Presents pour in for dying boy
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Washington –
Assistant Director Paul H. Appleby of the Bureau of the Budget has resigned, effective Dec. 1, to become vice president and general manager of the Queen Vity Broadcasting Company of Seattle, Washington.
Performances hit as ‘artful filth’
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Hyde Park, New York (UP) –
Mrs. Gladys Brower, Hyde Park town clerk, who said she stood “about two feet” away from President Roosevelt when he cast his ballot Election Day, today denied reports that the President used “shocking profanity” because the voting machine wouldn’t work.
Mrs. Brower, in whose office the voting booth was located, said she could hear the President plainly when he asked an election inspector, “What’s the matter?” with the voting machine, but she “heard nothing” like profanity.
Charleston, West Virginia –
Republican Rep. A. C. Schiffler today conceded his defeat for reelection to Congress from the 1st district to his opponent, Democratic Governor M. M. Neely, and withdrew his requests for a recount of votes in Marion, Brooke and Ohio counties. On a basis of unofficial returns, Mr. Schiffler was defeated by more than 1,000 votes.
Passing days are deepening the mystery of Adolf Hitler. The public has not seen him or heard his voice since July 21, when he assured the German people of his safety after the “bombing plot” which was quite possibly faked.
Since then, Heinrich Himmler has read two purported Hitler speeches, one announcing the formation of the Volkssturm last month, the other at the postponed “Beer Hall Putsch” celebration in Munich.
Is Hitler paralyzed or insane or even alive? The outside world is buzzing with speculation, and Germany must be buzzing even louder. For even the Gestapo cannot silence every whisper, or bring reason to recent illogical happenings.
For instance, if the press of affairs is all that keeps Hitler out of sight, then it is not likely that he would have taken time to write the lengthy Munich speech that Himmler read. Or if he had, then he certainly could have spared the time to deliver it, for it would have been to his obvious advantage to do so.
Every head of a state knows the necessity of showing himself in public on occasion to spread confidence in time of distress, to bolster his waning popularity, or to allay rumors which opponents may circulate.
So, the German people must know that all is not well with the Führer. All of which doesn’t concern the Allied nations particularly except as it possibly affects the war. The possible effect does not seem to be anything to build sanguine hopes on. For, whether Hitler is dead, ill, mad, or simply incapacitated by fear, the German Army and the German nation are still in the hands of leaders committed to a war to the death – the death of Germany, if need be.
These leaders are a desperate gang whose lives and fortunes are at stake. They are intent upon saving both. With them still are many thousands of the people, faithful, fanatic young followers whose minds have been carefully warped by Nazi education for just such an extremity as this. The rest of the Germans have the Gestapo.
If recent reports from within Germany are to be credited, the Nazis themselves have accommodatingly started the difficult task of de-educating and reeducating their followers. This is being done not through books, but through impressive laboratory demonstrations in their own city streets.
It seems that their dwindling manpower reserve has forced the Nazis to impress prisoners from Asiatic Russia into service, and thus knock the racial supremacy theory for a loop. For today the Germans see about them a conglomerate collection of men in German uniforms whose complexion and bone structure proclaim them to be “inferior,” according to the master-race diet which Hitler fed his people for 10 years.
That must be quite a jolt. And particularly since many of these foreigners wear the SS used to be the cream of the Nazi crop. Its fanatic members were intent on proving, by blood and slaughter, that the “Nordics” living inside certain artificial political boundaries were ordained by nature’s laws to enslave and rule their neighbors.
Today, thousands of those ardent disciples of the New Order lie buried in distant lands. So many are gone that the Nazi leaders must now force members of the destined slaved race, on pain of death, to defend the master race against inevitable defeat by the conquering “inferior” armies.
It would be a baffling task to try to explain such an anomaly. Here are prisoners compelled to take up arms in defense of a philosophy which would enslave them but which, by defending, they also destroy. The significance behind the sight of a Mongoloid face above an SS uniform can hardly be lost upon the most obtuse German.
And yet it may be wondered how lasting an impression the lesion will make.
