The Charlotte News

Friday, September 18, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: As yet unreported, the carrier Wasp had been sunk on Tuesday while en route as part of a convoy delivering Marine reinforcements and supplies to Guadalcanal. The ship remained afloat for over six hours, enabling the rescue of all of its crew. Its loss left only one operational carrier in the Pacific, the Hornet, also part of the convoy. The Saratoga and Enterprise, the latter damaged in the Battle of the Eastern Solomons on August 24 and the former suffering electrical damage from a torpedo a week later while on patrol, were both under repair in Hawaii.

Despite the loss of the Wasp, the 4,262 reinforcements got through to the island on this date, along with much needed ammunition, engineering equipment, gasoline, trucks, and rations.

The front page carries an ominous picture of a Japanese flag captured on Makin Island August 17 and 18, presented to President Roosevelt--which he then refused to touch.

Former Ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, also having been stationed in Berlin during World War I, warned that it would be Japan, not Germany, which in the end would prove the more formidable foe, that Germany, as in the first war, would fold its cards in due course, but Japan would fight on until "crushed". His prophecy would prove itself propitious.

American bombing raids on New Guinea to relieve infantry fighting by the Australians defending Port Moresby begins to remind of reports from Vietnam 25 years later.

Japan was celebrating the eleventh anniversary of the Mukden incident, the September 18, 1931 dynamiting of a Japanese-owned railroad in Manchuria which, though actually accomplished by the Japanese military, Japan blamed on Chinese nationalists, thus providing the rationale for invading Manchuria and establishing there in early 1932 the puppet state of Manchukuo, ultimately igniting the hostilities of July, 1937, beginning the widespread war in China. In the midst of the celebration, Japan had in as many days issued two apparently conflicting official statements, or at least the second suggesting the narrowing of the focus of the first to India. The latest appeared to deflect the prevailing speculation that Russia was the target of General Hata's warning of Wednesday that the war in Asia was about to take a critical turn in aid of the war in Europe. Colonel Nakao Yahagi, head of the Japanese army press, proclaimed instead that Russia had nothing to fear should it remain obedient to the tenets of the Russo-Japanese mutual non-aggression pact. This latter statement proved instructive of the future course.

In North Carolina, African-American leaders defused rumors that female servants were banding together to form "Eleanor Clubs" to make stringent demands on their employers, somehow hamstringing in the process the war effort.

Rumors to this effect had been circulating during the year, that these "Eleanor Clubs" were for the purpose of collecting knives and icepicks in preparation for violent revolt. Even the FBI had become involved in investigating the rumors based on tipsters warning that the clubs boasted the motto: "No colored maid in the kitchen by Christmas."

As we said: Kitchener wants YOU!

Parenthetically, we have to wonder what the relationship to the war effort was to being good, obeisant domestic servants. Madame of the house unable to take time from domestic chores otherwise performed by the maid to enjoy her usual facial and manicure at the beauty parlor? No time for the Bridge Club? Or the church social? Or, alternatively, to rummage through the attic and basement for excess rubber and steel to donate to the scrap drives?

--Got to clean the pot? This is the last straw, Rhett. This war sacrifice has gone too far. These Fifth Columnists stimulating these clubs have just got to go. Could you please contact your friend at the OWI and tell them to tell these Negro leaders that if they don't desist from this despicable display of unpatriotic fealty to that Eleanor Roosevelt, a known Socialist, possibly even a Communist, then we shall positively not only vote for Mr. Dewey or Mr. Willkie in nineteen hundred and forty-four, we shall in the meantime not employ any Negro cousins of our domestics in the service of this house again. You tell them that right now, Rhett. First, no stockings, or none fit to wear, no silk hats, no silk dresses, no sugar for the domestics to make the children's favorite pies and cakes, no more steel or iron pots, no new refrigerator, no gas or rubber for the new car, indeed, no new car this year or next. Talk of joining the WAC's even. How much more may a lady of the house take? It's all so disgusting. This is the last straw. You tell them that we shall question their patriotism if they do not withhold now and in the future from issuing these silly demands to increase their wages from a dollar per diem to a dollar and ten cents. Yesterday, even the Negro gardener made that very demand and, why, he hasn't the sense of Stepin Fetchit. What do they think, that we are made of money? You give them an inch and they will surely take the whole mile and then some. Didn't we miss some of our silverware last week? You see how they are. They will break in here and stab us in the back in the nighttime. Let's just fire them all. On second thought, call your friend, Mr. Hoover, and tell him all about it.

