The Charlotte News

Saturday, March 21, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Maybe that was in part the problem with the world at the time, too much sugar in the diet. For if a half pound per week per person was considered roughing it, then what typical consumption was would confound the imagination. This limit of usage did not include commercial products containing sugar, such as soft drinks, but rather applied only to raw sugar available to the consumer.

If you eat a half pound of raw sugar per week, you are an obese idiot. Cut down consumption before you die of diabetes.

What were they doing, daily eating sugar pies? How much tea or coffee did they take with their sugar?

And the government was contemplating allowing even more to home canners.

The hoarders of sugar at the time had the option of reselling their stash to retailers and thereby avoiding the necessity of confessing their sin to the government when registering for rations. Confession of supply also meant reduction commensurately of their ration coupons. But the article does not elaborate on the penalty for lying about the stash or confession of hoarding.

"She's in the jailhouse now, she's in the jailhouse now..."

A member of the House of Lords, Lord Strabolgi, the "Labor Peer", believed that the Japanese would soon attack Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and thus urged Sir Stafford Cripps, after he was done in India, to go to Ceylon to shore up pro-Allied attitude there as well. While such a strategy would have been consistent with Japan's island-hopping strategy in the South Pacific and thus not a far-fetched notion, the Japanese would never get that far.

In the wake of the Japanese attack on New Guinea, the native bushmen were reported to be rising up and looting plantations there. Fears abounded that they "would revert to headhunting and cannibalism against the remaining whites." New Guinea, we conclude, was the original Land of 1000 Dances.

Taking a leaf from Woodrow Wilson's book, at least the one provided by the letter to the editor of the previous day, the President utilized his new emergency war powers granted by Congress to seize a railroad for "successful prosecution of the war", after the operator of the line, the Toledo, Peoria & Western Railroad, had refused to arbitrate a three-month old labor dispute.

In Philadelphia, a defense worker learned the hard way that the British sailor took his national pride seriously. After mocking the British Navy for incompetence on the high seas, the worker was punched to death by the sailor. The sailor was charged with "homicide by fist".

A lightning flash on the high seas off Morehead City, N.C. enabled a U-boat to sink an American merchant vessel. God, it seems in this episode, was not on their side.

And MacArthur's escape to Melbourne from the Philippines via PT boat is further recounted by a companion on the perilous voyage, Brigadier General Hugh Casey. Journey by rowboat made for a better and more daring story nevertheless.

In any event, the entire front page, we think, may be summarized by the malady clearly besetting the world at the time: too much sugar in the diet. (It is no refutation to the theory that Hitler was a vegetarian.)

Two letters to the editor carp to The News about its editorial positions. The first expresses the profound displeasure of the man on the street with the recent couple of editorials challenging as unpatriotically superfluous the recurring candidacy for office of Dick Fountain, seeking in the Democratic primary at least pro forma challenge to incumbent Senator Josiah William Bailey.

The second letter inveighs against the stand of the newspaper in favor of knocking down the wage and hour laws for the duration of the war, especially the 40-hour work week. The textile worker makes the valid point in his letter that his wage of 37.5 cents per hour when compounded to time and a half for overtime, about 56 cents an hour, was not going to undermine excessively the profits of the textile mill, resulting in significantly higher prices when he was required to work beyond the 40-hour week to maintain production pace. But he nevertheless sees the debate myopically. It was, moreover, as "Privilege" in the day's column elucidates, that the war industry, in areas where a sufficient supply of trained labor to accommodate separate shifts was lacking, would suffer either for shortages of man-hours expended on defense production or, more probably, for excessively high wages necessitated in overtime pay to fill the void of available labor, thus raising prices to compensate for the higher wages.

The editorial, however, expresses the opinion of The News opposing extension of the workweek to 48 hours in communities or industries where there was a surplus of trained labor available. In other words, it favored abolishing the limitation only where otherwise the additional eight hours added to the workweek would have to be paid to the same workers as overtime. In communities and industries with a labor surplus, there would be adequate trained personnel to work shifts without a Congressional mandate allowing longer hours before requiring overtime pay.

The overall goal was to find a fulcrum by which to enable, to the extent possible, full employment in defense industries to afford full production capacity without creating thereby the necessity of wages which would either strangle profits so badly as to hamper production, create higher prices than otherwise might be achieved with the available work force, or to limit wages so as to enable undue profits.

And finally, down in the lower right corner, there is the one about O.V. McGee importuning the return of his lost barrow with rubber tires. We don't know if his wife's name was Molly and his sobriquet was necessarily therefore "Fibber", or how many tires that barrow had, most typically having but one being the reason why it is called a "wheelbarrow"; but whatever the case of his wife's name or their barrow's number of tires, it just goes to show again that life goes on, with or without rubber, with or without sugar, with or without automobiles, with or without barrows in the marketplace.