Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 10 March 1941 — Page 10
nt ———.
i | PAGE 10 _ en — I The Indianapolis Times
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ROY W. HOWARD RALPH BURKHOLDER MARK FERREE President Editor Business Manager
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. MONDAY, MARCH 10, 1941
HOW WE GO FROM HERE
BY thoroughly democratic procedure, after adequate debate by the elected representatives of the people, both Houses of Congress have passed the Lend-Lease Bill. It soon will be law. The bill grants tremendous and unprecedented powers __ Yo the President. The decision having been made, may the wisdom which is his as the outgrowth of his great experience in international affairs guide him to the objective which he himself has so often declared—full aid to Britain, and ~ the preservation of our peace. It should not be now for those who oppose the grant of power to hold back their support of him, in the face of an accomplished fact. But rather to take him at his word, as expressed in the campaign and as re-expressed three days ago—‘the first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war,” and “I am glad to reiterate the assurance that the policy under which the measure would be operated would not be a war policy, but the contrary.” Unto the President has been given one of the most difficult tasks ever faced by a human being. No man ever needed public support more than he will in the days to come. Such support however need not be blind. Congress has nt abdicajed’and public opinion is not stilled by the termsof the act. Clauses in the law as finally worked out, having to do with the purse strings and the right of recall of authority by a majority vote of Congress, take care of that. i * ” 2 ” ” t 4 ” But until and if the President by his performance provey that he lacks the wisdom to do the job that is set before him, let there be no sniping. e are entering a phase which reminds us of Lincoln’s story about Blondin, the Niagara tightrope walker. “Would ~ you,” said Lincoln, “when certain death waited on one false ~ step—would you cry out, ‘Blondin, stoop a little more! Go a little faster! Slow up! Lean more to the north! Lean more to the south! ?” or, as the story continues, would you ‘hold your breath until Blondin had a fair chance to get across? ~ But that doesn’t mean that, as the days and weeks and months move on, criticism which is really constructive should be withheld. We only emphasize that there is a difference between constructive criticism and backseat driving. : Since the authority has been duly given him, the Presi-
~ dent is entitled, on the basis of his own performance, to the
assumption that he knows how to perform until by his own acts he demonstrates himself to be unable. And may that never come to pass.
THAT'S FINE, MR. GREEN
: VWWILLLIAM GREEN has thrown the full support of the Ee American Federation of Labor behind the executive council of the American Federation of Teachers, which is
attempting to expel two local unions in New York City and
: one in Philadelphia on charges of Communist domination. y Appealing to the national membership of the teachers’ ‘unions to vote to revoke the charters of the three locals, Mr. Green said it would be “a sorry day” for the cause of unionism among teachers if the attempt to clean house should fail. ‘Here is a fine example of the type of leadership that the country has every right to expect from the president of a great labor organization. The head of the A. F. of L. is not a dictator. He has no authority to issue orders to the autonomous unions which make up the federation. But, by speaking specifically and forcefully, as in this case, he can give powerful aid to efforts from within these unions to remedy unwholesome conditions and correct abuses. It is to the credit of the A. F. of L. that few of its unions are suspected of Communist domination. The cause of A. F. of L. unionism is, however, being seriously damaged by some other conditions against which Mr. Green has not spoken so specifically and forcefully. We applaud Mr. Green's forthright attack om alleged communism in A. F. of L. teachers’ unions. We hope he can find a way to be equally forthright in attacking these other evils which are alienating public sympathy and support from his organization.
GIRL SCOUTS’ BIRTHDAY
HE national hat may well be swept off in a graceful salute during the current week to the Girl Scouts of America. "Thi week marks the 29th birthday of the movement. Indianapolis and Marion County Girl Scouts are to take part in the celebrating. ~~ 'Today 633,000 young American girls are organized in the ‘Girl Scouts. Their awareness to their country’s needs is well shown by their acting as hostesses last summer to delegates from 13 Western Hemisphere countries. The buillling of Pan American friendships is one of the tasks the
_' “@irl Scouts have set themselves, and they have made a good
start. The camp project will be repeated this summer. The heroic service England’s women have given during ‘that country’s hour of trial is visible evidence of how vital a part women may play in national service. The Girl Scouts appear keenly aware of their responsibilities, and ready to ~ gerve in whatever capacity seems necessary. Happy birthday, and many of them!
