Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 29 September 1941 — Page 10

LC -

| PAGE 10 — The Indianapolis Times

ROY W. HOWARD “RALPH BURKHOLDER ~~ MARK 'FERREE'

Business Mana,

Editor

President : : 7 (A SCRIPPS-HOWARD NEWSPAPER)

: Owned - and’ publistied E Price in Marion Coundaily (except Sunday) by The Indianapolis Times Publishing > Maryland St.

Member of United Press. Scripps - Howard Newspaper Alliance, NEA Service, and / Audit Bureau of 'Circulations.

a week. ption. rates 3 a year, outside of Indiana, 65 cents a month.

«> RILEY 5551

‘Give Light and-the People Wilk Find Their Own, Woy

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1941 _

HITLER'S INDIGESTION f JITLER does not need to read Napoleon's comment that conquests die of indigestion. His own bellyache tells him. For the conquered peoples from Norway in the north to Jugoslavia and Greece in the south, from the Low Countries and France in the west to the newly occupied Russian regions in the east, are a pain. Hitler has a word for them. “Barbarians,” that is what they are.. They are so dumb and uncivilized, says Hitler, they refuse to stay conquered when by all the Nazi rules they are finished. Vo : : Just what is the leader of the New Order supposed to do when the ungrateful recipients of his blessing prefer the savagery of self-government to the glory-of serving the superman? It isa hard question even for one who has all the answers. Because there is not time now to educate them as he did the Germans—and anyway the Germans are a “superior” race. . Obviously these people must be punished—for their own good, of course. But that is the worst of it; they are so barbarous they don’t understand ‘civilized punishment. Imprison them, shoot them, cut off their heads; the only result is that more rise to defy the conqueror. Instead of loving Hitler, they actually hate him. AH of which is a great sorrow to a sensitive soul who likes to be heiled. 8 & ¥ : 8 8 8 "THE lack of sportsmanship 1s particularly hard to take for one who has put so much constructive thought and effort into making the Germans sports-conscious. These conquered barbarians actually pick for their sabotage a time when he must withdraw some of his armies of occupation from) Western Europe for the Eastern Front. ‘In Norway they strike, in Holland and Belgium their signals guide British bombers toward Berlin, in France they shoot Nazis, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Greece they wreck the Nazi line of supply, and in Jugoslavia the guerrillas fight anid defeat Nazi garrisons—hill-billies so backward they do not know that rifles, dynamite and vendetta are not supposed to destroy the ammunition dumps, the tank camps, the plane-lined fields of the biggest and best mechanized army the world has ever known. It’s getting so a victorious leader cannot even trust his own allies. Why, the Rumanians and even the Hungarians have a vay of going over to the Russian enemy—-unappreciative of the honor of being placed in the front line ahead of the German elite. And as for the Italians—the Nazis have run out cf words for those who want peace. . Of course, one pain does not call for the mortician— even though that pain takes in most of Europe, Germany iacluded. But, given time enough, this is the kind of conueror’s indigestion which grows fatal.

THE SYNONYM SEASON UTUMN, season of mists and mellow fruitfulness—and synonyms. We have just gone through our first footall week-end, and in print and by radio once more have cxperienced the genius of the sports writer in avoiding repelition of words. = By that, they answer to the first law of high-school ~ English. ; 2 So, instead of just won—it’s clout, swamp, surprise, cdge out, upset, crush, down, trounce, smack, smash, sock, 1ick and shellack. er : oh ' This display of agility and erudition is not the least i ttractive phase of football.

FABLE FOR HENRY THE MORGUE (ONCE upon a time there was a fellow named Emerson = ~who made a better mousetrap. He invested $1000 in a little plant way back in the woods and started manufacturing. Mouse-ridden citizens beat a path to his door. ". The business was profitable from the start. For Emcrson was: a good manager, a hard worker, a good salesaan, paid good wages and his help not only liked him per;onally, but admired his mousetrap. As he prospered he paid better and better wages, improved his mousetrap, and rade it cheaper and cheaper for the buyer as volume ini Emerson knew that success wasn’t just a matter of collar investment. ‘He was keenly conscious that in business operations there are three Ms—men, management and ijoney; that the least of these is money; the greatest, the men and the management. wi * Competition in the mousetrap trade was keen and Emcrson never tried to average more than 4 per cent on his - mousetraps, thereby taking care of his competitive problem. Foe. : 8 = 8 FINALLY, after many-years, by 1941-Emerson was selling $10,000,000 worth of mousetraps annually. On that his gross profits was $400,000, of which he paid his Gov‘ernment, whose Treasury Secretary was named Henry Morgenthau Jr., 31 per cent in corporate taxes, or $124,000. On the remainder, which was personal income, Emerson paid $177,156.50 in- personal income taxes. That left $98,-

848.50. Of course there were a lot of other taxes, but any- |

way, pretty good for Emerson. But better for the Government. ! : : : Then, one day, Morgenthau had a bright idea. It struck him suddenly when -he was testifying before the House Banking and Currency Committee—out of a clear sky, like. He proposed that all business be taxed 100 per cent on everything over 6 per ‘cent on original capital investment.

