CRIME: Lesson Learned

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But Citizen Hoover's opinions of lynch law were not shared by the San Jose grand jury which adjourned without asking for the identity of their "patriotic" fellow townsmen.

On the nation's opposite seaboard, another Governor was being bedevilled for taking precisely the opposite view of lynching from Governor Rolph's. Month before a mob at Princess Anne, Md. had hanged and burned a Negro named George Armwood, accused of raping an aged countrywoman (TIME, Oct. 30). When the local prosecutor failed to act on the cases of four men accused of having taken part in the lynching, Maryland's handsome Governor Ritchie sent 325 militiamen to round up the accused, bring them back to Baltimore (TIME, Dec. 4). Farmers and fishermen of the Eastern Shore bridled at this procedure, attacked the Governor's troops. Last week the four prisoners, one of them a past commander of a local American Legion post, were returned to Princess Anne under two lone guards. Greeted like homing heroes, the men entered town on the running boards of their custodians' cars. A judge formally released them eight minutes after the court house hearing began. The State's Attorney General s office, which said it was unnotified, was not present to produce evidence against the prisoners.

While Governor Ritchie lay ill and disappointed in his fine old brick mansion in Annapolis, Eastern Shoremen proclaimed that they would like to ''trade Governors" with California. They loudly crowed that Governor Ritchie, who has aspirations of succeeding himself for the fourth time or running for the U. S. Senate next year, was politically dead. There was also some loud talk of secession from Maryland, to form a 49th State of the Eastern Shore and parts of Virginia and Delaware.

Thus did the nation's most dramatic lynching week leave Albert Cabell Ritchie the unhappy victim of a situation which, had it occurred in any other week, would have been relatively unimportant. As it was, Conservative Mr. Ritchie found himself in the same boat with Conservative Mr. Hoover, whom he had often criticized. So completely had a nation-wide fog of emotion obliterated the channels of logic that the tabloid New York Daily News observed: "Our own notion is that it is another chapter in the world-old story of the fight between the Haves and the Havenots. We think the plebeians and the patricians, the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, the nobles and the sans-culottes, are at it again today."

Other soundings from an historic seven days:

¶ Manhattan's fashionable Dr. Henry Darlington dispatched from his Fifthavian church a telegram to Governor Rolph: "Congratulations on the stand you have taken." He added: "Maybe we needed something like this right now to let our criminals realize that they cannot run riot." After protests from his Bishop, and while divinity students picketed his Sunday service, Dr. Darlington admitted that his message was the result of being "deeply stirred," that "it should not have been sent."

¶ Charles Francis Potter suggested to the First Humanist Society in Manhattan that "lynching" be changed to "Rolphing."

¶ Headline-of-the-week from the New York Evening, Post: LUST SEED SOWN, COPELAND'S VIEW.