The Charlotte News

Tuesday, July 8, 1941

THREE EDITORIALS

We stress this piece today because it points up a paradigm for the kind of interference activity Fifth Columnists ran for the Nazis, and that paradigm suggests precisely why Josephus Daniels may have acted to cover up a murder of an American journalist on July 1 in Mexico, to prevent the stirring of the international pot in a press already increasingly hot by the day for a shooting war with the Nazis.

How would it have looked, say, in The New York Times or in Time or Newsweek: "Journalist-Author W. J. Cash Murdered in Mexico--Nazi Agents Suspected"? That followed by a story of how Cash had been found hanging in a room at the Reforma Hotel, a noted American tourist and celebrity hang-out, his neck broken, strangled, hung?

Nonsense, you say. Why would even such an intriguing murder in Mexico of an American journalist and author have garnered that sort of publicity? But Time had done a glowing review of Cash's book in February, had announced in a brief note in an April issue his award of the Guggenheim in mid-March, would have considered it no doubt a proper follow-up. (We should note that what began this project ultimately for us was the discovery in July, 1991 of the Nazi spy arrests in the July 7, 1941 issue of Time, while, on a hunch, looking for a possible obituary therein on Cash, not present--our nose for news, albeit a half century old, no doubt at work. As neither biography on Cash had mentioned these arrests occurring the weekend before Cash's death, becoming public the day before, June 30, the day Cash began complaining to Mary of being followed by Nazi agents, it struck us as rather odd that the arrests had never been connected in the least with his death, even in so much as a footnote. Thus our fledgling research began, without our knowing for several more years that even The News had announced the arrests on its front page on June 30 and, ironically, presented an editorial on same the date of Cash's death. As a collateral note, we should indicate that major news stories in English, such as the spy arrest, could be had in Mexico no doubt the same day of general release by the press through at least wire service compilations, as we know the A. P. had, as in all international capitals of the time outside the Axis, an office in Mexico City; The News, on the other hand, would have come by mail only, not wire, and thus had Cash--as Cam Shipp, for instance, employed as a publicity agent for Warner Brothers in Hollywood, was doing, as we know by his letter to the editor in June re the change of Charlotte street names to run simpatico with Allied nomenclature--received daily copies of The News in Mexico, these editions of June 30 and July 1 obviously would not have ever reached Cash's hands before his death. Nevertheless, a copious reader of the news each day, he would have known of the spy arrests on June 30 by other sources available to him.)

So it stands to reason that neither Daniels nor the President would have wanted such a story of murder to surface. Such a story might have catapulted matters, together with the news of the arrests of 32 Nazis in New York, such that Congress either might have moved closer to approving entry to the war or, more likely placed pressure on the President to divert, at the behest of isolationists such as Military Affairs Committee Chairman Robert Reynolds, aid and increased diplomatic support to Mexico, intentionally to reduce aid to Russia and Britain at this critical time, with Lend-Lease fresh on the griddle since March, with the President's May 27 declaration of national emergency heating heavily now the forges for production of war materiel. And such a diversion of aid would have only increased that which the editorials of the day were arguing our delays in aid were doing otherwise: the Nazi chances for a quick victory in Russia, leading to the Channel invasion of Britain by a freshly fueled and fed Nazi army with amply protected supply lines into oil-rich Iraq, into the wheat and oil-rich Ukraine.

Daniels, incidentally, recorded in his memoirs that he phoned the President on July 4, the same day Mary related that he arranged through the State Department the cooked-up papers to enable her egress from Mexico. Though he does not mention Cash in his memoirs, he did to his family at some length in his weekly offering to them, as recorded July 7, set forth below in full.

Another reason, of course, as we have posited before, for not wanting a murder such as this to surface from Mexico at this time was the obvious fear that such a thing could have tipped the delicate balance of relations built up between the U.S. and Mexico over the previous eight years. There was a genuine fear afoot that the Axis might then suddenly obtain traction in Mexico by provoking a coup, with some 40-50% of the population having voted for the fascist Almazán a year earlier for president, a substantial portion of which believing the election to have been rife with fraud, threatening coup, with an active group of Nazi agents and saboteurs at work with impunity in the country, with the historic tendencies of sympathy with Germany on trade issues, with pockets of German population within the country going back decades. Enter William Rhodes Davis to the mix of issues when it comes to trade with Germany in the wake of Mexico's Expropriation Day--just as Anschluss, as a first step to war, was being inveigled by the Nazi puppets in Austria to annex Hitler's native land--, and the picture becomes complete.