He said he didn’t want to go into detail, but that somebody

had to wake the country up. be | ~ So Emerson was cut back from $98,843.50 a year to 6 per cent on his original investment—or $60 on the $1000. Though Emerson was a patriotic man he didn't like to

make mousetraps for practice. So he quit. And Morgen-

hau’s Treasury quit receiving $124,000 in corporation taxes |

50 ; !

Se ty, 3 cents a copy; deliv- | atm

| annuated players and by the base

=i

Fair Enough

By 'Westbropk' Pegler

. NEW YORK; Sept. 20.—It has covered a |

been six years since: I co World Series, but my last was my 17th in. a row, so I feel qualified: to give out on the social background of this peculiar American emotional disturbance whose most exciting phase occurred in the era of wonderful nonsense when hot- _ eyed preachers put poison in. the

hootch and nobody went to bed |

except to die. : The social life of the World Series takes place in the hotels customarily patronized by baseball magnates, scouts, traders and superwriters assigned to the show. This latter group included, in my day, a number of celebrated middle-name fictioneers commissioned by the syndicates to do the story in the

| manner of the living human document, an assignment

on which many a big name laid an overripe egg because, after all, a World Series game never ,adds up to anything more than a game of ball with bunting and some blurts of unbelievably bad band music. Time came, in Philadelphia, when a frugal management, stung by disparagement of the strains discoursed elsewhere in other years, dispensed with even this paltry festivity and substituted Sousa on records, magnified by the loud speakers. That was the year the customers in the bleachers spotted Herbert Hoover as he was leaving and hooted, “we want beer,” an affront so ominous to men of serious mind that an elderly cop in the cordon holding back the crowd, fell flat on his face and lay as if dead. -

Now or Never, Boys

PROHIBITION WAS UPON US in earnest in "21 and ’22, the bootlegging industry had not been organizéd and we of the press and our guests and a few hundred assorted by-gone celebrities of the game made merry in such determined fashion that the bill to the management of the two clubs would seem to have been no less than $50,000 each time. The “Press Headquarters” spread all over the Commodore's mezzanine with rare viands and exotic delicacies at the call of a great horde of friends of the baseball management. And from somewhere there appeared not merely bottles or cases but stacks of cases of -veritable prewar stimulant to which we all addressed ourselves in that pathetic and unforgettable greediness of the time every true American tried to drink his fill in the belief that the chance would never come again. In 1923, the social program was greatly reduced and, while economy may have been a reason, I am willing to believe that the hosts had come to the conclusion that their hospitality was getting their guests down. : -Or perhaps, in that early stage of prohibition, they had an apprehension that someone might walk out a window looking for the second door on the left and bring scandal on the great national game.

Hi-De-Ho Or Plain Coffee

THE MOST HYSTERICAL public demonstration of all occurred in Washington in 1924 when Bucky Harris won his first pennant for Clark Griffith. This one was hard to account for except on the grounds of innocent enthusiasm for Washington was extra

| dry and hardly anyone really lives there to the extent

of a rooting interest in the town. Nevertheless, the frenzies rivaled those of either

Armistic and thousands of citizens made fools of themselves far beyond midnight on nothing stronger than coffee. Mr. Griffith abhorred intoxicants from honest convictions and provided no bar, but each working press ticket was accompanied by a series of coupons, one for each day, which, presented at a certain room in a certain hotel, somehow entitled bearer to one imperial quart. It had become a binding tradition now to ossify the press and sundry and this

pretty custom continued on down to repeal when

temptation, or, anyway, opportunity, appeared on every hand, at popular prices. To be sure, we also -had ball games, but I am dealing with a side of the great national gala which was far more exciting and on which I now believe the statute of limitations may reasonably be said to have run. Much as our public envied us our seats in the working press, still more would the people of the U. 8. A. have pined to join us when we threw off the cares of high office to make fellowship.

