The Charlotte News

Thursday, May 14, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The next variant version of the verse went, however, something like:

If only man could fly, if only man had wings, he’d like as not shoot you in the face, thinking maybe you were trying to supplant Tenth Street with Kings. Then, more than that, kick you fast down the avenue, wrap a fire hose ‘round the rocker in which you sat, all to reign the parvenu, a superior goad, and turn the mind’s status quo to darkest crimson blode.

Once in 1970, late March it was, an unseasonably deep snow fell where we were. We sat by our early spring winter window in the confines of the white room, released for the day from the institutionalized habits which normally, this time of year, beset our daydreaming hours. So, naturally, on said unexpected furlough, being young and in need of transiency from the complacency of the moment, watching the snow fall, drifting there to heights superior to the blades of green and stamens pink which normally came this time of year to be, now hiding beneath the blinding blink, we stuck our pen to the sheets and on them placed some very versy words of what we saw, outside through the fabric’s lace, peering enframed by the putty-pasted chinks—a bird sitting on a wire there, maybe calling on the telephone to some worm without a care, became the subject of our dreaming day.

We were very pleased with our offering when finished, delivered from the silent snow’s jay. We still have it somewhere indelibly etched, but not anywhere on which our hands we might this moment lay or within our mind to fetch. Maybe later.

Then, some one or two years hence, we discovered that someone else had, more or less, stolen our poem some eighteen months before we ever took it down on paper ourselves.

Such is life when you’re young on a snowy late March morning, unseasonably so, in early 1970.

We found, incidentally, a film version of that speech which Vice-President Wallace had delivered on Friday, a rare thing in those days for any speech to be committed to film. Indeed, there is precious little of FDR, other than newsreel snippets, available in the moving medium.

The film presents a re-reading of the speech by the Vice-President from his office, presumably at the Executive Office Building across the way from the White House, overlayered by newsreel footage of production lines and battle lines in the various theaters of war at the time. Not as able a speaker as FDR, the flat, plain-spoken Iowan, a pre-Hooverian Republican, who later ran for President in 1948 on a third party ticket, was nevertheless a progressive liberal who, but for his outspoken tendencies which cost him the 1944 Vice-Presidential nomination, would have otherwise been President on the death of FDR on April 12, 1945. If it had been so, would President Wallace have dropped the bombs? Such phrases in this speech as "No compromise with Satan is possible," in reference to the Axis, make it seem as likely as not that he would have. But it’s an unanswerable question. Whether he was ever actually asked it, we don’t know.

He lived until 1965 and eventually recanted some of his forties peace rhetoric with respect to Communism, after he saw the results of its aggression manifested in Eastern Europe and in Korea after the war. He supported Eisenhower’s re-election over Democrat Adlai Stevenson’s second run for the office in 1956, and then Nixon in 1960, (whose public speaking style, incidentally, appeared borrowed from watching his predecessor Vice-President), but graciously accepted John F. Kennedy’s invitation to the 1961 inaugural, indicating his embrace of the Kennedy vision for progress, a vision which was not without some resemblance to the Vice-President’s views of the world in the early 1940’s, albeit a vision which President Kennedy could deliver with a great deal more persuasion, restrained by less stilted rhetoric.

While obscure in history, this speech, as is evident by the amount of editorial coverage it received in the national press, became well-known and well-received by the public of the time.

The front page shows the map of the Crimea and the Kerch Peninsula, site of the new German offensive, aiming for the oil-rich Caucasus. The map provides the specific areas where oil was concentrated, Tuapse, Grozny, (which gave its name to one of the problematic ships, spelled in the dispatches as "Graznyy", a tanker, which was heading relentlessly toward the blockade line imposed by President Kennedy during the latter stages of the October, 1962 Cuban missile crisis, threatening a showdown until the end of the crisis averted the confrontation), Makhachkala, and to the southern side of the Caucasus Mountains, the richest prize of all, Baku, the key to the Caspian Sea, providing in turn potential entry of the Reich to the oil reserves of Iran, as well as control of the railhead leading back to the Black Sea and entry then to Turkey, affording a way into Syria and Iraq as well.

Meanwhile, in America, while salesmen in Charlotte grumbled, as reported on the editorial page, about being cut under the "B-3" ration card to a mere 6 gallons per week with which to ply their road trade, still two to three times that of the average consumer for personal use, the service station owners’ association on Long Island, as the front page reported, warned its members against the temptation soon to be offered them to bootleg gasoline at the astounding price of 50 cents per gallon. To what, oh what, was the world coming? A half buck for gas.

"Hey, there, fella. Want to score a little, ye know, Texas gold? Maybe take the missus and the children for a little Sunday ride, perhaps. You know ye would. How long has it been, pardner? Two, maybe three days now, without. You got the itch, don’t ye? Just would love to pop that clutch and bang that accelerator pedal right through the floorboards, and set sail down the glass-shimmering blacktop into the springtime sunshine, leaving rubber tracks behind just to spite those Japs and Nazis for doing this to us."

"No, come now. No tears needed, my friend. I can tell by your quavering voice how to provide solace to your malady. Got ten nice clear gallons of pure golden high-octane for ye, right here."

"Yeah, I knew that would bring a smile back to your glowing countenance. I’ll let the whole thing go for $4.75, cash—no credit. The President says we shouldn’t be extending too much credit these days in this war for world democracy, ye know. And just to show that we’re both patriots, I’ll get you to sign this pledge card saying that you will only use this gas wisely and in proper pursuit of happiness in defense of the American way of life. That way, neither one of us need feel the least bit, what they call, moral compunction about the whole matter in question. Then we’ll both sing the Star Spangled Banner in unison and kneel here and say a little prayer together to bless the fuel and bless our troops fighting to preserve it for us."

"Atta boy, I knew you'd see it my way. Peel out those greenbacks. When you got the itch, you just got to go on down that road to nowhere and everywhere, all at the same time, don’t ye?"

"Yeah, that’s right, you got the style, alright."

"My name? Unimportant, my friend. I’ll be here though next week, same time, same location, right here in the alleyway for ye. I’ll try to bring you twelve gallons next week, maybe even make a present of the other two. The price could be a little steeper though, as supplies are getting tight, ye know."

"No, no, that’s not me. Don’t pay any attention to that business card I dropped on the pavement there at your feet. Merely an unfortunate accident of importunate solicitude. That was just one I picked up somewhere across town. Gentleman by the name of B. L. Z. Bubb. Kind of an odd name, but that’s not me. No sirree. He’s just my supplier."

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper writes in praise of a compulsory savings plan offered up by the young Congressman Albert Gore of Tennessee, the father of the former Senator and President—that is to say...