The editorial page carries a piece by Raymond Clapper bemoaning U.S. censorship of British reporters stationed in the United States at a time when reports were surfacing of war correspondents suffering capture, torture, and even death. The theme is ironic for Mr. Clapper as he, himself, would become a victim of the war on February 2, 1944 while accompanying a U.S. bombing mission in the Pacific, his plane catching fatal flak.

Dorothy Thompson provides some insight as to the demise eventually, post-war, of the small family farm. Though not becoming a fait accompli until the mid-1980's, there was gradual erosion of its viability going on in the forty years before the final crisis which spelled final consumption by agribusiness. And that, notwithstanding the rosy prospects of parity-plus charted in Paul Mallon's piece.

The clipped quote of the day, incidentally, was: "Angling is somewhat like poetry--men are to be born so."--Izaak Walton.

Perhaps, it is and was likewise the case with family farming.

We watched "A Canterbury Tale", incidentally, and found it a pleasing enough film, quite remarkable for its having been filmed on location in Kent and Canterbury in 1944, apparently before the second blitz of 9,000 V-1 rocket bombs and over eleven hundred V-2's reigned terror over British streets, beginning respectively in June and September of that year. The film shows in its latter scenes the scaffold-supported remains of the tower of St. George's Church in Canterbury, some two years after the Baedecker travel-brochure raid of June 1, 1942 destroyed the remainder of the church, a bombing scheme which for morale reasons had targeted English towns most frequented by tourists, that, in the case of Canterbury, just as the RAF pummeled Cologne with a thousand planeloads of bombs the same weekend.

Just what precisely the film's "glue-man" symbology, if it is that, is intended to communicate, we haven't yet gleaned satisfactorily--that is, the mysterious "glue-man" who pours glue into the hair of unsuspecting young women traversing the night in the village of Chillingbourne, doing so for apparent sadistic pleasure, the mystery of its source and reason the film eventually unravels for the viewer, but never its metaphor. Perhaps, its reason is to be found in these lines from "The Squire's Tale":

And when this knight had thus his tale told,
He rode out of the hall, and down he light.
His steede, which that shone as sunne bright,
Stood in the court as still as any stone.
The knight is to his chamber led anon,
And is unarmed, and to meat y-set.
These presents be full richely y-fet,--
This is to say, the sword and the mirrour,--
And borne anon into the highe tow'r,
With certain officers ordain'd therefor;
And unto Canace the ring is bore
Solemnely, where she sat at the table;
But sickerly, withouten any fable,
The horse of brass, that may not be remued.
It stood as it were to the ground y-glued;
There may no man out of the place it drive
For no engine of windlass or polive;
And cause why, for they can not the craft;
And therefore in the place they have it laft,
Till that the knight hath taught them the mannere
To voide him, as ye shall after hear.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps it was about Eleanor Rigby buried in the churchyard.

Nor have we pinned down the allusive significance, if any, of the caravan in storage, though some it surely must possess.

The nonchalant reference by the two American soldiers in the last scene set in a Canterbury tea shop will surely bring a titter or two to those who came of age in the 1960's and 70's. Perhaps, this was the origin of that symbology to the British mod and rocker set, or perhaps it pre-dated the film, both the mod and rocker version.

We also found the wheelwright's colloquy with the soldier an interesting aside, perhaps interjected to the film for the Axis symbology. The soldier and the wheelwright discuss the common American and British customs associated with the cutting, milling, and drying of three species of lumber: white oak, beech, and elm.

Whatever the case as to meaning, Margaret Mitchell never made it to the theater to see it.

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