The Charlotte News

Saturday, October 31, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Aside from the typical war news appearing on the front page, plus a reminder that nationwide gas rationing, despite registration being postponed until mid-November, would nevertheless commence on November 22, and another report of summary mass executions by Nazis for alleged sabotage, this one from the suburb of Warsaw, Palmiry, where over 2,000 Poles had been systematically murdered in the first half of 1940, earning the town the title of "The Village of Death"--aside from those stories of sacrifice and heroism, a significant story predicts that voter apathy resultant of the war would produce the lowest raw turn-out of voters for an off-year election since 1934, about 35 million predicted to show up at the polls--or a paltry 65 percent of the eligible voters, claims the piece, compared to the more typical for off-year elections, 75 percent, with 80 to 85 percent usual in presidential elections.

It is significant of course because today we hail 60 percent turnout as a bellwether of highly participatory democracy in action, and, for good reason, when elections prior to 2000 were likely to bring at best a little over or less than 50 percent of the eligible electorate to the polls, a woeful statistic played out redundantly from 1972 onward. The 2008 election, for instance, sparked unusually high participation for our times: 57% of the eligible voters came to the polls, compared to 55% in 2004 and 51% in 2000. In 1992, a non-incumbent year when a badly faltering economy was the central issue, 55% turned out in a three-way race, with additional unusual participation of otherwise alienated voters sparked by the presence of a viable third-party candidate, a folksy billionaire.

The trend after the 1968 election, with turnout typical for the times at 60%, was downward: 55% in 1972, and henceforth between a low of 50% in 1988 and the highs we have indicated above, with the typical turnout averaging about 52.5% during the other presidential election years.

The 63% turnout of 1960 remains a record for the last 50 years, and indeed higher than any election during at least the thirty years prior to it.

Off-year congressional elections, which had hovered at around 46-48% of eligible voter turnout during the 1960's through 1972 suddenly took a dive in 1974, the election which took place three months after President Nixon's resignation over the Watergate scandal, with a turnout of only 38%. Voting rates in off-year elections since have remained in that vicinity of 36-38%, right through the 2006 election, which registered a 37% turnout.

These statistics, incidentally, vary somewhat under different analyses, showing, for instance, off-year election turnout since 1974 being as low in some cases as 32-34%; but relatively, the statistics tend to be uniform in their trends, significantly lower off-year and presidential year election turnouts since the Watergate scandal of 1973-74 and the tendency thereafter toward political apathy and "cultural malaise", as President Carter termed it.

Yet, while the modern analysis holds to paint a picture of 30 years of post-Watergate indifference and burned-out cynicism toward the political world, with those hallmarks lessened significantly since the close election of 2000 and its aftermath, some adjustment is required for the rather overly optimistic story of the past presented on the front page of this date, three days before election day in 1942. Whether it was deliberately overstating the case of past turnout to encourage greater presence at the polls than predicted by shaming the public into a belief that greater numbers typically voted than actually was the case, the actual numbers from the off-year elections between 1930 and 1942 show a very different trend: 1930-34%; 1934-41%; 1938-44%; with, indeed, the modern nadir reached in 1942, with a woefully dismal turnout of 32.5%, the lowest of any year since before 1930.

That 1942 low, incidentally, was roughly equaled only in the midst of the presidential scandal of 1998, an election which took place during impeachment hearings in the House, drawing a mere 32.9% of the eligible voters to the polls, while the 1986 election, in the midst of the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal and its hearings, drew only 33.5% of eligible voters to the polls.

The intervening presidential election year turnouts were: 1932-52.5%; 1936-57%; 1940-59%, with 56% in 1944. After the war, the trend was similar, with the exception of 1948 which saw only a 51% turnout in the election between Truman and Dewey; 1952-62%; 1956-59%. The off-year congressional elections ran thusly: 1946-37%; 1950-41%; 1954-42%; 1958-43%.

The probable discrepancy between the story's vaunted numbers of usual voters in mid-term elections approaching 75% and 80 to 85% in presidential election years was probably the result of considering only registered voters, even if the story indicates that eligible voters were taken into account in the analysis.

