Black on White

The overwhelming victory for Nazi Germany in the Saar is a bitter pill for those who regard Hitlerism as a plague and a disaster. But it is one that must be swallowed without too much gagging.

And there is small comfort in sugar-coating it by explaining away and deriding the completeness of the Fascist triumph. Walter Lippman, on the morning of the Nazi victory, consoled himself at length with the thought that the election was no true index of Saar sentiment. It was vitiated, he claimed, by the fear of reprisals for opposition and other factors. “There is no way of testing dictatorship by democratic principles,” he concluded.

That fear and pressure may have swung some votes to Hitler may be taken for granted. But a ninety per cent vote cannot be pooh-poohed or minimized. It must be faced. The fact is that German race sentiment gave a nearly unanimous demonstration of its strength. Race feeling in its undiluted essence asserted itself— above class, above civil rights, above everything.

For the purists of economic determination who discount national and racial emotions the Saar votes holds a moral. For the rest of us the moral is of a different nature: Our fond superstition that the masses anywhere are particularly interested in freedom has received a staggering wallop.

Jubilantly these masses rush to shove their necks under the dictator’s iron heel. They celebrate their loss of freedom, their enrollment in a rigid, impersonal and brutal discipline, as though it were a release. Those among them who have the equipment and inclination to think at all, regard it perhaps as collective or racial freedom. With the others it is a blind, instinctive stampede, a herd movement into the Nazi stockades.

For the Jews, another corner of the map has been painted black and surrounded with bayonets and “verboten” signs. Once more Israel shoulders his pack and runs for his life. The boundaries within which he can move are being constantly narrowed down. Soon, perhaps, there will be no place to which to escape….

Is the American public really as excited about the court proceedings in Flemington, N. J., as American editors suppose? My private guess is that the press is over-estimating the popular interest. I mean that curiosity is large but not so large that it wipes out everything else in the planet.

Personally I am bored by the dragging, repetitious affair, by the handwriting experts, the gurglings of writers famished for copy. Most of the people I know are equally bored by it. I have yet to find anyone who reads the verbatim transcript of the record in full. While those I meet are hardly a true cross-section of America, I do believe the press is plunged into a sort of hypnosis in this matter. No newspaper dares to be the first ### relegate the trial to its proper place in the news picture.

Thus far the trial has uncovered none of the deep-running excitements of such celebrated affairs as the Hall-Mills or Snyder-Gray murder trials. Those, at least, had raw passion as their breeding ground. Sordid, brutal, revolting as they were, those crimes grew out of basic emotions. On a lower, more tragic plane they mirrored passions that are all too human. The millions who looked on felt in themselves faint echoes of the turgid emotions which had trapped the pathetic Mr. Gray and the Rev. Hall.

In the Hauptmann case there are no such overtones. The Flemington trial is a cold-blooded almost scientific inquiry into a cold-blooded crime of greed. The kidnaping had about it a grim drama reminiscent of Greek tragedy. The trial—Hauptmann, his lawyers, the comic-opera jury, the gaping yokels—is painful anti-climax. Not all the high-salaried “names” reporting the trial have succeeded in raising it above a petty, sordid level. As drama in the grand style it just won’t jell.