The Charlotte News

Tuesday, February 3, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: A former nurse at the Morganton mental facility now takes up the cudgels against Tom Jimison for daring to criticize her former employer. It is perhaps no accident that thus far of the several letters printed on the Jimison series, only two have gone out of their way to defend the place, and both are former employees.

Mrs. Nurse here tells of how sad it is to see bellyaching over something so minor as a little dead fly or hair in the soup. Why should charity patients, which, she informs, comprise three-quarters of the population of the hospital, complain about the lack of haute cuisine? Why, they are lucky to be fed at all. And this puling adolescent, Jimison, should be so temerarious as to challenge the nurses for being uneducated and unable to read, for being country bumpkin idiots. Well, she allows, it is true that some of the nurses probably could not read, but most had a high school diploma and she, herself, had a year of college. So, what's to complain? Why, Mr. Jimison ought to go to some Yankee hospital for the insane if he wants city nurses. What a smart aleck. Who does he think he is, being a minister, lawyer, and journalist? Couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to be, the hog. No wonder he wound up in the insane hospital. And, why should he be complaining about a place where he voluntarily stayed a year when he could go home after two months? And why was he cozying up to the doctors on staff except to cuittle them to obtain information from the inside just so's he could make trouble for all those nice people doing all that charity for these poor unfortunate animals. He ought to be ashamed of himself. Why, he ought to have a frontal lobotomy. He ought to be taken out behind the building and horse-whipped. That would teach this lunatic a lesson. Okay, so it isn't perfect. It's charity. What's a little rat in the White Horse gravy among friends? Don't the inmates know that such is all a part of the treatment, to enable them to discern between what is real and imagined? Feed them well and they'll just keep coming back for more, free of charge, malingering as the insane to avoid work.

Troublemakers like Jimison need themselves a lesson. He should be committed there for good. That'd teach him.

Another letter, from another former patient, disputes Mrs. Nurse and confirms Mr. Jimison's version of the matter.

Ray Clapper tells of the fond farewells at the Plymouth and Dodge plants to the passenger car as the last rolled off the assembly lines for the duration of the war, giving way to guns and tanks and planes. The Pontiac plant was already churning out anti-aircraft gun bores at the rate of one every twelve minutes, soon to be cut to three.

"The Uniform" reports of some reporters in Philadelphia who duplicated a British experiment and appeared in public in Nazi military regalia, only to find that, despite the affecting of German accents, nobody, not even police officers, noticed the Swastikas, but instead responded to them as if American military. Perhaps, the cruel jest was that the country suddenly in the previous seven months had become so heavily militarized that no one could discern anymore much of a difference between Germany and the United States.

"War Aims" speaks of Mrs. Roosevelt's speech at Chapel Hill, urging that America would need to become in the future the world's policeman to prevent recurrence of Nazism and Fascism. The piece tends to view this suggestion with circumspection, that it resembled insistent proselytization of potentially unwilling conscripts to democracy reminiscent of inculcation in followers of Muhammad, treating the rest of the world as infidels. We do not believe, however, that Mrs. Roosevelt meant to suggest the extreme assumed by the piece, that the United States would, could, or should ramrod at the end of a musket democracy down the throats of the unwilling, then or now. What she meant, we glean, given her later role during the 1960's at the U.N., was that the United States, for its wealth, must in the future act as a good steward and monitor of the world and that when democratic peoples, such as Great Britain or France, called upon the United States for help, the country must stand ready and willing to respond with aid from the outset of trouble, rather than delaying, to enable a world war such as that astride the world, plaguing its every corner and continent.

That is a concept to be distinguished, however, from fighting pre-emptive wars and ramrodding democracy, either or both being bad precedents, in the long run only destroying democracy and its reputation both at home and abroad.

"Double Loan" refers to the potential of closing off the Burma Road to China and what the absence of delivery of aid there might cause, the inability of the forces of Chiang Kai-Shek to continue their long fight against Japanese aggression, ongoing without respite since summer, 1937, its continuance being especially important now at this critical juncture in the Pacific war. The harder the Chinese could fight, the fewer troops from that arena the Japanese could spare for the southern campaign. The harder the Chinese could fight against depleted Japanese troop strengths, reduced inevitably for the southern campaign, the greater the likelihood of their achieving early victory and providing a friendly zone of operations for the Allies from which to fight Japan in the north.

The Burma Road would be cut off soon, as Rangoon would soon fall, leaving the British to make a last stand to the north at Mandalay, from which they would be forced to retreat to India in May. But aid nevertheless would flow by air, starting with 30,000 gallons of gasoline for the Doolittle Tokyo raid of mid-April, eventually, by the end of 1943, effecting delivery of 12,000 tons per month of supplies, four-fifths of that previously going by the road. The route utilized was from India and northern Burma over the Himalayas, known to the fliers as the "W" Pass in "The Hump". (Just what that portended for the 1968 and 2000 elections, we scarce not venture to suggest, but you may have at the raw meat of its sub-conscious portents should you be so bold.) Double Loan, indeed.

And "Minor Test" tells of how Charlotteans offered to the scrap men some 50 tons of spare iron, whereas New York City had only managed one ton from its boroughs, the sum of which were 73 times larger than Charlotte. Perhaps, however, given the former murder rate of Charlotte, having been tops in the nation for a good while, substantially ameliorated as of 1942, some 45 tons of the stuff contributed consisted of shooting irons no longer presumed to be needed in the darkened nighttime streets there in the wild, wild west of Mecklenburg.

The murder rate for Charlotte in 1939, for instance, when it grabbed the prize, at 35 out of a population of 100,000, was 9 times higher than that of New York City, at 291 out of seven million. Thus, with relative resultant paranoia being an arithmetic factor worthy of at least a 5 to 5.5, one might expect roughly 45 to 50 times more firearms in Charlotte for "self-defense" (to enable pre-emptive self-restraint) than New York City at the time. Thus...

Men, leave your irons by the curb. Uncle Sam needs them for guns.

That's actually a good idea for today. Slogan: "Give up your guns to U. Sammy; the world's policeman needs to proselytize some more converts".