The Charlotte News

Monday, July 27, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: As another large RAF raiding force of some 600 planes struck Hamburg, the 91^st hit on Hamburg of the war and the sixth of the year, the front page reports of U.S. fliers raiding again northern France and striking a fuel supply dump at Tobruk in Libya. Gradually, U.S. pilots would increase in number on these bombing missions as training proceeded in Northern Island and in Egypt.

On the Russian front, fighting continued in and around Rostov as the Nazis sought to push south into the vital Caucasus oil reserve. Fighting centered around rail approaches to the key oil depot of Baku on the Caspian Sea.

The Nazis were reported to have burned down a village in Norway, Televaag, for its alleged participation in the killing of two Gestapo agents. Eighteen Norwegian hostages were shot and the male inhabitants ordered to concentration camps. Televaag thus became another Lidice in the increasingly familiar pattern of indiscriminate murder and destruction riding the wake of any resistance activity, especially that aimed at Gestapo agents.

Following the Saturday broadcast by J. Edgar Hoover urging perspicacity, spottings of three Nazi saboteurs thought to be in the country, possibly having slithered in with the eight currently standing trial for their lives who landed via U-boat and entered through Florida and Long Island, N.Y., were not in paucity. Thus far, however, all of the reported sightings had turned up only doppelgängers.

J. Edgar Hoover, meanwhile, celebrated his 25^th year with the FBI. He would be Director for yet 30 more years, until his death on May 2, 1972. Many strange things happened in the country during his 55-year tenure with the FBI. Sometimes, it is best to quit while you're ahead.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon suggests that a speech of Secretary of State Cordell Hull on the war and prospect for the post-war future stood as the right side counter-point to the left side point of Vice-President Henry Wallace whose speech of May 8 had set forth a post-war vision of continued effort by the United Nations to insure liberty and democracy to those desiring it and act as a security force to enforce peace. The former Secretary of Agriculture had also counseled, among other things, the drinking of a quart of milk per day. Secretary Hull did not.

From a Republican family, his father having served the Harding and Coolidge Administrations, Democrat Henry Wallace, as we have previously noted, supported Richard Nixon in 1960 for the presidency, but, after the election, graciously accepted an invitation extended by President-elect Kennedy to attend the inauguration. Whether or not milk was served to the former Vice-President is not reported.

The debate continues on the page as to whether pharmacists were gouging the public for the penny extra per paper cup or whether it was a just surcharge to absorb the heightened costs for paper cups. A proper touché is offered by one reader: because of the increased cost for newsprint, The News recently had, without protest, raised its price from 15¢ to 20¢.

Perhaps, however, the letter writer misses some of the point of this tempest in a mortar being stirred by the pestle as the world was slowly slipping into the thousand-year abyss of no return at the behest of Nazism:

"Now, look heya, have you any idea whose mouth has been on that glass? Why, look at them sitting there at the counter every afternoon. Just look at them. It's enough to turn your stomach. Just look at those slavering jowls licking the rim of that thing. No sir. We need us some paper cups, good Dixie paper cups, yessir.

"And to charge extra for them is discriminatory against those of us who wish a clean paper cup, untrammeled by such filthy, grimy hands and unclean, greasy lips full of Satanic virulence and unwashed impurity."

"..."

"Yes, well, if my friend here wishes to drink after me when we have properly first sent that cup back via the boy to the druggist for rinsing, that is her business. Mind your own. I am not possessed of any such impurities and a simple rinse is quite adequate. But in the case of such as you, no amount of sterilization could erase from my mind the thought of your improper tongue touching the same glass which mine should otherwise touch. Ooh. Banish the thought. I shall not drink after Satan."

"..."

"You are not listening. Communion in church is a wholly different thing. Why, whoever heard of getting some disease from communion with some of your own church people? See how you are? Twisting everything, trying to confuse me. Those people do not come to our church. They would not be allowed. We are Christians, not heathens. We do not get TB or those other diseases they carry."

"..."

"Oh, you are so sickening with your questions. Just breathe in the fresh air God gave you to breathe and enjoy His wonderful sunshine on your pitifully pale face."