New Books By Stephen Ellis

. TOO FEW REAL BOOKS have been produced dealing with the men who built the foundations of the American republic. Too often we find ourselves enmeshed in myth and half-truth and we are frequently in danger of picturing our nation’s builders as holier-than-thou giants of intellect and brawn, devoid of human frailties and spirit. So today may be a sort of redletter day for us. Bobbs-Merrill placed on sale the first volume of a projected three-volume set, “James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist,” by Irving Brant. I have just finished this first volume. It is a magnificent job and if the succeeding two equal this one, it will rank as a monumental piece of work. : Most of us think of James Madison only as the fourth President, the man who got us into the War of 1812 and had to flee from Washington; the man who was the celebrated Dolly Madison’s husband; who got Whore he was only because he was Tom Jefferson’s end.

Honest and Refreshing Study

MADISON WAS ONE of the very greatest of the early Americans. He was a man of great intellect and skill and ability. His relationship with Jefferson was because of these very qualities. Mr. Brant’s opening volume deals with the first 29 years of Madison’s life, from his birth to the day he left for Washington as a member of the National Congress. : For 400 pages in between these two events we are treated to a scholarly and absorbing study of Madison’s schooling, his evolution at Princeton, his early revolutionary activity in#Virginia, his role in drawing up the Declaration of Rights and his part in Governor Patrick Henry’s Council of State.

The revelation of Madison's cutting and obscene wit at Princeton is a point in question. Madison has

Irving Brant

always been pictured as “one who never said or did

an indiscreet thing.” It's just a little thing, but the suppression of his ribald Princeton days has served to give a completely erroneous picture of one of our Presidents. We have never demanded that our Presidents be angels; we have asked only that they be

men. Irving Brant is doing all of us a service in bringing forth this honest and refreshing study of the fourth President.

JAMES DISON: THE REVOLUT]O! on JS ARRON, TEE YRGRA, BRICLTIOS, pages. 34.4 . - With 47 pages of notes; appendix, index: 19

So They Say—

NO government, no ruling class, no leadership, is wise enough or far-sighted en to do the choosing for the people—~Dr. Hu Shih, ese ambassador to the U. 8. : ® . *

THIS is not the time to wait and see. It is time to think and act.—Nicholas Murray Butler, president, Columbia University. . a

THE. Marquis de Lafayette, patron saint of this college, . . . would turn in his grave could he know the

\

_ THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES The Quiz Kids!

gREDO

You

?

- GTAND

IA

The Hoosier Forum I wholly disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.—Voltaire.

HOPES ‘ABOMINABLE CLOCK CHANGING’ IS DONE By F. 8. Evans, Indianapolis We finally have come to the end of daylight savings, and I hope that Indianapolis has become so well fed up with it that it will not be repeated next year. Those of us who rose early for jobs starting at 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning found we were losing an hour’s sleep each night because of

the heat.

As far as I can tell, the benefits of longer days are more than counteracted by this lack of sleep. We would be in much better physical condition without this abominable clock changing. Let’s have no more of it.

8 8 8 UPROOTING OF TREES BOTHERS NORTH SIDER V..M., ex-Fairmount : For several years now, I have been driving to and fromm my North Side home. And every time I approached the 16th-to-21st St. stretch on Capitol Ave. I damned the bottleneck that slowed traffic to a snail's pace. I was especially voluble, violent and profane when a thoughtless motorist would pull away from the curb near Methodist Hospital, almost jamming me into the oncoming line of vehicles. And I longed for the day when the street would be widened. A couple of weeks ago they started and I hummed happily. But I have not been so cheerful about it for the last week. If you've seen the big steam shovels uprooting block after block of lovely shade trees which lined the street, splintering them and dumping them onto trucks, you haven't felt so good about it either. Maybe that’s the price we must pay for safety and progress—but it’s a stiff one. " So while I drive down another street now to avoid the scene of destruction, I often think to myself maybe I'll go back to Fairmount, where our shrubbery reaches way up into the sky, gets as big around as a wash tub, and doesn’t have to worry about its future running head-on into a trafic problem.

(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.)