Regardless, the story's prediction, relatively speaking, was accurate. Unusual voter apathy occurred in the off-year election of 1942, unequaled by any year since or prior to that time since before 1930 anyway. (We have not analyzed turnout prior to 1930, a year into the Depression.)

That is, when considered, a remarkable notion: that a generation facing a comprehensive draft, with the question of the drafting of 18 and 19-year olds for the first time being put before Congress, at time of election still awaiting final merger between the Senate and House varying versions, with the entire country on a wartime footing, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the war going, at best, erratically, with occasional good news interspersed primarily by bad to worse news for the Allies, the economy being so controlled and rationed as to be inconsequential as an issue, salaries just having been capped for the wealthy at $25,000 per year by James Byrnes as part of his new duties as head of the Office of Economic Stabilization in response to the President's call for such a cap, taxes through the roof on everyone--, that a generation facing such pivotally determinative issues failed to vote in any but record low numbers.

Democracy, appearing to be on hold for the duration of the war, one would have to suppose therefore, most people simply felt it a fait accompli that war was the inevitable fulcrum upon which society's institutions for the nonce were bound to turn, no matter for whom they might cast their ballot for Congress. And so, most simply didn't bother.

Conclusions: Scandal involving the presidency considerably curtails both presidential and congressional election year turnouts. World war, embracing all of society in a war production effort and a comprehensive draft, limiting freedom in the process, significantly dampens turnout. Comprehensive economic depression, while its effect thus being counter-intuitive, also, at least in 1930 and in 1932, dampened turnout. The unusually low presidential election vote for its time in 1948 was the result of the almost unanimously improvident predictions broadcast in the press and pre-election polls of a Dewey landslide. (Some historians speculate that it is why Dewey ultimately lost that election.) Conversely, high turnout tends to result, not so much from issues, as from the personalities of interesting candidates capturing the collective imagination of the electorate in presidential election years. Off-year elections tend to be so uniformly low in turnout, relative to their times, that it is not susceptible to easy analysis, except as a general gauge of either voter ennui or relative interest and the extent to which belief runs at any given time that the Congress might genuinely affect matters for the better or worse.

In any event, there you have it. Just when you were led to believe that the country was so unprecedentedly united in its patriotism and war effort--which on some level it clearly was--in the year following the attack on Pearl Harbor, it turns out on close analysis of the daily tide of events a hardly rosy time at all, scarcely united on much of anything, unless viewed through rose-colored glasses of the rosiest variety. In fact, it was the worst of times, when good news was measured only by how little bad news might reach the eyes and ears of the informed on any given day. Only children so instructed in the tragedy of war and sufficiently adaptable and callow to accept about anything as being usual for want of any reference point to the contrary, and adults who were either insensate to their times or were functionally or actually illiterate, could have viewed it otherwise. Certainly, by today's standards, indeed by the standards extant by the 1950's, it was an intolerable time, a dark time of social restraint, of sacrifice, of a time permeated by the slow, sinking feeling of being surrounded on all sides by the dead and dying, of stories of worse death and dying all around, of struggle for continued freedom against the horde of barbarians seeking to take it away and make of the world their own feudal plantation.

While we should feel fortunate not to live in a society where voting is both compulsory and pre-determined in result by coercive measures exerted at the polls, or, equally evil, where voting is not allowed, we should feel likewise ashamed in this cradle of new world democracy, standing as a beacon to the modern democratic world, that only somewhat over half the eligible voting population continues to vote in any given presidential election and only about 40% or less in the off-year elections, both of which combined, including judicial confirmation elections in the states and counties of the nation, determine our daily fates collectively.

We get the government which we either choose or which, by default, we do not choose but have chosen for us by others.