- HATS HAVING studied the many problems of the millinery in- : dustry, the Women’s Bureau of the Labor Department ~ yeports that one of the chief of them is “Dame Fashion’s whims.” Some observers see in this a hint that the Federal " Government ought to do something to dissuade women from ~ wearing what the bureau describes as “freakish” hats. Many husbands, though agreeing that something ought
to undertake.
[]
to be done, will feel that here sone task too difficult for |
Fail Encugh
By Westbrook Pegler
If U.S. Is Forced Into War, Only Germany, Which Twice Exploited Bolshevist Menace, Can Be Blamed
EW YORE, March 10.—If this nation goes to war there will be those who will say that President Roosevelt willed it, or Winston Churchill, or the warmongers, or international bankers, or the Jews. But if this nation goes to war the same German nation will
be responsible which created the Bolshevist menace in a late, desperate effort to win the last war, the menace that Hitler later exploited as a monstrous invention of the international Jew, until, when his plans were ripe, he discovered that it was neither a men ace nor Jewish at all. When Hitler was ready to strike the blow that began the Second World War he discovered overnight that bolshevism was a compatible ally in another attempt of the German nation to conquer the world. Germany brought bolshevism into being for the selfish purpose of eliminating .Russia from the First World War.
Although he insisted that bolshevism and Jewishness were identical and inseparable, theré were, until Hitler's rise to power, 10 times as many Communists in Germany as the entire Jewish population of the country, including the Jewish children. So bolghevism was Aryan Cierman, after all,
It has been observed, since the German nation began this war by an attack on Catholic Poland, that both Hitler and his sordid little flunky, Benito Mussolini, have changed -their story about the nature of Jewishness. 'Jewishness is now capitalistic, while bolshevisni is, if not Aryan or Latin, certainly not Jewish or otherwise offensive to them.
# 8 a
OR years Hitler shrieked to arouse the Germans to furies of self-pity over the iniquities of the Versailles Treaty which, in the light of recent. history, seems to have been indeed iniquitous but on the side of lenience, not severity. The severities of which Hitler complained were gentle restraints by comparison with the enslavement of the Poles, and it has already been revealed that, whereas the Germans were set free to govern themselves within their own country, the present German nation has a cold determination to reduce captured peoples to the status of subhuman toilers for the (German super race. If France and Britain had done that ta Germany there would be no German war of world donquest today, but they were forgiving and humane and wanted from Germany only peace. It is the German method to poison the fibers of the free countries and paralyze their nerves by arousing within them suspicions of their governments and of their neighbors, especially of Jews. Hitler has had some success here, and people, otherwise sensible, who have seeri hini arm for this, war and start the war, nevertheless find themselves sometimes accepting his assertion that the Jews, now turned capitalists, began it. THis despite Hitler's own assertion that there is not room in this world for this plutocratic democratic nation and his own. :
8 8 ”
HE French nation, far from threatening Hitler's peace, had spent enormously to create a purely defensive fortification, and the people and the army so loathed to fight that the whole country collapsed under a blow. The British were so disinclined to war that they had to send untrained militiamen tc Norway. Before that Britain was humiliated before the world for begging Hitler to keep the peace, and was taunted for cowardice by der Fuehrer. If this nation goes to war it will be fatal to seek the war-guilty man anywhere but where he plainly stands dark against the fires that he has set. It will be wisé th examine the plan of disruption, of internal disorganization by lies, persecution and theft’ which the Hitler propaganda attributed to world Jewery and discover hat every evil attribute and dark method which he identified with Jewishness is employed expertly in the Nazi method. All the machinations which he attributed to Jews, from the parasitic type of naturglized citizenship which betrays its adopted country to plain larceny and the theory of the chosen people, are found in Hitlerism. : Only one question can remain, and that does not concern the identity of the warmaker but his intentions toward this nation should he conquer Britain. Having declared that the American system cannot live in the seme world with his, he would seem to have dispelled that doubt.
Business
By John T. Flynn
Jail Penalty Now Proposed in Farm Bill, but It's a Logical Development
EW YORK, March 10.—Somehow or other the farm problem—the American farm problem—is about to intrude itself on Congress. And the intrusion seems geared in a manner to cause some scrapping— if Congress ever permits itself to be diverted from . more important subjects, like settling the affairs of Malay and Indo-China, to deal with so trivial a matter as the American farm problem. As matters stand, the Govemment has an immense amount of cotton and wheat on its hands. It has been making loans to farmers on the cotton and wheat they cannot sell. So there is hanging . over the market a tremendous sur= plus which cannot be used here, while people in other lands perish of starvation or go unclothed. The farmer has sort of ambled along, not through any settlement of his problem, but practically entirely by getting money from the Government. The Government has handed out billions. But the problem remains the same. At the moment the Government owns about 6,183,000 bales of cotton outright and has besides cotton as collateral for $283,000,000. Now, to make matters worse, new crops are abundants and the surplus promises to be greater than ever. So the farm Congressmen and the Agricultural Departmen: have cooked up some more bills.
