As One Editor Sees It by R.F. Beasley, 1941

Beasley’s Farm and Home Weekly, Charlotte, N.C., July 31, 1941. A single score of years is 20 years, so four score means a person is 80.

As One Editor Sees It by R.F. Beasley

George Bernard Shaw, the playwrite that people have been talking about an arguing over for many years, was 85 one day last week. He said he had been trying to die for a long time but couldn’t. The old bounder is of course fibbing. When he gets sick he will forget all about dying and try to get well. We all talk big about being so many score years young and not expecting to die as long as we feel well. I went to call on an old friend the other day who is 85 and he never said anything about trying to die. He was trying to live, because he is sick. Sam Jones used to say that people told lies about being ready and waiting to go to heaven. Every one of them, he said, would run for the paregoric bottle at the first touch of pain. Life is a tragedy any way you look at it. No one escapes. And death cannot be laughed off even by George Bernard Shaw.

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I think that Senator Burton K. Wheeler is about the most detestable man in the United States. He has been violating the spirit if not the letter of the postal law in using the franking privilege to send out all kinds of attacks upon the President of the United States, even postal cards to men in the army asking them to violate the military rules by writing letters demanding that the draft period not be extended. Wheeler hates Roosevelt so bad that he would apparently turn this country over to Hitler or anybody else if only it would hurt Roosevelt. We are arresting men in this country for sabotage, but we apparently can do nothing about any sabotage a United States senator chooses to practice. When Andrew Jackson was president and some senators were acting about like Wheeler is now, Jackson turned loose a grapevine telegram that since there was such a thing as treason, people could be tried and hanged on the charge. It had a good effect. He did not except United States senators.

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Japan has been coddled by this country and England for years. That country is the one which started the wave of aggression 10 years ago by robbing China of Manchuria. Now both England and America seem to be ready to stop the coddling and talk business. Why is there no outcry about our stern attitude towards Japan while some are bursting their lungs against aid to England and defiance of Hitler? The Pacific coast hates the Japanese and that closes the mouths of some United States senators. Yet it is perfectly well known that Hitler is the man who is instigating Japan to more and more aggression. Through his pressure on the French government, which is his puppet, Japan has been given a free hand in the French territory of China. France calls upon Japan to protect her possessions are the fake charge that America and England are preparing to take them. That is simon pure Hitler politics.

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There is one thing that this country should put a stop to. That is all these various societies and organizations of people in this country who still hold allegiance to foreign countries. When in former times men came to this country from Europe they came to escape those countries and to be transformed into Americans. Now they appear to come to America only to continue to be something else and to exert pressure on this country to cease to be American. Westbrook Peglar contends that only natives of America should be allowed to vote. Foreigners come here now, often lie about their naturalization papers, and waltz into our politics and put pressure on our officials in behalf of that country they came from. No German-American bund should be allowed to exist, nor any Communist party. We are so wasteful of liberty in this country that pretty soon we shall have none. No many who splits his nationality ought to be allowed to vote in this country, and all naturalization ought to be put on a probationary status.