact that the Fleet was unmistakably our own, the dead, our citizens and soldiers. Regardless of how it came, it came. And the terms were then struck, the populace instantly galvanized finally to act and immediately, not tomorrow.

But that something had already transpired within the minds of a large segment of society well before Pearl Harbor is evidenced by the transition we observe to have taken place in Cash himself over time. Witness, for instance, in "MacDonald", November 10, 1937, his receptiveness to the anti-war sentiments of Ramsey MacDonald voiced in the fall of 1914 after the guns of August, or his defense of pacifist Bertrand Russell in the face of his first being hollered down by Neanderthalers from the offer of a philosophy chair at Berkeley, then being barred by the courts of New York from teaching at CCNY in spring, 1940, albeit in the latter case at least ostensibly for his views on open marriage, not his pacifism, as expressed in "At It Again", March 14, 1940, "Bad Logic", April 2, 1940, and "Sales Boost", April 23, 1940; and compare those pieces to his diatribes against Lindbergh and the America Firsters of spring, 1941, as exemplified by "A Parallel", March 24, 1941, and "A Formula for Unity", April 24, 1941. Compare that again to Cash's own general pacifist sentiments displayed in the "Moving Row" column he wrote for The News on March 18, 1928, "Who Nurtures War?"

The times had changed; the stakes had become much higher than merely the question of support for war or not against a war of conquest and re-conquest somewhere else in the world. The question was no longer one of general pacifism, but whether the free world could any longer survive in the face of active taunting by those bent on seeing that there would any longer be no such thing as pacifism in the world, that all would be enslaved to the will of war to the end of war with full employment to that end the answer to unemployment--the latter sentiment being echoed even so close to home as by Charlotte's own Dave Clark in summer, 1938 in his Textile Bulletin, directly attacking Cash and Dowd of The News in the process for their supposed Red sympathies, nay, for their supposedly being Reds, for daring to suggest Hitler and Nazism all bad.

The times were confusing.

Dorothy Thompson's piece on the page this day speaks in those very terms of confusion--on the politics of the "New Order" of Fascism being defeatism offered to those who were the prey by the predator, contrasting, in a strange twist, that New Order with something seemingly thought by Ms. Thompson as laudable in traditional Fascism, the centralizing of power in a militaristic order, in which all of capital and industrial drive in the society is based purely on the military model and insuring continuity and sustenance of that military model, corporate syndicalism in the hands of Mussolini.

If that was the message of the piece--and we do not assume necessarily that it was--we would rejoinder that there is nothing inevitable or laudable in that model, however our own society has tended toward it over time, perhaps during the entire industrial age since the Civil War. There has always been a tension in this society, probably in any industrialized democratic society, especially ones with large populations, between the realization of liberty, both personal and economic, and the apparent necessity for achievement of that liberty to create a system to sustain it which has fascist characteristics, that is built in part at least on a military model with industrial concomitants to sustain that military, built in part at least on notions of empire to sustain the raw materials necessary to keep that military model functioning, etc. And the sway of that society being one way, toward full embrace of that military model, then the other in reaction and repulsion to it, toward the democratic ideal, with less stress on the military, a swaying tendency not unlike that Wave of the Future the Fascists in this country believed in during the time of Hitler and Mussolini.

That tension exists historically in the United States as surely as the tension between a strong centralized government and states rights.

Neither, however, is inevitable, we posit, in the sense that those tensions have inexorably led us to war, either civil or against foreign sovereigns.

But in a time when two world wars had broken out in Europe in the span of 25 years, when, added to that, there was new empire quest in the Pacific, equally unsettling that region of the world, when empire quest and fascism appeared synonymous and a resistless third rail of mankind through the centuries prior to the twentieth century, perhaps it was a foregone conclusion that the world, in order to subsist, had to do so on some basis other than by pure democracy, that piracy was an inevitable concomitant to this third rail; and that any world order in which mutual trade was an objective to be sought, as opposed to warring for scarce goods and raw materials in the homeland, was a dream for starry-eyed idealists not familiar with the complexities of the human creature, especially its dark side. Such was the pessimism of the age, an age now gone, and one which need not come again, which need not subsist by that tension, if only the human creature might be made to understand that it may subsist and live comfortably without that tension, without the excitement bred by war or its omnipresent threat.

For succumbing to that pessimism, assuming that the adult thing to do, the realistic thing to do, is to accept the reality of such fascist modalities running as the third rail even in democracies, to keep those trains running on time, is also to deny that freedom is ever a dream to be realized, freedom not to do as one wants in whatever way one wants impinging on the rights of others, but nevertheless freely to think and express one's self, absolved not by man but the inherent nature of the human being from royal edicts or the least bit of chilling of that expression by any authority whatsoever, essentially the freedoms to be an individual, the dream of which freedoms that gave birth to the United States.

It is not the freedom of cynicism, to assume that one must work to have freedom, that "freedom is not free". That is an oxymoronic view of freedom, a fascist view of freedom, an enslaved view of freedom.

Freedom most definitely is free, and for the taking, not something about which one must work or labor. As the Founders put it, one manifested directly from God, not from man.

In any event, in keeping with a former tradition of The News, we shall revisit the editorial page of three years ago this date, June 5, 1938, all to provide you something shocking, though we think not a third rail or anything tending toward fascism or cynicism. Whether on Thursday night, incidentally, her stockings needed mending, or whether her father darned his socks in the night all alone, we don't know. Our friend in the Caribbean who provided that part of the roman à clef has never told us.

Just why that comes to mind, you'll have to figure for yourself.

Installment 4 of Jan Valtin's book is here. Sorry Miss Gurley, old Superman is back. Guess they just supplanted him with the Royal Crown bearing blind date for a day. Whether Superman was a girly-man, we don't know. But we hope you and your little sister survived nevertheless, even amid the cattle rustlers taking on Red Ryder and the boys headed for Frisco.

That said, as an added bonus track, comes to mind a referral for you also to the pieces and notes of November 2, 1938, even if it isn't anywhere close to November yet here in the heat of June 5, 2008.

Today, forty years ago, we remind, Californians were casting their ballots in the primaries. For us, 3,000 miles away, it was the last full day of school, with only a partial to go, in the ninth grade. Not so long ago really. We remember it well. The ideals which that day held for us still persist. They are persnickety that way. And no one, no army, has the power to kill them, certainly not with the feeble device of a gun.

This day in history, also, Wilbur and Mary Cash arrived by train in Mexico City.

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