The Charlotte News

Friday, July 17, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: A letter to the editor on today's editorial page responds to the June 30 editorial, "Opening Gun", on Paul McNutt's June 27 radio address, delivered live to two African-American groups, regarding equal opportunity to have and to hold jobs in defense industries for the benefit of war production, as much as for the sake of equal right and opportunity to work. The editorial had found in the speech a suspicious air of using the war effort to advance Administration efforts at desegregation, a movement toward social equality for African-Americans. Its final paragraph, however, was ambiguous, characteristic of The News in these days of de facto segregation, enforced with special assiduity in the South, but as well throughout the country.

As we pointed out on June 30, even while Cash, one of the foremost Southern white progressive writers of his day on the subject of race, was aboard as associate editor, the paternalistic tone, albeit with acerbic undertones, often crept into otherwise progressive print on the subject. As we have commented before, whether that patina came from the editorial oversight of J. E. Dowd or publisher W. C. Dowd and the more conservatve editorial stance toward race relations which, as with most other Southern dailies of its day, had pervaded at The News throughout its earlier existence prior to the arrival of Cash in 1937, is hard to discern.

Yet, did this particular editorial, as with many of those pieces on the subject which we have attributed, albeit with more than a little doubt, to Cash, actually mean that which it ostensibly says, that the Administration should not be using the war effort to further the ends of desegregation? Does the last paragraph not dispel this notion with cautious irony, suggesting as it does that if desegregation and social equality were the results the Administration ultimately sought from its argument for equal opportunity, then the South must look to it with "good will and clear head"?

The thought, not coincidentally, echoes precisely the last paragraphs of The Mind of the South as well as the closing remarks by Cash in his June 2, 1941 University of Texas commencement address.

The letter writer, former head of the Washington office of the Associated Negro Press, astutely recognizing that he may be misinterpreting the editorial, nevertheless proceeds to clarify that what African-Americans wanted was equal opportunity, not social equality.

But, is it not the case that equal oppportunity leads perforce, with time and generations passing, inevitably to social equality? Does anyone doubt that neither the letter writer, Cash, nor the editorialist who wrote "Opening Gun"--presumably Burke Davis or J. E. Dowd--were oblivious to this fact and were, in studied fashion, not in fact making the point, ameliorating its impact in a manner palatable to white segregationist readers of the day? ("General Pickett, sir, you must look to your division.")

Yet, one might counter with the query regarding the editorial that, since Paul McNutt was not expressly advancing the notion of social equality, then why should The News raise the straw man to begin with, if only to knock it down ironically.

Precisely. And so The News, as was also characteristic of its policy encouraging open forum debate on its editorial pages, presented the ostensible counterpoint from the thusly stimulated responsive reader--without, you will note, an editorial postscript either corroborating or denying the letter writer's assumption of the meaning of the ambiguous editorial.

Paul Mallon explains the tactics of the Nazis in detail, and the way of it for the Russian defenders: taking versus preserving the four rail lines of supply between Mosocow and Rostov to Marshal Timoshenko's Russian troops protecting the Caucasus and thus the entire campaign from disastrous end, occupation of the region by the Nazi and possession of its crucial oil supply, providing with it strategic access to the oilfields of Iran and Iraq. Nevertheless, the Nazis having split the rails at Voronezh and Rossosh, still the Russians were receiving materiel and food from Stalingrad and Astrakhan, Mallon reports. Thus, the putsch would now be directed at cutting those last two vital links, the first two, while important and the most direct means of supply, having been primarily devoted to troop replenishment. Present target for cutting off the line to Stalingrad along the Volga was the taking of Povorino. The winding Don and its few bridges had made the river's defense difficult, subjecting its defenders to entrapment among its many bends.

Soon, the tale would be told for this 1942 Nazi summer offensive and for the entire war itself in Russia, as the Nazi drive would again falter, as during the previous fall in the suburbs of Moscow, before the stolid defenders, young and old, male and female alike, this time of Stalingrad.

Pertinax tells of the increasing trend of resistance in France. Its spirit was being fueled by rumors of a second front soon to be opened, hoped to be on the Continent, hoped to be in France. Its drive was being nurtured by the active British commando raids on the various Nazi coastal defenses, the March 28 raid on St. Nazaire providing recent example, the resulting pandemic resistance activities having to be put down forcefully by the Nazis with wholesale executions interspersing the roundup of the defiant. Some 400,000 French resisters were now in concentration camps.

As Dorothy Thompson had recently conveyed, that number included all of the intellectuals, most of the young men of France who were most able to fight.

"Field Reversed" bemoans the decision of the Army to devote Wallace Wade, recently resigned for the duration as Duke football coach to volunteer for active service in the war at age 50, to coaching duties of the Army football team. In frustration at the news, the editorial retracts its June 23 praise of Major Wade's act of patriotism.

"Senility First" provides a cogent argument against the Congressional seniority rule, citing the elevation of a small-town Kentucky lawyer, Andrew Jackson May, to the chairmanship of the House Military Affairs Committee. Mr. May had stated recently that the war would be short--tending the average citizen to relax attention toward such vital daily war contributions as rationing and requisitioning of scrap rubber and scrap iron, scrap kitchen fat. Perhaps, Representative May should have been included in the list of fathead scrap to be cooked up for the latter's purpose, along with his twin in the Senate, as appearing in "Pot Lucky" on Tuesday. The Congressman's prediction, even had it been accurate, was neverthless scrambled, without toast, and none too lean on the ham and bacon.

The poem from a letter writer addressed, not kindly, from the Soldier to the Draft Dodger, by the 1960's might have been re-titled, "Better Dead Than Red". President Kennedy would have no doubt responded, "Neither Dead, Nor Red." But he unfortunately was not around after 1963 to see what was to become of the New Frontier as it variously morphed first into the Great Society, then the No Treat But Tricks Silent Majority.

From Hollywood, comes the news that Tarzan receives a daughter. Whether her nickname was Tarzana is not reported.

And, whether "Grasshoppers", warning those many East Coast residents who, despite the shortage of available oil for coming frost, had been blinded by summer sun to procrastinate, had not yet therefore converted from oil to coal furnaces, received the inspiration for its title from Aesop or from the chapter of Numbers quoted on the page the previous day, (or even from Henry V), we don't know.

Regardless, that's the way it was, Friday, June 17, 1942.

To Mr. Cronkite, wherever you are now reporting the nightly news, thanks for the ride and the memories, especially bringing us the Beatles. When we were old, we admit, we preferred Huntley-Brinkley, first because we liked Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, second, because we didn't like the moustache. But that was when we were older then.