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HE basis of all these bills is control—control of crops, prices, surpluses, etc. And, like all control measures, it is ‘always found that the first controls ale mmadequate and must be buttressed by more controls. . The new bill will provide for quotas, taking wheat, for irstance, on farmers raising over 200 bushels or planting tc 10 or more acres. The quotas having been fixed, farmers who exceed their quotas will be subject to penalties—loss of benefits, etc., but also to money penalties—and now, such is the course of control, to criminal action. So that the farmer who exSe his quota may be sent to jail for a year or fined Thus the whole tendency is toward tighter, more drastic, more comprehensive regulation and control, beginning with loss of benefits for the recalcitrant and ending with jail sentences for them. Another proposal, of course, and as inevitable as the pénalty provision, is to pay the farmers more money —to establish parity prices and pay them 100 per cent of that. There is plenty of dynamite, fianancial and social, in all these devices. But there apparently is no solution of the farm problem in them.
So They Say—
WE ARE NOW, for the first time, approaching quantity production in the sense that the term applied to the auto industry of many years ago.—Richard W. Miller, president of Vultee Aircraft. *
THE PART that nature did.is wonderful, the part that man did is terrible—Henry Miller, writer, and until recently self-made “exile” in Paris, now returned to the U. 8. and commenting thereon. : » * *®
TEE SELF-DISCIPLINE of a free and independeni; Joople wil always enable them to
produce, ad. out-live any ' system of
out-think, oute |S
— THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES British Plane
The Hoosier Forum
I wholly disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.—Voltaire.
CHARGES H. R. 1776 FOES GIVE COMFORT TO NAZIS By George V. Kendall, Crawfordsville
If one can avoid being angry, it is amusing to read and hear what the isolationists are saying. They deny being allied with the groups in the United States who are working for the Nazis. Now let's see. Americans, I should think, wish to live in an America based on our free past with constitutional improvements. If Hitler continues to enslave area after area of the world obviously we cannot do this. It is therefore necessary to eliminate Hitler and the social regime he makes. The foreign policy of our Souniry is properly directed to that end. Lest we have the whole job to do ourselves, we take steps such as H. R. 1776 to aid those who are already spending their blood to eliminate Hitlerism. It is painfully plain that obstruction of H. R. 1776, or any other measure in favor of Great Britain, will discourage the British, and encourage the Nazis. Those American citizens who know they are Nazis are fighting H. R. 1776. How then can partisans of “America First” maintain that they are not allied with the Nazis? They are whether they know it or not. It’s really absurd; one would smile if it were not so deadly serious that good people should so deceive themselves. 8 § =»
URGING SOME REALISM IN NATIONAL THINKING By W. H. Edwards, R. No. 2, Spencer, Ind. The Times editorial of the 3d, on the Lease-Lend Bill, which I have just finished reading, is, in the main, an excellent piece of editorial writing. But, unfortunately, the clarifying amendments which it ad-
vocates are the confusing issues used by the Bill's opponents to delay our aid to the British until it may be too late. It might be all right for Congress to refuse to surrender any of its powers, as your editorial states it should not do, if we had a Congress in which all of its members would put national welfare and national safety above their personal political ambitions. But we have seen national safety stalled by a minority of our Congress, just as other nations now under the heel of Hitler were stalled, until it was too late. Gas, of the right kind, used in the right places, is an important commodity. But gas, used in our halls of Congress for personal or political reasons, begets confused public
(Times readers are invited to express their views in these columns, religious controversies excluded. Make your letters short, so all can have a chance. Letters must be signed, but names will be withheld on request.)
