The Charlotte News
Wednesday, September 10, 1941
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: "Vanishing Doves" tells of the hunting season licensed by Washington being relative to migratory species prominent on the coastal plain, while the Mecklenburg variety were instead provincial in their habitat, resulting in the young hatchlings being afforded too little time to take wing before being shot by hunters, regularly depleting thereby the population. It concludes by suggesting that without a closed season for one year to enable replenishment of the brood, a mandatory five-year hiatus would follow to prevent annihilation of the area's entire population.
The editorial takes on a metaphorical aspect which is fairly predictive of the United States involvement in the war, even if it took 44 months, not five years, to bring about the end of the war after Pearl Harbor--that is unless one includes the 44 years in Europe which followed.
Whether the hunters voluntarily cooperated in Mecklenburg and participated in the suggested moratorium during the 1941 dove hunting season or let go with their shot anyway, we don't know. Perhaps, the doves found a way to migrate eventually. Perhaps, they were rendered extinct in the region.
There is of course a great difference, however, between being a dove in the figurative sense, and that to which "Foolish Show" and the piece by Gerald W. Johnson of The Baltimore Evening Sun reference. When nearly all of Europe was in Nazi chains, with dissenters and scapegoats being herded into concentration camps, it was no more than cold stupidity for Lindbergh to say, as Johnson recounts, that the war was started by Czechoslovakia invading German territory--presumably in reference to the dispute over the Sudetenland. Just how that, in his mind, justified an invasion of Poland by Hitler to acquire the Danzig Corridor to join Germany with East Prussia, we don't know. But we are certain that the propaganda-filled mind of someone decorated by Hitler was able to conjure a rationale valid unto himself.
"Foolish Show" demonstrates the same phenomenon at work with Senator Nye.
Nevertheless, we must always preserve the dove, as the Johnson piece also recognizes, lest we go to war on false premises to satisfy an inherent lust for territorial acquisitiveness, based on trumped-up rationale, thereby becoming precisely what Hitler was--the consummate hawk looking for prey.
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