The Charlotte News

Saturday, December 19, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports on a British offensive along the southern Indian-Burmese border, 60 miles north of Akyab, on the Bay of Bengal, the first such offensive since the fall of southern Burma in May. It occurred with virtually no Japanese resistance, indicative of the displacement of Japanese defenses north along the Burmese-Chinese border and into China, as well as the dispersion of Japanese forces into New Guinea and Guadalcanal and other points northwest of Guadalcanal in the Solomons, those concentrated on Bougainville and New Georgia.

Eddie Rickenbacker, in San Francisco after his rescue November 13 from the long 24-day ordeal at sea, after his plane ditched in October, reported that Japanese air operations were now suffering from reliance on inexperienced pilots while American operations in the Pacific were improving steadily. He also urged Americans to knock off their gripes over relatively minor sacrifices when men on Guadalcanal and elsewhere in the Pacific theater were daily facing death amid sacrifices which the average American could only imagine.

From Stockholm came a report that the Nazis had executed four people in Prague, two for "treason" (in a foreign country) and two for illegally slaughtering cattle; in Kiel, reported the dispatch, a German welfare worker was hanged for hoarding food and clothing reserved for the Wehrmacht. Nice little Nazis, they were, just desiring peace on earth, good will toward men.

General Montgomery was again on the move in the chase to box in Rommel, exerting the British Eighth Army another 65 miles, to within nineteen miles of Sirte, 155 miles beyond El Agheila, where Rommel previously had been holed up for ten days while each side replenished materiel and restored themselves for the harsh desert conditions ahead.

On the editorial page, "First Loss" reminds readers of the ongoing sacrifice abroad by American soldiers compared to their own mild domestic concerns over enough coffee to drink, sugar for desserts, silk for stockings, and gas and tires for the car.

As reports had streamed in over the teletype indicating only light resistance to the Allied landings in Morocco and Tunisia on November 8, came home eventually the news of the death in those landings of a Davidson College graduate, subsequently a divinity student, Lieutenant Monroe Wicker of Charlotte, the city’s first casualty of the North African campaign.

"Swan Song" records the departure of Office of Price Administration director, Leon Henderson, who, it says, exhibited undaunted courage in his difficult position during the previous troubled year for the country and went out smiling. Mr. Henderson, only 47 at the time, retired from public life and went into private business, dying in 1986.

"Prize Exhibition" records his last act, the absurdity of contradictory statements imposing additional curbs on gas rationing for pleasure driving, all the while after leakage of the prospect had caused on Friday an immediate run on precious gasoline, defeating the purpose of the additional rationing, sought consequent of the pressure from winter heating requirements.

Samuel Grafton writes of America’s tendency to underestimate its newly acquired weight in the world with its twenty times increase of machine tools over that of 1939. Specifically, he complains that, while America was getting tough with Mussolini, it appeared still to be coddling the equally fascist King Emmanuel III. Mr. Grafton argues for an unreserved toughness, to appeal to the democratic urges of the Italian people, rather than mollifying the devil the Allies didn’t know so well in replacement of the one they did.

Does the country sometimes still suffer from underestimating its own power for good in the world, its own power to set a democratic example for the world?

Raymond Clapper warns labor again that the country appeared fed up with threatened strikes and walk-outs at a time when everyone was being forced to sacrifice while labor had it relatively good. He cites as example the recent chastisement of the CIO by the War Labor Board, led by labor friendly Wayne Morse, for its repeated strikes at the Yellow Truck & Coach plant, as a bellwether of this shift in attitude.

Wayne Morse, in 1942, Dean of the University of Oregon law school, was elected in 1944 a Republican Senator from Oregon. In 1950, he broke from Republican ranks and became an Independent; in 1955, he joined the Democratic majority, persuaded by new Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson into the Democratic fold. He nevertheless, in August, 1964, was one of only two Senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving President Johnson powers to expand United States involvement in Vietnam after the reported attacks on the U.S.S. Maddox, imputed, in the latter of two reported instances in the Gulf of Tonkin August 2 and 4, falsely to the North Vietnamese. Primarily because of his continued opposition to the war for the next four years, Senator Morse was defeated by Republican Robert Packwood for re-election in 1968.

In May, 1953, in the early days of the Eisenhower Administration, he set the record for the longest one-person filibuster in the history of the Senate, as reported by Time that year, 22 hours and 26 minutes, a record which still stands. He was symbolically registering opposition to offshore drilling legislation, eventually passed by the newly elected Republican Congress and signed into law by President Eisenhower, later upheld and clarified by a decree of the Supreme Court in 1960 in U.S. v. Louisiana, et al., 363 US 1, (subsequently reduced to a final decree by the Court), establishing that the Gulf Coast states, including most notably Texas and Florida, had a right to offshore mineral rights extending to three miles into the Gulf from their low-water marks along the coastline.

With a report out this week in Time that a new study from Princeton and Harvard indicates that high-water marks of the encroaching Flood may reach, not just 13 to 19 feet as previously believed, predicated on historical data, but rather as high as 26 to 31 feet, based on 125,000 year old fossil records showing what happened the last time the polar caps melted, we had better either start becoming far more responsible or prepare to build an Ark, as Senator Morse's foresightedness is borne out. The study cautions that at the present rate of meltdown of polar ice, which in such bulk has its own gravity on sea water, delaying for a relatively short period the dire effects of the melting--the ice-in-the-bathtub effects--the oceans could encroach to these catastrophic flood stages by 2100, that is within less than a lifetime from now, one enjoying enough longevity either to cuss us as they float along in their Ark or praise us for foresight, as the case may be.

Everything at 31 feet above current sea level would be under water--Central Park and Broadway, for instance, thus becoming the only remnants of the Island of Manhattan. And that is just the immediate physical impact, not taking into account the massive displacement of crop belts across the world brought on by resulting climate change, an impact which feeds cyclically on itself for its change of ocean currents and consequent impact on the atmosphere.

Ninety years from now is not that long; looking back on the calendar ninety years to 1920, it is a time well within the lives of the parents of many of us today in middle age. Nor will the oceans rise 31 feet overnight. They will slowly creep to these levels during the intervening years.

Think about it, as you drive that gas guzzler into Hell this coming Christmas week, shopping amid all those lit-up fantasies which, by three or four days after Christmas, invariably turn out to be no more than another sparkling, bauble-wrapped pile of junk, headed for the basement a few months from now.

Perhaps, it is why Ogden Nash left his footnote on the three-alarm fire to his line about the "lllama"--not just playful humor.

As to the quote of the day, you might wish to peer here, here, here, et seq., here, and here, pages from How to Grow Roses, by Robert Pyle, published in 1923. And then, in remembrance of times past, you could recall these words by John McCrae, from the Great War. At that point, it may all perhaps suddenly hit you in the heat of the night.

Today, our school got blistered in the new Cowboy Dome out in Arlington, Texas. We'll get 'em come March, though. By then, the barbs won't be cutting so bad, down there below the panhandle. At least, that's what Mista Hagga told us--by way of Elvis, that is.