thinking, leading to disunity within our Nation, when, more than ever before, we. need to be united in fact as well as in name. ... Realism, of which your editorial speaks, should convince peeple, including editorial writers, that Japan is playing a game of power politics, dictated by Hitler's agents in that island empire, a game loaded with T. N. T, which may cause an explosion soon. : So acute is the threatening attitude of Japan that our Government doesn't dare withdraw any portion of its Pacific or Asiatic fleets from that ocean, so long as the Japanese navy is on the rampage, which means that we are too weak to guard thoroughly our Atlantic shore if the British navy goes down or falls into the hands of Hitler. Realism, thou art a gem of great price! Let's all, including newspaper. publishers and writers, get realism into our thoughts and writing, instead of the gas of obstruction now being expended by some members of Congress, who think they are advancing their political fortunes. 8 = =»
PARABLE RECALLED BY CRITICISM OF WHEELER Mrs. R. G. Levan, East Chicago, Ind. The impassioned Forum letter of Mrs. Alex Vonnegut bewailing' Senator Wheeler's “myopia of the mind” is a very good instance of the practice of accusing another of the same shortcoming the writer herself possesses. It reminds me of a passage in Plato called the Parable of the Cave. All human beings, in this parable, live in an underground den with their backs to the light, chained from childhood. All they can see is moving shadows. The truth to them is nothing but the shadow of images. Plato imagines someone breaking loose and going into the outer world of sunshine so that he learns the difference between sub-
Side Glances=By Galbraith
stance and shadow, between truth and popular belief. When he returns, according to Plato, he blinks and cannot see in the darkness and the cave people pass a law against letting people up into the sunlight. Whoever, says Plato, would face the light, must turn his back on the crowd and its shadows. He must climb into another world of values, He is set free from its delusions, even from what it holds to be important, and he has a new approach to things in general, and other habits of judging. In the letter mentioned the typical crowd voice speaks against one who has gone up to see things as they are in substance. It shows a tragic lack of understanding of the world’s real problem. Hitler, without in the least minimizing his Machiavellian ruthlessness, is an effect of the world crisis, not its cause. His snswer to the problem is totalitarianism, but it is a mistake to assume that his answer is the problem. And if we permit ourselves to lose our heads so far as to fight Hitler, we are fighting the wrong enemy and wasting our resources. The real problem—and my contention is supported by the Jan. 15 report of the Temporary National Economic Committee, is the failure of economic leadership in the world at large as well as in this country. Until the disease attatking the economic roots of the world is cured, (and it must be solved in a demo-
diseased political and social foliage, and withered spiritual flowering. We may wipe out this Hitler, but
the economic roots of man is enrichéd for all nations, we’ll have many more Hitlers cropping up in the future. No law can be enforced if it is not a just law to begin with. International law and order cannot be preserved if it is inequitable at its base, and that’s what our precious proponents of the Administration’s foreign policy would have us do—preserve the status quo ante to give economic provilege to the few with no consideration of the necessity of justice for all nations in the way that matters most, i. e., economically. If reason, logic, justice, common sense were not discredited as “appeasement” we could see where the real problem lay and possibly even have the intelligence to solve it and avoid a war.
2 ” ” OPPOSES PRIMARY FOR SENATOR AND GOVERNOR By Claude Braddick, Kokomo, Ind. Some legislators have asserted that choosing our candidates for U. S. Senator and Governor by direct primary is “pure and simple democracy.” The statement is open to question. We tried that method, you'll remember, and it didn't work out that way. Instead, it furnished a glaring example of rule by organized minority against the will of the majority. Administrations were set up by a tight little group with a single pet idea to the negation of everything else, resulting in the blackest records in the history of Indiana. Legislators more than 40 years old should. remember these things and be warned.
SHEPHERDS
By MARY WARD
The little clouds are white as sheep, That roam upon the height, And lambs that near the others keep Lest they get lost at night. The gray cloud is a shepherd tall And - watches, hours untold.
small, Nr Come safély.to the fold. Thoughts can be spotless as the
sheep, | And always kept in si
will ead away
DAILY THOUGHT And he that killeth any man
cratic way) we'll continue to have] i
unless the foundation soil feeding | j
Bureau, 1013 Thirteenth St., Washington, D. C.).
To see that flocks both large and]
To pastures of delight. ~~" 3} ; a
MONDAY, MARCH 10, 1941
Gen. Johnson Says—
Many May Be Fostering False
Hopes in Thinking Hitler Will Repeat Errors Which Exiled Napoleon
ASHINGTON, March 10.—Napoleon conquered a large part of Europe. Because he had some idea of a sort of United States of that continent, semisovereign states united in a loose league, he allowed the conquered countries a good deal of leaway. Perhaps his further idea of putting his own people, family or fellow soldiers, on the thrones of several of these states had something to do with his liberality. Whatever the reason, he didn't exercise a close enough control to keep Some of them conquered. In Prussia, Scharnhorst and Stein effectually evaded his disarmament decrees by using the permitted small Prussian army in a new concept, not as a fixed regu~- ; lar establishment but as a military training school through which they rushed yearly classes of recruits as rapidly as possible. In this way, they forged the forces which finally sent Napoleon first to Elba and later, after Waterloo, to St. Helena. Napoleon just wasn’t tough enough. eo a good deal of talking about our great liberal free union of semi-sovereign states, the United States of America. But we frequently forget that, so far as the states of the old Southern Confederacy are con= cerned, there was nothing free or liberal about it.
