The Charlotte News

Monday, February 9, 1942

SIX EDITORIALS

Two letter writers condemn further the conditions at Morganton, one describing how her son literally starved to death, another describing how his friend caught pneumonia from being escorted from the bath area through an open yard with her hair wet, and then died a few days later.

The Richmond County Journal and The High Point Enterprise also register their opinions anent the conditions described by Tom Jimison, the former doing so with far more acridity than the latter which merely suggests the need for investigation and the funding for more highly paid staff. The Richmond County paper suggests a criminal investigation be conducted and charges of malfeasance be brought. Assuming the accuracy of the two letters chronicling the deaths of the two patients, that suggestion appeared to have been apropos.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Nurse, who had written in a few days earlier contradicting Mr. Jimison and finding offense in his assertion that some of the nurses could not read, though admitting the fact of it, that the food was inedible, though admitting that hair and flies probably occasionally wound up in the soup, offers a letter she wrote in response to a letter received by her responding to her original letter, the responsive letter telling Mrs. Nurse apparently to keep her mouth shut. Mrs. Nurse remains on the defensive and refuses to be quiet. The tension is being ratcheted up.

Raymond Clapper comments further on the topic raised in The News Saturday in "Woo-Woo!" He suggests that both Mayor La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt should step away from their duties heading the Civil Defense Board, as they were only serving to distract the public from the arduous tasks of preparation for air raids and blackout drills. He points to Mrs. Roosevelt's nod to Mayris Chaney at $4,600 per year to encourage rhythmic dancing for children as one such distraction; another being the appointment of Melvyn Douglas to place actors, writers and musicians into defense roles. (Melvyn Douglas, of course, was married to Helen Gahagan Douglas, who later ran and lost against a certain Congressman in the 1950 California Senate race. The Congressman had used to great effect, at the height of the McCarthy era, the label "Pink Lady" to disparage her during the campaign and thus establish, and by equal strokes, diminish, his national reputation.)

Whether any of these things were really worth expenditure of print when half the world was drifting into fascism and, of the other half, half again was riding the fence to see who won, Hitler and Tojo or Churchill and Roosevelt, we cannot say for sure. But somehow, it seems incidental to the overall issues at work on the world. It nevertheless provided, no doubt, a harmless distraction from the misery otherwise of the daily news, especially since Pearl Harbor, and perhaps that was the whole point which Mrs. Roosevelt had in mind. Better to teach the children to dance rhythmically than to have them cowering under their school desks in mortal fear of Nazi or Japanese bombers overhead.

Woo-woo, goo-goo-goo-joob.

What will you give me? say the sad bells of rhymney.