The Bulletin’s Day Book

With French Fascism during the last few days again on the front page, we find it timely to announce that a sister group to perhaps the strongest nationalist group in Paris has been formed in New York. The New Yorkers, as in France, go under the group title, Croix de feu, “Cross of fire.”

We are told by a Jewish member of the group that it is in no wise anti-Semitic. He says that Jews among other transplanted Frenchmen are lending the movement in their native land considerable support.

Some years ago when America was irritated with its own fiery crosses we happened to be out on the Pacific Coast. Because the Jews were sparsely settled in that region, the brunt of responsibility of warding off the KKK, bearers of the crosses, fell mainly on the shoulders of Catholics.

A priest in a little Oregon town one Sunday attempted to psychoanalyze those who had been knocking over sacred statues on parish grounds, stealing gates and hanging them on telephone poles, and generally deporting themselves in the manner of Hallowe’en vandals.

“I believe,” the priest said at mass, “that these pranks are being perpetrated by men with nothing else to do, men who have never quite grown up. Now there is only one way to handle bad boys, and that is to give them a good tanning and put them to work. This I shall do if I ever lay my hands on members of the KKK.”

Now, some nights later, the priest saw a group of ten or twelve white-robed men stealing through the churchyard. He ordered his housekeeper to give him a sheet from the linen closet, which he hastily cut into a hood. He joined the gang without being detected, followed along until they began mutilating one of the statues in the yard, and promptly let loose–

“Ye sacrilegious spalpeens,” he shouted, as the bewildered Ku Kluxers turned in astonishment. “I’ll teach you some manners,” he cried, and forthwith he sailed into the white-robbed mass with both fists flying.

Being stalwart, athletic, and altogether skillful with his hands, he felled two of the marauders, while the remainder sought cover. The two stunned Ku Kluxers he dragged into the house, looked them over, and addressed them as follows: “Both of you look as though you’ve had enough chastisement for one night. Now get yourselves up to my spare room and get to bed, because early in the morning you’ve got a little job to do.”

The townspeople were surprised on the following day when upon passing the church grounds they saw two white robed figures, each with a trowel, repairing mutilated statues. And near them sat the priest calmly smoking a pipe, a strap across his lap. He was never again molested, as far as we know.

We are not frequently given to moralizing, but it seems to us that if vandals were generally treated in this manner, there would be more tolerance and less trouble in the world.

It is true that not every man is capable of taking a number of roughnecks by the seat of the trousers and knape of the neck, but we do believe that man’s ingenuity could devise some way to handle vandals properly.

To recognize their activities as awful crimes against civilization, to hold public demonstrations against them and thereby advertise a group that is unworthy of notice, and then to allow them to run rampant until they do something really harmful, is to nourish mischief. We would recommend an immediate and informal trouncing for an individual ill-doer before counter-demonstrations can be mustered to formalize their activities. Thus raised to ridicule–or lowered in their own estimation–they may behave themselves, if right-thinking people are willing to let bygones be bygones.