The Charlotte News

Thursday, November 5, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Vice-President Wallace explained his view of the election results: that the Republican sweep was caused by young soldiers not being able to vote and labor being too busy with war work to get to the polls, while the wealthier classes had expendable time to cast their ballots--an explanation, which, given the low turnout, probably contained more than a grain of truth.

In New York City, song and dance man George M. Cohan died at age 64 of abdominal cancer. The report indicates that in his latter times he had enjoyed strolling in Central Park to feed the pigeons and provide the bums with dimes. Dig it.

One other problem, we note--speaking of music--, with that proposed coinage in plastic reported Monday would have been that there would be no longer in the well-protected pockets the familiar ring of the jingle-jangle--but, maybe the editorial on that prospect had already effectively pointed that out.

The editorial column suggests that the Republican tide in the election was not so much the result of endorsement of a leaderless Republican Party which had rejected the statesmanship of Wendell Willkie. It offers no definitive explanation, but suggests that it may have been simply an ad hoc sort of victory, based on state-by-state political organization and various personality and single-issue referenda, coalescing to form a patchwork trend across the country--in other words, an instance of getting rid of incumbents in exchange for fresh blood, feeling the darkness of a world in utter chaos.

The editorial cautions that the constituency of the new Congress, while still nominally Democratic, would be far less pro-New Deal and pro-Administration on the war, that over half the House Democrats were from the South, always a prickly lot, likely to be inimical to continued domestic spending on social programs, and plainly, for the most part, against social equality for blacks.

The piece concludes cryptically: "In [the two years before the election of 1944], the South's Democracy may be swallowed up whole." What did it mean?

In any event, the piece accurately sets forth in high relief a characteristic of the Democratic Party, its division between its liberal-progressive wing, primarily from the North and Midwest, and its Southern wing out of the traditional antebellum, anti-abolition roots which caused it to be suspicious of anything smacking of equality among the races or any form of force bill issuing from the Federal government, indeed any perception of strong, overbearing central government. It was this schism among the Democrats which the Nixon forces in 1968 were able to exploit so effectively to disintegrate the old Democratic coalitions internally for the next twenty years. These old Democratic alliances had grown to epic proportions by 1936, swallowing up the Republican Party for all practical purposes, driven by the promise of the New Deal reforms in the wake of the Depression, perceived, not without reality behind it, to have been brought on by Republicanism favoring the wealthy and big business over labor and the small farmer, trickle-down economics which never adequately trickled down because simple greed always overtakes voluntary compassion when wealth comes to those without sense, as all too often wealth has a tendency to do.

Those alliances, farm and labor, were still quite vital in 1942, as evidenced by the results in 1944, but, perhaps for the reasons set forth by Henry Wallace, had simply not been able to find the time or opportunity this time around to vote in great numbers. By 1968, however, with postwar prosperity booming for the greater part of the previous two decades, save the recession of 1958 and the stagnant period following for two years, and with the Great Society programs extending what had begun during the New Deal, the old coalitions no longer felt beholding to the Democrats and the Southern bloc, split asunder by civil rights and by fiscal issues of perceived excessive spending on social programs--exemplary of which was the Texas rift in 1963 between the Yarborough and Connally factions of the Democratic Party--, drifted in part to the Republican ticket and continued to drift over the ensuing twenty years.

"Westward Ho" accurately predicts in its last paragraph that the new offensive of Bernard Montgomery would prove the beginning of a larger offensive against the Nazi, the next turn of which, after clearing the Axis from North Africa, would be by spring either toward Italy, southern France, or the Balkans. "The march begun west of El Alamein may become the shortest route to Berlin," it concludes. The editorial was indeed prophetic.

Norman Soong reports by radio from China that the recent indication by the British and Americans that they would renounce extra-territoriality in China--the extension of the equivalent of diplomatic immunity to civilians--was heralded as a new day in Sino-Western relations, and one which made sense in light of the fact of considerable Western-influenced reform and restructuring of the Chinese court system since 1935. Now, he reports, to ameliorate distrust of what formerly had been perceived as an anti-egalitarian form of jurisprudence, the foreign national could rest assured in the expectation instead of Western-style justice. We trust that it did not include the likes of Roy Bean sitting on the bench, but instead made way for the Learned Hand form of jurisprudential wisdom, that is, a balancing of equities, ultimately favoring individual rights over corporate rights, and performed with absolute integrity and without subjective bias toward the deep pocket.

Incidentally, whether Norman Soong was any kin to T. V. Soong, the Foreign Minister who had of late recommended that the primary United Nations form an executive committee to formulate unified political policy, with aims toward constructive planning for the post-war world, we don't know. Nor do we know whether his being the NANA correspondent was somehow significant, or was somehow later celebrated in song.

Whatever the case, at Guadalcanal, the fighting continued against the landing reinforcements of the Japanese at Koli Point.

Around the globe, the killing, the rampant killing--by the dozens, by the truckload, by the hundreds, and by the thousands--in places as yet unspoken to the public by the press not privy to the reports other than by hearsay, continued.