The Omaha guide., 1937-07-24
STATES TI7HFs LYNcHINa AND PROHIBITION

Tia. be has listened to The requests Of Southern friends7
when he be- twice helped shy so-caled federal an @ilynehing
bills has been quite apparent TO sponsors and friends Of that
Legislation. Then as nsual, he eloaled his opposition in venera-
ton for he Constitution TO my mind he said. "ff that sort
of bin can be passed and sustained by the supreme Court, we
have utterly %aanihlaed all STA e sovereignty we have broknen
down state lines completely Recently, reaffirming his cons i
tutional objection. he ayowed tia SHOULD the unexpected
and great honor come to me Of being President OF the Uni ed
States and anch a bill should reach me | would mhes.
itatngly We o it, Borah's frequently displayed lack of integ-
rHy m maintaining a position always casts doubt upon his
sincerity lu il he is genuinely prepossesSed by some abstract
theofy OF The relations between the state and national Civ
ernments, there is, in this ina anee, ample answer. Statutes de
signed either 10 prevent or punish mob violence in fory states
including ten with the wors %lynehing records, have not check
ed lynehing a study Of the University of North Carolina shows
thai only eiehtFenths Of one per cent Of the lynchings since.
1900 have been followed by conviction of the lyneher4 Sttae en-
forcement officials, insenstive to their states default in afford
ing equal protection to citizens have publicly applauded mobs
which have usurped the fude ions if the STATE and dealt our
anarehaie Judge Lyneh's barbarity in place of due process Of
law. 4 conscientious legislator should not be criticized for de-
Ginning 10 support a measure palpably nncon9 itutional and
impolitie But there can be no question Of the good policy of
the a%ngilyneh legislation. And where able and dainterested
constitutional lawyers urge the validity Of the proposed legis-
latlon, a constructive legislator would not block the possibility
of the highest test-judieial examination. What the Supreme
Court would do with the antilynching law cannot be predicted.
1t is Interesting to recall that the present Chief Justice If the
Supreme Court, in 1919, was a leading spirit in a National
conference on %Lynching which unanimously passed a resolution
10 the elect that lynehlng be made a federal crime punishable
by the United States courts.
Estates rights gave the Idahoan no trouble when it came
to supporting federal prohibition, The SNUG opportunists who
seized upon the emotionalsm and patriotism of war to dry up
all the states by national action found IN Borah d champion.
Later, when the nobility of the prohibition experiment had been
furnished by the bootleg racket and its bloody concimitants,
when wholesale and contemptuous disregard of the prohibition
amendment was sapping respect for laws generally, Borah
rang the air with pleas against notification" Speaking at
Washington, in 1928, ON "Shal the Constitution of the United
States Be Nullified" he acclaimed:
The subject which has been assigned to me does not
devOlve upon me the duty Of arguing the wisdom or unwis-
dom Of any provision of the Constitution. That question was
settled when any particular provision was placed in the
Constitution. I take the instrument as I find it-she crystal
lied views of a nation and mead TO insist that it shah be
maintained and enforced as written.
Startling is the comparison of this idealism with words ut
tered by Mn Borah in a coloquy in the Senate with John
Sharp Williams of Mississippi, few years before. Borah after
pointed out that the MissisSppians had kept the Negroes from
voting in evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment, added:
Now, I am not discussing at this time the question as
TO whether or not the South could submit to the domination
of the inferior race. / am not discussing the nlstifica-
ton of what you have done. We would do the same thing
in the North If the situation was the same"
Right, indeed, was Borah when in the notification speech
already quoted from, he said:
I'VE need to have constitutional morality declared as
was the gospel Oftod To the highland the low, for against
this neither things present nor things to come shall prevail"
Itisaneed William T. Borah may himself be charged with
CONTINUED Next WeekO