There were therefore several reasons--including potential deterrence of the substantial tourist trade between the U.S. and Mexico at a time when Mexico's economy, in trouble if reliant on sale of the March, 1938 expropriated British and American oil, still largely embargoed from Mexico and in need of a foreign market outside the Allied sphere, now even cut off from access to Germany via Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian railway, was yet ailing--which would have prompted the better political solution to the matter of Cash's death by having it quickly determined a suicide, body cremated without further observation and analysis stateside, than the messy business of murder, especially if that murder pointed to Nazi agents.

Mary said in her 1957 report that the Mexican Government was "neutral" in the war, and so, nominally, it was--all the more reason, as America moved closer to joining the side of the Allies by this point in time, that there was a fear by the U.S. that this nominal neutrality, coupled with a willingness still to do business with Hitler, could lead, over any slight tip of that precious balance, to open conflict with Mexico, with an Axis-supplied military on the make.

The report of Josephus Daniels to his family, dated July 7, 1941, as contained within Joseph Morrison's papers on Cash at UNC's Wilson Library, went as follows:

Incidentally, the choice of words in the latter sentences is interesting as the visit by Robert Rice Reynolds to Mexico in 1940, posing, sombrero style, as just such an Ambassador of Good Will, was, as Daniels recounted also in his memoirs, a profound embarrassment; he hurried, he said, to find ways to get the Senator from his native state shunted off the noticeable path to such important affairs as the unveiling of a statue in a remote rural area and, as quickly as possible, to avoid his blowing the whole previous seven years of improved relations with the country, to effect his return north of the border. Cash often referred to Reynolds in his pieces as the "playboy" or else he who kissed blonde actresses, in this case Harlowe.

At the same time, Daniels appears perhaps overly sensitive to such invasions to his embassage. The goodwill efforts of the thespian crowd, for instance, which he references negatively, had drawn on April 21 precisely the opposite reaction from Raymond Clapper, who observed that such goodwill proved indispensable to improved relations with Mexico, favored an "army of movie stars" to be sent to invade Latin America.

So, had Daniels, rumpled newspaperman, former Secretary of Navy under Wilson, former boss of Undersecretary Franklin Roosevelt, who still as President called him "Chief", perhaps, become a little crusty with excess wisdom in his latter months as Ambassador after his eight elder years in the station? Still and all, Daniels guided the Good Neighbor Policy expertly and kept Mexico enough friendly to the United States that the Nazis largely lost the foothold they had gained during the early years of his tenure, a foothold naturally inherited from the Kaiser's efforts in the mid Teens, a foothold fostered by President Cardenas as a necessary adjunct to his oil export business with Hitler in 1938-39.

But as Raymond Clapper points out again in his column today, you couldn't do business with Hitler--any more than you could do business, as Dorothy Thompson insists, with the "ineffable" Mr. Lindbergh and his coterie of Nazi-sympathizers in the America First movement, lately become rabidly anti-Communist, since June 22 anyway.

In any event, with Cash as a suicide, the piece is sui generis in the larger puzzle, disconnected, an aside, a "baffling tragedy", as Daniels intones. As a murder by Nazi agents, however, all the pieces suddenly fit, as surely as the jagged edges of South America neatly carve out from the opposite coast of Africa.

So look how Daniels so easily accepts without question these "delusions" of Nazi spies following Cash, accepts without question the suicide, despite his recognition that his son Jonathan was a friend, indeed had, with the Knopfs, co-sponsored Cash for the Guggenheim--finally offers in explanation a theory supposedly derived from Mary, concern over the Russian invasion, which Mary debunked. But, as to the suicide scenario, he had nothing but Mary's word on the matter, that of a cousin to his own wife? Perhaps, perhaps there was more.

Again, it is the dissembling regarding the timing of the cremation of Cash's remains in the face of his parents' objections, the lack of "suitable permission" for same once done, and moreover the absence of an autopsy report, which begin to unveil that mystery.