“DUMB LETTERS YOU PRINT BURN ME UP”

By Lettie Sawyer, Greencastle

The letters yow've been printing burn me up to realize so many are really so dumb when it comes to politics and national affairs. People don’t read only partisan political matters. ‘Read “The days of Our Years,” by Pierre Van Passen and you'll learn that Mr. Robin Adair is right. Not only that, but if you've taken the trouble to read the articles by Mrs. Woodrow Wilson in the Saturday Evening Post a few years back you'll find it again and also in many other books and articles I have read. Now you dyed-in-the-wool Republicans who figure only your party can save this country, remember it first got us into this mess by its own shortsightedness, by refusing to join the League of Nations, by high tariffs and many other blunders. You couldn’t even recognize greatness when you had it in this last election. Now if Mr. Willkie stays with you he’s a greater fool than I think he is. : Also you now praise Mr. Lincoln, but how did your party treat him when he was President. We are living now and for the future, not the past. All this pleading over the draft extension is pure silly when who knows how long before we may have to be fighting for our very lives. And if you think the Democrats or New Deal is hard on your liberty, think what it would be under the Nazis. : I think from what I've read France has a lot of blame to lay on her shoulders for this war. She could have stopped Hitler's rise to power by extending credit and lessening the heavy payments as the aftermath of the first World War, she demanded from the German peoples. She could have given Italy a greater share in the new layout, but greed held her down and now she’s lost.

But we must not let greed cause

Side Glances=By Galbraith

us to make the same blunders over. Maybe future historians will be able to show us Roosevelt's grestness and weakness, as they "have Washington and Lincoln. 8 » ” URGES ALL TO PURCHASE DEFENSE BONDS ; By Dr. Charles R. Sowder, Newcastle Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau has appealed to us to buy

|bonds with which to pay for defense

of our country and to supply others fighting the world menace, Hitlerism, to whom we have obligated ourselves. ” Wages have increased by hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only are more people employed than ever. before in our history, but increases

in pay have far outstripped the now rising cost of living. As our industries turn from peacetime production there will be less consumers goods for sale and billions more money with which to buy. You are now hearing much of the hydra - headed monster inflation. Early this year in a special article I advocated the freezing of all prices to avoid this very thing. For 12 years we have not been able, due to a prolonged depression, to buy the things we would like to have. The public now has the money and it will be coming in in an increasing stream until this war is over. How soon or how suddenly it will end is beyond anyone to say. However, when the end does come there will, of necessity, be adjustments in turning back from a wartime economy to one of peace. This adjustment will affect labor most. Do you not think it best, in order to be able to meet this change, that you forego your desire. to buy and lay aside funds to meet the shock at the war’s end? ..... Your government—yours and mine —is earnestly asking you to provide for this inevitable time by buying defense bonds to be paid back to you on demand. Would this not be better than to ask your neighbors to care for you and yours? This money which you save now and spend when needed will not only help to prevent inflation but your ability to buy when this boom collapses will insure your job and your neighbor’s job when you will spend it when the crash comes, as it will surely do. :

Help yourself and your neighbors

patriotic duty.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The World is' too much with us; « late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; : Litug we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, : The winds that will ‘be howling at all hours

{atin

by buying defense bonds until it y hurts. You will not regret this

And are up-gather’d now like sleeping flowers, : For ‘this, for every thing, we are out

of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed out-

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his weathered horn. . : William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

DAILY. THOUGHT

With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. —Mark 10:37.

. desertion.

MONDAY, SEPT. 29, 1041 |

Gen. Johnson

WASHINGTON, "Sept. : 20. When Secretary. of the Treasury Morgenthau said he thinks profits | - should be limited to 6 per cent of - invested capital, he: wasn't reade ing from his prepa manue : sorib, Which made 10 such’ sugad libbing that way. Hin getting to be the “best Secretary of the «Treasury since Willie Woodin” has been largely due to his choice of some able.assistants. Henry, on his own, ain't any too smart. His 6 per cent recSmuendagion ag Siler very vicious. or very igno- . In these troubled times it is mate charitable to gay. ory jetta.” \ i io Ny . Invested cap not the important thing Yo. look examining ‘ the performance of any enterprise. Proof of that is- that no financial ‘expert on securities

| looks first at the balance sheet of a company in ques-

tion, It looks first at its income statement to learn what it earns, not in percentage of invested capital, but on each share of stock. ’ : : In many cases (as in non-par common stock) -that has nothing whatever to do with invested capital which usually means largely bricks, mortar and ma« chinery and which isn't worth a tinkers dam if it can’t Sarn and is in that case a liability rather than an asset.

