Men Should Speak Their Minds, As Long as Willing to Face Consequences, Sept. 11, 1925

Colonel Mitchell Calls for a Show-Down

Are not these army gentlemen in Washington aware that there exists an invention known as the telegraph?

Instead of sending Colonel Nugent to Texas to ask Colonel Mitchell if he really did say what the papers say he said about the war and navy departments, they could find out all they need to know about his responsibility for the published statements in three hours at a cost of $5 or $10.

A good example of the wastefulness and delay which bring down so much criticism upon government methods of doing business.

The truth probably is that the men whom Colonel Mitchell has assailed are engaged in killing time, in order to get their defense into better shape and prepare the counter attack.

This is by no means to say that all the charges of the air force officers are true. No doubt some of them are well-founded and others are overdrawn. It must be kept in mind a member of any branch of the government service (whether civil or military) almost always exaggerates the importance of his own branch in relation to others, and almost always is convinced that it is unfairly treated in the division of funds and in the limitation of its independence.

Colonel Mitchell has a direct way of talking, and a certain picturesqueness, that makes a strong appeal to the newspaper reader; but the subject that he is discussing is a complicated one upon which an outsider is incapable of forming an even measurably sensible judgment until he has given to it a great deal more study than the reading of the blast from San Antonio.

It is for the public good that every man well informed about any part of the public business, whether he be in the military service our out of it, should speak his mind, and Colonel Mitchell is not to be blamed for speaking his. He knows he must stand responsible for what he has said, and he is evidently prepared to take the consequences. Persons who are inclined to revere authority may be shocked at his “insubordination.” But most people, properly enough, do not care a hang about that. The country as a whole—to the extent that it is interested at all in military preparation, which, in our opinion, is to a very small extent—will applaud the hell-raising air colonel for calling for a show-down.

From the editorial page of The Chapel Hill Weekly, Friday, Sept. 11, 1925

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