Super-racism isn’t a Nazi invention. It has flourished in Germany for more than a century, in such things as Hegel’s theory of the dominance of the Germanic people as world rulers; Nietzsche’s vision of a superman and a “daring and ruler race” triumphing over slave types paralyzed by Jewish-Christian morality; Wagner’s grandiose Teutonic myths; Treitschke’s anti-Socialist, anti-Catholic, anti-Polish and anti-Jewish writings.
Hitler’s circle weren’t the first small men to pervert philosophic thought to despicable practice.
Germany was also the cradle of modern anti-Semitism. In the last quarter of the 19th century, this bigotry spread to Russia, Hungary, Romania and France, climaxed there by the infamous Dreyfus persecution. Directly after the last war, anti-Semitism reappeared in Germany, and it took but little encouragement for Hitler to fan it into flame.
Racism is a congenial German aberration. Its eradication will be a hard, perplexing problem for Germany’s conquerors. But a practical example of its inconsistent folly, presented unwillingly by German authorities, may be as hopeful a beginning as could be asked for.
By Thomas L. Stokes
Washington –
In the passing of Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina was the passing of a tradition.
That is, symbolically, for the Smith tradition still lives here and there in the South.
It is the tradition of the rampant individualist, the rebel against too much government. “Cotton Ed” was that except occasionally as in the case of cotton. He was the champion, in his younger career of the sharecropper and tenant farmer, the way to political power, but in his later years he scorned help for such low-income groups from a paternalistic government.
It was not so many years ago, during a New Deal fight, that he dropped a remark about 50 cents a day being enough wages in South Carolina.
Demagogue type
In him was the development into almost the epitome of a type of demagoguery seen most often in the South, though not peculiar to it. This is the demagogue for the predominant economic and financial interests, who is able to sell his doctrine to enough of the masses by a picturesque personality, a gift for the homely simile and story, and with a slug here and there of prejudice, usually at the expense of the “Yankee” or the “Nigger.” The last was laid on more heavily if he was pressed hard politically.
There were few figures so engaging to watch in action as the belligerent “Cotton Ed” with his mustaches bristling.
There was a counterpart for some years in Georgia’s Gene Talmadge of the red galluses, who was taken care of by the people a couple of years ago, though it is too much to predict or hope that he won’t come back.
“Cotton Ed” was finally toppled from his throne in South Carolina in the primaries this year, after 35 years in the Senate. The people of a newer generation finally caught up with him. It must have been a great disappointment – his defeat – for a man so long in harness. But he was full of years. He celebrated his 80th birthday Aug. 1.
Middle class family
He died in the old house where he was born at Lynchburg, in the South Carolina midlands, where the Smith family had lived for over 150 years. He came from the substantial yeomanry of the upcountry, the backbone of the South, though less advertised than the aristocratic icing, with its legends of big white houses and honeysuckle, its mint juleps and pickaninnies, racing about to do “Old Marster’s” bidding, or the masses at the other end, satirized in Jeeter Lester and his breed.
Ellison D., who was “Cotton Ed,” was born a few days after Gen. Sherman burned Atlanta. He was a child in the stormy Reconstruction days and grew up with the memory of Wade Hampton and his “Red Shirts” who took over the state government from the Carpetbaggers. Wade Hampton was one of “Cotton Ed’s” heroes. The Senator donned a red shirt in the celebration after his victory in 1938 when President Roosevelt tried to “purge” him. He was jubilant that night.
Characteristic of the Senator, and the meaning of his kind in the South, was a scene that took place in front of his home described to me a couple of years ago by a traveling companion on a train rolling across Georgia.
My companion, who happened to be in the neighborhood of the Smith home on business, was taken by a friend to meet the Senator. They found him in the front yard, in his shirt sleeves, a pine branch in his hand which he was lazily swinging back and forth across his shoulders to keep off the mosquitoes.
The visitor asked him where the mosquitoes came from. The Senator pointed across the road where he said there was a swamp. He was asked why he didn’t drain the swamp.
“Oh, it’s been there since my grandfather’s time, and it might as well stay,” the Senator replied.
There’s “Cotton Ed” and there was the South which he represented. Fortunately, that’s passing.