'It Isn't Bad for the Big Guy'

FURTHERMORE, SOME COMPANIES, railroads for example, are heavily over-capitalized, burdened with some “assets” which are just dead horses—unburied corpses of dead mistakes. Six per cent of their “imvested capital” would be bonanza for them. At the other end of the list are companies which depend almost entirely on good-will and skill which can’t properly be written in their “invested capital.” Consider a great law firm. Its “invested capital” is in a snag of books and a group of offices, sometimes sumptuous, but even this is unnecessary if it is get= ting results. Its “invested capital” is negligible. If it had to be restricted to 6 per cent on that, its whole value is gone, : Think about chewing-gum companies. Lots of their factories are marvels of efficiency, but their value lies in the intangibles of public preference and confidence. A good deal of this is true about news= papers and magazines. . There is another vital point. Most old and long established industrial companies, the “economic empires” and “potential monopolies” have very large “invested capital” relatively unburdened with debt, Most new and up-and-coming little fellows have much larger proportions of debt. Six per cent isn't so bad for the big guy. It is poison and bankruptcy to the little one, He can’t get out of debt at 6 per cent.

It's "Man on Street,’ Who Pays

THE REAL MURDEROUS bearing of this Mor« genthau suggestion is not on the companies at all, They are mostly corporations—artificial persons. The real bearing is on the man in the street who has bought a few shares of common stock in this or that company—not for speculation but for investe ment. He did that on the universal rule of market prices, not on the tricky and :inapplicable rule of “return on invested capital,” but on the long estab lished principles of “earnings per share.” Once Mr. Morgenthau’s suggestion becomes law a large’ but indeterminable proportion of the holdings of investors in common stocks would become in the wind. Perhaps unconsciously, but nevertheless effectively, almost every recent policy, headlong priorities, proposed piece-meal price legislation and now this 6% nonsense has yepded toward an increase of: monopoly and destruction of enterprise the Uniied Staies, ‘ aA n re e intention to. corral private property into big pieces because it is easier thus to absorb it into the equivalent of Government ownership? ai I think there is no such intention, but if the were it couldn't be done faster than it is being done. . :

A Woman's Viewpoint -

By Mrs. Walter Ferguson:

that women are cry babies and are behaving reprehensibly in the war emergency. “This nation was not built by whiners,” goes his lecture, “and it won’t be saved by them.” : As you see, he runs with the crowd now charging outrightly or by. implication that there is sissiness in the Army and that women are to blame. : Yet if you are looking for the person who never gives up, who won't budge an inch from a moral position, and Who never admits defeat, find a whining woman. If you doubt the statement, ask the man who owns one. . The trick is to get their attention fixed in the right direction. Once they set their heads, neither hell nor high water can stop or swerve them! Therefore, it ‘seems to me, men in Army circles are singularly lacking in tact when they prefer these blanket charges against feminine citizens. Such behavior shows deficiency in good taste and good sense as well as a big smattering of the Pharisee.

Why Can't We Be Honest?

WHAT THEY SHOULD do instead is to follow the example of the husband in the home and throw themselves upon the whining women’s mercy. Nothing is so bracing for one cry baby as another cry baby. If men Were honest with themselves and us, they could easily improve a condition which is now deplored by our Chief of Staff and others. honesty compels them to admit that, if morale is bad among the troops, it is due largely to the repre hensible manner in which the draft law was passed. For that error men only are to blame. Their methods were worse than whining—they were downright deceitful, and it would clear the moral atmosphere if they -admitted their mistakes instead of yelling abou the sins of women. . The Old Adam alibi never has kept men in Eden

et. Why can’t we be honest With ourselves and each other? . Morale jis not what it should be, perhaps, but no particular group is responsible. And I'll. back whining women to save the country any day against avaricious men. So let's have less of the “holiers than-thou” attitude on the part of the males and a title more eating of of us.

Editor's Note: The views expressed by columnists in this newspaper are their own. They are not necessarily those of The Indianapolis Times. a

Questions and Answers

(The Indianapolis Times Service Bureau will answer any question of fact or information, mot involving extensive re search. Write your questions clearly, sign name and address, inclose a three-cent postage stamp, Medical or legal advice cannqt be given. Address The Times Washington Service Bureau, 1013 Thirteenth St., Washington, D. C.) Q—My husband deserted me 10 years ago and I have never h from him since. Does that constitute an automatic divorce? ’ A—No,’ There is no automatic divorce because of

Q—How many panzer or armored divisions has

Germany : ; A—A recent estimate places the number between 20 and 25. Q—In English grammar, what is a syncope? A—The elision of a letter or syllable from the midst of a word, as ne'er for never; can’t for cannot. . Q—In which of Dickens’ novels is “Mrs. Harris” & character? : : ! —*“Martin Chuzzlewit.” She was a fictitious pere son invented by “Sairy Gamp” for the purpose of enforcing her statements by quoting the opinion of Mrs, Harris upon the subject under oY. the Canadian Army

Q—How long are draftees required to serve? = .

chaff :

or more effectively

THE MAN NEXT DOOR says .

‘humble pie by the whole log

\