The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 10, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells the newly arrived freshmen on college campuses not to become too comfortable in their dormitories. Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced that by the end of the fall term nearly all draft eligible reservists on college campuses would be called to active duty, with all surely being needed in subsequent terms. For the present, the minimum draft age remained at 20, but talk of drafting 18 and 19-year olds made life as uncomfortable for the freshmen and sophomores as for the upperclassmen.

In Russia, the rains began hearkening the coming of winter, and before the Wehrmacht had conquered stubborn Stalingrad, the primary obstacle to obtaining control of the Caspian Sea and thus final control of the Caucasus to the south. The siege was now underway, a siege, along with the battle front in the Pacific, upon which the entire fate of the free world now depended.

Russian communiques were claiming that since May 1, fully 73 German divisions, approximately 1.1 million men, had been killed or captured. Combined with the two million Nazis killed or captured from the initial invasion of June 22, 1941 through the beginning of the spring offensive, that brought the total to around 3 million Nazi soldiers out of the war, and most of those being the best trained Germany had to offer.

The war was over. It had been over since the previous fall.

But the military genius, Hitler, was simply not astute enough to understand that basic fact, just as he was not astute enough to read weather forecasts, just as he was not astute enough to comprehend that which he had read with so much emulative desire to replicate out of the histories of Napoleon’s conquests of the previous century. Thus, millions more of his own people would have to die before the lesson was driven home.

A preview of the sports page mentions the active upcoming football schedule of the Navy Pre-Flight School football team at Chapel Hill. Among its assistant coaches was Gerald Ford, a 29-year old Pre-Flight School instructor who arrived at the school in April and remained there for a year before beginning active service in the Pacific theater.

Prime Minister Churchill informed Parliament that the violence of the previous two months in India, in demand of immediate independence from Great Britain, had been largely quelled, having been the result probably of Japanese fifth column activity. He accused the All-India Congress Party of not following leader Gandhi’s principle of non-violence. But when he stated that 90,000 Muslims in the country were opposed to the violent demonstrations in support of independence, a member yelled derisively to the P.M., "Nonsense."

In Parliament, of course, it is customary to engage in such fervent and spirited exchange with the Prime Minister.

Wholesome or not, in Revolutionary America, our Congress normally attends speeches of our presidents with a sort of demitassic tea-and-crumpets expression of politesse—that is, until Joe Wilson, Congressman of South Carolina, last night decided to split with 220 years of customary behavior pattern and, in reaction to President Obama’s statement that his proposed health care plan would not provide free medical coverage to illegal immigrants, as some have tried to suggest, exclaimed, "You lie!" President Obama, in his best Parliamentary fashion, calmly reiterated his assurance that illegal immigrants would not be covered, and continued with his speech to its end.

Whether Mr. Wilson has been watching too much of the British Parliament on the tv or perhaps listening to the 1966 Bootleg Series, we cannot say.

Regardless, perhaps the better response by the President would have been simply, "Judas!"

But, on second thought, probably not.

In any event, we hope that the health care plan passes, and without the problems occasioned by the Muslim issue necessitating the formation of Pakistan which occurred in India when independence finally came in August, 1947. That is to say that there will be no necessity in America for the creation of a new state to be carved out somewhere to provide medical care to illegal immigrants.

But, where are they treated now?

The editorial page points out in "Quaint System" the inequitable practice in Georgia of county-unit voting. It was in fact even more inequitable than the information in the column had it. Actually, the units were divided only three ways, six units for urban counties, four for town counties, and two for rural counties. In 1960, for instance, a candidate carrying the three smallest counties, with populations totaling 7,000, ranked equivalently with one carrying Atlanta’s Fulton County with 556,000 people. The system had been officially in place since 1917 and had been used informally for twenty years before that. It obviously favored candidates favored by the bulk of sparsely populated rural Georgia compared to the city folk. Hence, in part, the reputation of the Georgia "Cracker".

Then, in 1962, the landmark Supreme Court case of Baker v. Carr was decided out of Tennessee, requiring under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that the basic concept of "one person, one vote" be strictly followed. This decision then led to Gray v. Sanders being filed in Georgia the same year, challenging the validity under the Fourteenth Amendment of the county-unit voting system. Despite the Georgia Legislature having amended the statute to provide a broader allocation of units, basically apportioning units on relative graduate, incremental population increases per county in blocks of 5,000 to 30,000, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which then included future Carter Administration Attorney General Griffin Bell, ruled the system violative of the proscriptions as elucidated in Baker v. Carr.

In 1963, in an 8 to 1 decision, with only Justice Harlan dissenting, the Supreme Court agreed, as reported at 372 US 368. The Supreme Court, however, went further than the Court of Appeals, which had held that a county-unit system could be sustained if it were no more discriminatory than states relative to one another in national elections. The Court held that any such system by its nature was violative of the principle, sacred under Amercian life and law, of one person, one vote.

In its first test without the county-unit system, Carl Sanders, a liberal from Augusta, was elected. Governor Sanders worked with the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations to bring about desegregation in Georgia in accordance with Federal law.

Then, in 1966, in its second test, reactionary Democrat and talk-show walker Lester Maddox was elected Governor.

Well, as they say, be careful of that for which you wish.

Governor Carter would ultimately play the role of moderator between the polarized ends.