E- forced them to remain in the union at the point of bayonets. After they were vanquished, we treated them as “conquered provinces,” Abraham Lincoln’s policy of treating the “erring sisters as though they had never been away” was replaced, after his death, by the more realistic and more cruel plan of tyrannical and predatory carpet-bag government until there was no possibility of a new revolt. The North was tougher and more successful than Napoleon. This historical contrast may be worth remembering in considering the present condition of the world. It is worth remembering because, after the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies, especially England and France, made exactly the same mistake that Napoleon had made and made it with exactly the same warlike peole, the Germans. ‘ ’ Pp There was never a time, up to 1936 at least, when with the controls at their command, they couldn’ have stopped Hitler, as Winston Churchill continuously urged that they should do.. They didn't. As Napoleon had done earlier, and as the North did not do after the -Civil War, they permitted the conquered country to build up an overwhelming military superiority, under their very noses. Now the situation is reversed. Hitler sits astride most of Europe. He has disarmed it and made its vast military booty part of his own forces. He, like Napoleon, also contemplates some kind of compulsory United State of Europe. Some observers, reverting to the Napoleonic failure, say that it can't be done— that his conquest will collapse through counter-revolu-tion caused by a combination of interior strains and stresses with outside pressure. " » 8
ILL it? Napoleon, himself, frequently said that all empires of conquest die of indigestion from over-eating and referred to the crack-ups of the em=pires of Alexander, the Romans, Ghengis Khan, Charlemagne and the Caliphates of Bagdad and Cordova. i An eventual crack-up is probable on all the precedents—except one. Perhaps the forcible retention of the Confederacy in the American unjon isn't a fair parallel. After all, we were still one people. Lin. coln’s hope, so long deferred, was right in the end: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone . . . will yet swell the chords of the union, when again touched, as they surely will be, by the
better angels of our nature.” Nobody could say that about Hitler's conquests,
but just the same, on all the evidence to date, he is not likely to repeat the blunders of Napoleon and the Allies through any lack of toughness, efficiency or cold-blooded cruelty. Let's not kid ourselves too far from realism.
A Woman's Viewpoint By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
HE psychiatrists console us with the announce= 1 ment that horror books and lurid comic strips are not bad fer the children. It's the best of news, for, if they were, the tots of our time would already have suffered irreparable injury. Being a good deal cleverer than the professors think, parents arrived at the same conclusion a long time ago. How otherwise can we interpret the general unconcern on the subject? The innocence of our own little dears is constantly bombarded with wild-eyed, tawdry and even bawdy pictures and stories, yet most parents remain calm. In fact, either Father or Mother reads them to the pre-school flock, and in many cases seems to enjoy them more than the children do. Perhaps this parental calm is explained when we remember how we came safely through the Grimm Fairy Tale era, which was also pretty dreadful too. For the children of that time the world was peopled by ogres, witches, mam-eating giants and wicked stepmothers. In cone trast, however, there were also elves, pixies and fairy godmothers. Yesterday's boy identified himself with Sir Galahad and the Handsome Prince; today’s feel himself one with Flash Gordon and Superman. Every age must have its own particular type of hero and villain, although the struggle between them, symbolizing the everlasting contest between good and evil, goes ‘on forever. Milton wrote it out for the learned in his great book and different and simpler versions have told and retold it a million times since. It should be clear that some censorship is needed for the average child’s reading, but to those past their first youth it is equally clear that milk-sop stuff can turn out vicious brats too. Besides, when we compare the comic strips with a lot of the literature and movies devoured by the nation’s mothers, we lose our fears. Superman is actually no more incredible than the heroes who thrill and delight the ladies in scores of home magazine serials and on a thousand screens. .
Editor's Note: The views expressed by columnists in this newspaper are their own. They are not necessarily those of The Indianapolis Times
Questions and Answers
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o—Is “Heiifioation? a proper word in the nx
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