The Charlotte News

Monday, May 18, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of the bombing of the Prinz Eugen, the German heavy cruiser which had, along with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, eluded RAF bombers in February, escaping from Brest through the English Channel net into the North Sea and safe haven in German home waters.

The ship had aided the Bismarck in the sinking of the British destroyer Hood on May 24, 1941, and became a target therefore for the RAF. It was hit while at Brest during a night raid on July 1, 1941.

The elusive ship survived the previous night’s attack in Norway at Trondheim where it had been undergoing temporary repairs after being struck in late February in the North Sea.

It then returned to Kiel for permanent repairs. The ship survived the war and in August, 1946 was heavily damaged during the Bikini tests of the atomic bomb and then scuttled in the waters off Kwajalein. It was one of three Axis ships used in the test, including the Japanese destroyer Nagato, Admiral Yamamoto’s headquarters ship back in Japanese home waters during the Pearl Harbor voyage of the First Air Fleet.

The editorial page follows up on the commutation by FDR of Earl Browder’s sentence for passport fraud, referring back to the position of The News originally favoring the tough four-year sentence in its editorial, "Fair Enough", of January 23, 1940, admitting now though in hindsight that the sentence was likely motivated, as much as by the actual underlying criminal conduct, through hostility directed at Browder politically.

But, the editorial suggests, the actuating motive for the reprieve, the "unity" of which the President had spoken, was merely a euphemism for insuring continued support for New Deal programs among labor leaders and American Communists. The alternative reason, that the "unity" was to enable focus on aid to the U.S.S.R. in their war effort against the Nazis, was one the editorial found to be begging the question as to why, when the country was already reasonably united in that effort.

We respond that while perhaps the cynical answer was valid, the case in fact stood as a prominent political symbol of an earlier official anti-Communist stance of the government, and thus commuting the sentence sent a message to Stalin insuring good will and, moreover, sent a strong message to the remaining anti-Communists in the country, always loud and viscerally paranoid anyway, that for the duration of the war, targeting people for Communist sympathies was no longer an acceptable government policy. Despite this retrenchment during the war, the practice, of course, would be revisited with a vengeance after the war.

"Turning Point" applauds the coming of war industry to Charlotte, which promised substantial new employment to supplant some of the lost income occasioned by the shutting down of appliance sales, automobile sales, and now severe curtailment of gas sales. About half of the new employment would go to women—making bullets.

As the 60^th anniversary edition of The News in December, 1948 described the period:

So many of The News' employees had gone off to war by mid-1942 that the paper started sending out a mimeographed letter called "News From The News," and this letter gradually grew through the war to a regular newspaper of its own. Before it stopped publishing the monthly paper for the people in service, The News had 77 men and women in uniform. Among them was J. E. Dowd, who turned the editorship over to [sports page editor] Burke Davis in 1942 and joined the Navy.

Local news coverage was changed radically in those war years. The war seemingly touched everything. Prime sources in Charlotte were Morris Field, the Army Air Force base; the Charlotte Quartermaster Depot, which grew almost continuously until it was one of the largest supply centers in the South; the U.S. Rubber Co.'s shell-loading plant, where some 10,000 men and women worked to prepare ammunition for the Navy; the National Carbon Co. Plant, which turned out millions of batteries for walky-talky radio transmitters.

The staff found no shortage of news, and no shortage of readers. Circulation inclined comfortably over the 50,000 mark in February, 1943, and it kept going up, month after month. But The News like other papers, was severely restricted by the Government because of the shortage of newsprint. There wasn't enough of it to go around and the editors found themselves having to "weigh" every item for value more carefully than ever. As each quarter-year passed, the restrictions became tighter.

Raymond Clapper writes of the new steel tank treads replacing the treads made from the tumtum trees, now that tumtum was in short supply until a properly economical synthetic substitute could be developed.

Dorothy Thompson discusses the new novel by John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down, a story about an unnamed country in northern Europe invaded by an unnamed power at war with Russia and Britain, and the methods by which the invaded country handles its invader, resisting by underground organization the invasion with consistent stealth. It should have been on Hitler’s reading list, but Der Fuehrer had little time for pleasure reading in these days, we suspect.

BANQUO

How goes the night, boy?

FLEANCE

The moon is down; I have not heard the clock.

BANQUO

And she goes down at twelve.

FLEANCE

I take't, 'tis later, sir.

BANQUO

Hold, take my sword. There's husbandry in heaven;
Their candles are all out. Take thee that too.
A heavy summons lies like lead upon me,
And yet I would not sleep: merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose!

--Act II, Sc. 1

Porter

Here's a knocking indeed! If a
man were porter of hell-gate, he should have
old turning the key.

Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of
Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged
himself on the expectation of plenty: come in
time; have napkins enow about you; here
you'll sweat for't.

Knock,
knock! Who's there, in the other devil's
name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could
swear in both the scales against either scale;
who committed treason enough for God's sake,
yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come
in, equivocator.

Knock,
knock, knock! Who's there? Faith, here's an
English tailor come hither, for stealing out of
a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may
roast your goose.

Knock,
knock; never at quiet! What are you? But
this place is too cold for hell. I'll devil-porter
it no further: I had thought to have let in
some of all professions that go the primrose
way to the everlasting bonfire.

Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter.

MACDUFF

Was it so late, friend, ere you went to bed,
That you do lie so late?

Porter

'Faith sir, we were carousing till the
second cock: and drink, sir, is a great
provoker of three things.

MACDUFF

What three things does drink especially provoke?

Porter

Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and
urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him
in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.

--Act II, Sc. 3

Macduff, it is said, incidentally, in Scottish lore, eventually escaped the treachery of Macbeth by means of aid of the villagers at Elie, where the Thane of Fife crossed the Firth of Forth.

ROSS

Where is Duncan's body?

MACDUFF

Carried to Colmekill,
The sacred storehouse of his predecessors,
And guardian of their bones.

ROSS

Will you to Scone?

MACDUFF

No, cousin, I'll to Fife.

ROSS

Well, I will thither.

MACDUFF

Well, may you see things well done there: adieu!
Lest our old robes sit easier than our new!

--Act II, Sc. 4

By the way, we read today in the Wicked-pedia that the 1960 Chevy in the motorcade, the one with the football, was actually a Bel Air. Not so. It was, as we stated several years ago, a Biscayne. The Bel Air, the observant will note, had full wheel covers and chrome trim around the perimeter of the rear panel which held the tail-lights. The cheaper Biscayne, used by the Army and Navy and for other fleet uses, had only hubcaps and no such trim. It was a Biscayne and it did have within it the football.

Beware where you obtain your information these days. There are some Tricky people still abounding among us who are more interested in the lie, and how they and others politely impart that lie, than the truth. To these people, if you tell truth, you are threatening them.

You will know these obscurantist idiots by their favorite question: "Are you threatening me?"

We of course know how to respond to such silliness: No more to you, sirrah or madame, than doth the third thing which the strong drink you drink doth provoke the Firth, and unprovoke and provoke at once and in the Seine the Forth.

MACBETH

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

--Act V, Sc. 5