The last three paragraphs of the Raymond Clapper piece, discussing the detriment of the war effort consequent of the collision course on which the President and Congress appeared headed regarding who should govern wage and price controls, concludes with three paragraphs of contemporary note, expressing that newspapers for the sake of prosecuting the war with proper stealth had been willing to forgo for the duration excessive insistence on freedom of press, that historically when the electoral college had been deemed a quaint 18th century convention no longer viable, the country had simply side-stepped it and cast their popular lot according to the common weal and blithely carried on as if no past college education beyond its formality existed, that the object lesson should be taken from the dictatorships at work on the world for having come from too insistent mutually resisting political and ideological blocs, so mutually inveigling and ultimately mutually destructive of one another that they permitted the entry of extremists who then established military dictatorships amid them and proceeded to destroy all vestiges of republican democracy.

As to those comments of Mr. Clapper, fit for his time in 1942, we feel nevertheless compelled, in light of recent history of the last decade, to cite to the comment following the third letter to the editor, and simply say: Ba~ba~ker-ker-kerchoo.

"Contacts" reports of the punching of two African-American ministers, one 76 years old, because they had the temerity to exercise their recently affirmed constitutional right to walk from the segregated day coach to the segregated dining car through the segregated white passenger day coach, much to the consternation of some of the white folk by whom they had so arrogated themselves as to walk with effrontery without bowing and saying something to the effect, "Yassuh, Massa, I’s just be a moments in yo’ way, massa suh, if yo’s fawgives me faw breathin’ the same air as befits such fine gentlemens as yourselves," while on their way to a Baptist convention along the Southern Railway to Memphis, Tennessee.

Should they have scarce uttered any such phraseology as, perhaps, "I have a dream today that we shall walk together in harmony and enjoy the same table in the dining car," no doubt these same never-never past-dwellers who merely hit them this time would have ended their lives then and there, and with finality in their stomp, echoing down the train's jingle jangling corridor, quite in sympathy with their brethren fighting to the end before Stalingrad.

The editorial finds the incident quite as it should, deplorable, and suggests that the future problems would occur with respect, not to granting rights of equal opportunity and voting, equal justice, and equal educational facilities, but rather in everyday social contacts between whites and blacks.

In sociology, they call this phenomenon the contact hypothesis, that is to say that preconceived prejudices will begin to find their way into manifested behavior patterns when social contact breeds the inevitable contempt common to all human intercourse, regardless of any interracial differences. But, when racial differences are first injected, a tendency develops to attribute to those racial differences, based on pre-existing prejudices, whatever common discord ordinarily might snake its course into that Pullman.

Over time, however, the same hypothesis generally contends, the ordinary human tendency to affability toward the other, bred by social interaction, will in most supersede any inherent prejudice or preconceived notion of the other to the extent that, on balance, social intercourse, when performed on a level without caste distinction between positions, will ultimately serve to result in acceptance of one by the other. This behavior pattern then transforms beliefs and beliefs in turn transform values which in turn have ameliorative impact on interpersonal behavior.

Yet, in the meantime, before that latter component of the hypothesis could be adequately borne out, for the maintenance systemically of both de jure and de facto walls between the races in too many of the social conventions and institutions of society, oh, what a lesson they of that otherwise brave and wise generation had to learn about the confidence they had reposited in their fellow citizens’ sense of continued equanimity and social justice in the face of change in rapidly changing times, threatening in their train the very extinction of mankind.

The face-hitters, the gun-wielders, the pick-handle pushers, the pride-talking, wide-walking, Hyde-Fawkesing kick-down mandible crushers would yet insist upon their way in the South, do or die, imbued with recrudescent recreance threatening to destroy the country which had tolerated their royal insistence on superiority for far too long, for a hundred years and more after the Civil War was done.

That sense of defensive pride of which Cash so eloquently and accurately wrote would yet find its way back into the mainstream of Southern life, quickened in its impact, iridescent in its burn, into the age of rocketry, yet so conflicting, so atavistic to its time, as to be finally taken down, sign and all, by a generation outraged and disgusted by its blood play before their youthful eyes, hence hurled headlong by its head in derision, shamed so as finally to be expelled from itself, that ugliness finally faced in the mirror, and with firm conviction of "nevermore".

But that took the witness of the blood-red sacrifices in the streets, in the film, in Life, before it all would melt away.

Good will, inherent in a large part of the population, North, South, East, and West, was nevertheless for a little season yet after the war to be overcome by the hostility, North, South, East, and West, by the unremitting insistence on rebirthing a past which never existed in the first instance, by the blaspheming of the God some so loudly professed to follow but failed to understand, no matter how many times was professed the Book to have been read. And especially was it so in the South.

Yet, it was in the churches, in the final analysis, where the appeal to conscience finally rounded the corner and found its greatest acceptance to be cast abroad the land, and on each side of the color lines.

The little piece from The New Yorker reports of the extinguishing of the Boston Light in Boston Harbor for the first time since it was first lit in 1716, a final bellwether of war, one which had remained lit from George to George, from 60 years before Independence was declared from Great Britain until 77 years after the Civil War. But now Hitler’s U-boats had successfully played candlesnuffer even upon the wicks of liberty which lit the lighthouses of the coastline.

And, to Mr. E. L. Bechtold, we would just like to say that we were mighty glad to oblige.

It was a Mighty Day at Rhymney with those Chimes flashing, wasn’t it?

Oh, Belles. We misread that.

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