We stress: do not complain about anything if you do not vote. You have no right to be heard unless and until you vote. Car won't start? Tow truck too expensive? Repairs out the roof? Don't complain if you failed to vote for any reason other than mental or physical incapacity. Legislative and judicial policies or lack thereof determine each of these courses: car companies making poor product; the economy determining franchises without adequate competition or adequate policing of anti-trust laws by the executive branches of state and Federal government or application of those laws by the courts to keep prices reasonable. Remember it, next time the car won't start and you didn't bother to drive the block to the polling place last election to cast your ballot because you were too busy to participate for ten minutes or so in a given two-year period in something as inconsequential to you as your democracy.

Well, contribute something. Bike to work for the next six months as penance--and, next time, vote--and only for candidates properly backing the advent of that cheap, stylish, practical, virtually instantly rechargeable, electric car with a 500-mile range, obtaining at least the equivalent of 100 mpg with virtually no direct hydrocarbon emissions, made by our company in which we hold 60% of the stock, General Motors.

On the editorial page, as Herblock attempts to strike at the conscience of the pathetically apathetic voter, Raymond Clapper points up the list of sacrifices due and already existing on the home front, yet paling in significance when considered against the plight of the soldier at Guadalcanal and other desperate spots around the globe, on this night, one tumultuous and fateful year since the sinking off the coast of Iceland of the Reuben James.

Dick Young recounts the topsy-turvy careers and careerings of the fire-horse brigade, a thing of the past since the advent of World War I, relegated for a time to the lowly art of pulling garbage wagons, thus bedraggled and rendered bereft of their prideful mien, finally consigned to the great paddock beyond, where all the princely-maned, prancing steeds of the track, from War Admiral to Whirlaway, reach equine parity with the mean, haggardly work-horse of the former fire-wagon detail.

The editorial column relates and exalts the progress of the work from start in the early spring to its conclusion nearly eight months hence on the 1,500-mile Alaskan Highway, just opened to traffic.

"Words Unspoken" finds bedevilment in that which was sub rosa in General MacArthur's pronouncement that he had no political ambitions, to allay voiced suspicions in the press that he was angling for a Republican presidential nomination in 1944 by having voiced concerns of a dangerous division in military commands in the Pacific theater. That which he did not say was that his criticism was in error, leaving his original remark for its depths to be plumbed to ascertain the extent of its probity and whether it portended a fatal disarray in the organization and deployment of troops and naval and air support of them in the Solomons and New Guinea. And, of course, there had been, as far as the operations on Guadalcanal since August 7, considerable problems in funneling to the troops adequate supplies and reinforcements and replacements.

True to his word, and to his credit, MacArthur never did run for political office, though he was widely considered a probable candidate for the presidency in 1952, that after his triumphant return to the United States to tickertape parades and his speech to a Joint Session of Congress, following his dismissal from his command in Korea by President Truman for insubordination. He had already, however, been de facto ruler of Japan during the years following the war in its rebuilding effort, an extension of the Marshall Plan for rehabilitating war-torn Europe. Thus, whatever taste he may have had for civilian command may have been neutralized and satiated by that experience, or, in terms of trying to translate skills required for effective military command to those for competency in political office, his will was tempered by the realization that military command and civilian political office are two vastly different enterprises requiring in the latter not merely the diplomacy of the former, which sometimes he lacked, but also a deft ability to adhere to the will of the constituency being served, something his fierce streak of independence tended to kick out in revolt, unbolt the stall doors, and send him galloping down the street--as surely as was Ross, Charlotte's fire horse, by the streak of lightning sending an electrical jolt to his tongue for his habit of licking the pin which held him in check awaiting the next wagon-pull to the fire with all the people of Charlotte anxiously waiting and applauding the results when the fire was out.

Or, do we confuse his personality too much with that of Patton?

Well, regardless, old war horses never die, as they say; they just fade away.

Since it is Halloween and since just a couple of weeks ago, the nation had an apparent early Halloween prank pulled on it with the flying saucer balloon sailing over Colorado in a Rocky Mountain high, we figure we don't need to add any more ghost stories to those we have already imparted recently.

Well, on second thought, we shall reprise this one.

But, other than that, we simply refer you back to October 30, 1938 and the Mercury Theater's presentation of that date. The site of Grover's Mill, New Jersey has changed, incidentally, since 2005 when we last uplinked to it. It is now here.