The Charlotte News

Wednesday, September 30, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells of the re-capture from the Japanese by the Allies in New Guinea of Ioribaiwa Ridge in the Owen Stanley Mountains, the ridge at the 32-mile point to which the Japanese had advanced some two weeks before, as reported September 17. They had now retreated ten miles back to the north from Port Moresby, to Nauro. The goal was to push the Japanese back to their base at Buna, cut off their supply lines, and then force them off the island entirely.

From the Sportspalast in Berlin, the military genius Hitler told his Party and the German people that the plan for the ensuing year of war was to hold the territory acquired and resist Allied invasion wherever it might come. This defensive statement was a distant cry from addresses in years past which successively with each annual passage had predicted victory and a new Germania conquering supreme. But the military genius hedged in his bravado even in its defensive posture by providing the advance warning to his countrymen that he could not know where the Allies might invade for the fact that they were led by "military idiots"—unlike himself who, fifteen months earlier, had invaded Russia in the footsteps of Napoleon with a plan to conquer the country of antiquated defenses in four to six weeks.

Mark it down in the Book of Military Genius--Hitler’s Rule No. 666.6: Only a military genius telegraphs where he will invade so that the enemy may completely prepare themselves for the invasion, quaking in their boots the while at the thought of the insuperable majesty of His Highness, the military genius.

The News and The Observer, as further explored in the editorial column, part of a statewide press-led cadre, announced a concerted effort to stimulate a three-week scrap drive in Charlotte, aimed especially at collection of metals.

Prepare to shed those fenders and bumpers, gentlemen and ladies. It is about to become slowpoke city even if winding up looking like hotrod country.

Tom Revelle, author of the front page piece and pictured with J. E. Dowd as a member of the scrap committee, not a scrap committee but a committee on scrap, was among Cash's closest friends on the staff of The News, and regular afternoon participant in the Little Pep casuistries. A mountain man with one arm, he had been a reporter for the newspaper for many years and regularly held down a dog column, not a dog of a column but a column about canines.

Incidentally, the news of the scrap drive causes us momentarily to return to the chart on yesterday’s front page and ask whether its preparer at the A.P. offices vaguely floated to the surface from his or her subconscious Cash’s "Moving Row" piece from The News of March 25, 1928.

Well, the country eventually sent a rocket to the moon.

And, despite all the war news abounding on the front page, somebody decided it fitting to insert a snippet on the scoreless first inning of the World Series. Stay tuned, sports fans, for more news of innings of note.

The editorial page quotes Lt.-General Brehon Somervell, Chief of Supply for the Army, speaking in St. Louis in praise of the heroes of Stalingrad while decrying America’s continuing complacency at home and disunity between various blocs as it continually questioned the strategy employed by its military commanders abroad.

Had he uttered the same words a mere decade later, he would have been hurled before a Senate committee and branded a traitor and a Comm-mmm-unist. How quick we change when it is no longer in our self-interest to be allies.

On the eve of the President’s October 1 deadline provided Congress September 7 for either passing a bill to curb inflation by limiting farm prices and wages or suffering his employment of war powers to implement the limits directly, Robert Humphreys writes of the initially successful intervention by Representatives Albert Gore, a tobacco farmer, and Mike Moroney to block in committee the passage of an amendment to the farm parity bill making minimum prices subject to determination by adding to costs of farming the costs of farm labor—an amendment meant ultimately to enable the farmer to compete with city wages to hold labor on the farm. But the amendment, providing for this unique basis for determining parity, had arisen in response to an incorrect literal interpretation of five words in the President’s message, intended to be limited to calculating commodity ceilings based on labor costs to industry. Despite the industry of the two congressmen, the amendment was nevertheless added back into the bill on the floor of the House.

The piece suggests that since the real issue was the acquisition of labor on both the farm and in industry out of ever-diminishing pools reduced by manpower demands of war, the whole matter appeared as a red herring. For if there was little or no labor to be had, obviously including or not including cost of labor in parity adjustments was inconsequential. At issue was the survival of the family farm itself for want of workers to sustain it. The rest appeared as election year politics.

The problem as framed by the President on September 7 was that the January legislation passed by Congress had enabled an average of 116% of parity on farm goods causing food prices to rise and thus causing inflationary trends harmful to the wage worker unless wages kept pace, creating the potential for an inflationary spiral. The President wanted both possibilities checked by freezing wages and farm prices simultaneously.

Thus far, the Congress had bowed to the farm lobby—and the November 3 election less than five weeks away.

And yesterday, we read that a Senate committee excluded the public option from the health care plan, bowing to the insurance lobby. And the next election is yet thirteen months away.

"Pigs Is Pigs" tells of the fat coffee drinkers and the need therefore of the store to impose its own private rationing program on customers. The editorial concludes that such pigs were the root cause of lack of available coffee for the breakfast table of 1942.

The problem with this picture is that we have never seen too many fat coffee drinkers, unless, that is, they were also stocking up on equal amounts of adulteration for their cups from the other store down the way--from which, despite sugar rationing, thus far no news had emanated with regard to limits on its available inventory except in and around military reservations. Perhaps, had some degree of self-imposed rationing on that front proceeded after the end of Prohibition, the war might have been avoided entirely through more attentive and astute reaction to the tee-totaler’s behavior pattern in Berlin.

But, it took a rather rotund gentleman who is said to have enjoyed regularly his toddy--and judging by appearance would so suggest--to lead Britain into a fit swell enough to combat the thin man of Germany, whose likewise thin counterpart preceding in Britain had found him cozy enough company by the chestnut-roasting boasts of September 1938. So, perhaps the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was not in possession of the answer, after all. Yet, then again, fat-boy Mussolini had actually started the whole movement in 1923. Judging by the editorial’s gauge of corpulence and its causes, he must have taken quite a lot of espresso from cups larger than demitasse.

Or, perhaps, it is all resolved by the old adage that one cannot determine the contents of a book merely by examining, even closely, its cover.

In any event, put that piece together with the little story on the invention of Thomas Blanket, and you have a fancy crepe to go with your three pounds of coffee, sirrah and madame, --ay?