Thursday, October 18, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, October 18, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that indictments had been filed against the first 24 Nazi war criminals who would go on trial at Nuremberg, a list of whom and their roles appears on the page. Prime among the 24 were Wilhelm Goering, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Robert Ley, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Albert Speer, Julius Streicher, and Rudolf Hess.

The indictments charged mass murder and pillage against millions of persons and dozens of nations. It charged conspiracy to make war as a crime against humanity, an unprecedented action. The defendants would be permitted 30 days to prepare their defenses. All were in the Nuremberg jail save Martin Bormann, still at large.

Hitler was not indicted despite inconclusive evidence of his death.

The prosecutors also intended to convict as a group the SS, the SD or Secret Police, the SA or Storm Troopers, the General Staff and High Command, the Cabinet, and the leadership corps of the Nazi Party.

General Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, told the Senate Military Affairs Committee that presently, an atomic bomb could be attached to a guided missile with a television camera aboard for remote guidance to a target, enabling launch by an aircraft beyond anti-aircraft range, some 300 miles outside the borders of a country. He assured that the only defense would be to stop the technology aborning. The United States had nothing to block such a delivery device. He advocated establishment of a highly competent intelligence arm and a powerful striking force.

Senator Warren Magnuson relied on Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer for the advice that there would not be on the near horizon atomic replacements for automobiles, trains, or power dams. Atomic energy, he had stated, might supplement electric power at some point in the future, but would not replace it.

What, no atomic car? What good is it?

General Marshall also told the Senators that there was need for a world-wide espionage system, as adjunct to the Army and Navy and their proposed joinder under a Department of Defense umbrella. Before the war, he said, the nation depended on the type of intelligence which could be obtained over coffee cups during dinner—whether Maxwell House or, perhaps, a more regional brand such as Reily Coffee's Luzianne, not being indicated. There was, he asserted, now need for a sophisticated intelligence gathering service.

On October 18, 1962, the Kennedy Administration entered the third day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as chronicled in conjunction with October 18, 1937. The dictabelt of the President's memorandum, to which we made reference five years ago, summarizing the day's assessments of the recommended action in response to the presence of the medium range missiles in Cuba, may be accessed here.

In Argentina, a nationwide strike of 500,000 workers who had been supporters of ousted Vice-President Juan Peron, effectively paralyzed the country. Peron was returned to power the previous day and forced a formation of a new Cabinet.

In the tenth installment in the series by General Jonathan Wainwright, he tells of the several close calls he had while inspecting the meandering lines on southern Bataan during February, 1942. In one instance, he had been yanked from harm's way by the seat of his pants by a Texan drawling, "Damn it, General, get down or you'll get your damn head shot off!" Just at that moment, a burst of heavy rifle fire hit where his head had been, and barely missed the head of his aide, Tom Dooley. A Philippine officer and another soldier were killed just a few feet away.

He had also nearly been hit by strafing fire from planes on two other occasions, in one instance avoiding the fire of a descending Zero along a road by diving into a ditch.

Reporter Freck Sproles of The News tells of her first ride in a helicopter, "the flying egg beater" which had been flown from Elizabeth City by a Coast Guard Ensign for the Southern States Fair.

On the editorial page, "The Lost Old Ladies" tells of the report by former Associate Editor Burke Davis, now doing special assignments, anent 25 elderly women transferred to Camp Sutton as mental patients. They had already been in other facilities for an aggregate of 607 years and had cost the State over $100,000.

In 1945, the per capita appropriation for patients of the State Hospital system stood at above $200, compared to $162 in 1939. There were about 8,000 patients within the system. There was need for an additional expenditure of twelve million dollars for new facilities and improvements. Therapy was now being stressed, in departure from the past when mental patients were simply locked away and forgotten.

"The Great Wind" finds Congress trying to emerge with a compromise on the minimum wage increase, currently at 40 cents with 65 cents favored by the Administration. It was likely the wage would be set halfway in between.

Still, industry would carp, as it had in the days of the first minimum wage, at 25 cents in 1938, calling it Red and Fascist all at the same time. The National Association of Manufacturers had then managed to evoke the memory of John C. Calhoun in their drive to defeat the concept of government-controlled wages, and would likely this time, remarks the piece, call up the Magna Carta.

"Last Recourse" points out that the efforts to abolish finally the remaining poll taxes in the South would not eliminate the voter discrimination which took place in Democratic primaries, effectively limiting in one-party states the voter roles to whites.

Georgia's recent abolition of the tax thus stood as essentially an empty gesture, for the Democratic Party could still sponsor its own primary privately, apart from the State, seeking to circumvent the Allwright Supreme Court decision of April, 1944, holding that state-sponsored elections had to be open to all. Yet, a Federal District Court in Georgia had held recently that blacks were entitled to participate in Democratic primaries, regardless of attempts to separate the primary from the concept of state action, a prerequisite for application of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. So, in the end, all efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, the elections might finally be forced open to everyone, regardless of race, after all.

The piece suggests to the likes of Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi that he visit Charlotte where blacks had been voting for many years without the skies falling as a result.

Nevertheless, the Deep South states would manage to fight a retarding action along the Moron River for two decades to come—even if the one across Bataan is pronounced, we assume, as "Morun". The one in the South is, and still is, as it looks.

"Poor Weather" comments on John L. Lewis of the UMW having called off voluntarily the coal strike which had stopped production in a thousand mines and left 200,000 workers idle. The piece believes that he had held up his finger this time and found the winds blowing coldly against him and so decided to withdraw to fight another, more appropriate day.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Charles Savage of Washington discussing with Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan the full employment bill as it related to veterans. Mr. Savage had been a former employer and a union official.

Mr. Hoffman inquires whether there ought not be an obligation of the idle to accept public works jobs when created by the Government to fill the void left by inadequate employment within the private sector.

Mr. Savage interprets the question as being related to striking workers, and informs that strikers generally had difficulty collecting unemployment compensation.

Mr. Hoffman says that his question did not pertain to strikers but rather the generally idle.

Mr. Savage states that the Government would not sponsor public works if the idle of the country were not desirous of the employment. The bill, he stresses, so states. Furthermore, unemployment compensation would be cut off should the work become available through the Employment Service and the unemployed worker not accept it.

Mr. Hoffman responds that such a provision still did not cure the problem as he saw it.

Drew Pearson comments on the several trips scheduled for President Truman in the ensuing months, similar to the one he had taken recently to Independence and then into Western Tennessee to Gilbertsville, Ky., to open the last dam of the TVA project. Initially, journalists had speculated that the trips were political, but that speculation had now changed, that the conventional wisdom was that the trips were simply getaways for the President.

At Caruthersville, Mo, he had arisen at 6:15 to spit in the Mississippi and then swap yarns with the local postmaster and others, following which he rang the bell of the small-scale locomotive, a French engine from World War I being paraded through the streets of the town by the "Forty and Eight" club of the American Legion, so named for the 40-man and 8-horse capacity of the small-scale cars the engine pulled. Mr. Pearson speculates that the President may have been reminded of the similar trains from which he unloaded artillery horses during that war. He was with War Reconverter John W. Snyder, also from Missouri, and both men began ringing the bell in an impromptu contest.

When he went to the Mississippi to spit, in accordance with the tradition, he went alone initially, until the Secret Service got the word and sent four agents after him. The President then skimmed some stones on the river.

Mr. Pearson concludes that the President got a great kick out of forgetting for the moment that he was President.

Secret Service chief George Drescher had received some criticism for allowing the President to take off from Washington Airport in the rain when other air traffic had been grounded, allowing the Truman motorcade to wind along circuitous roads of Virginia in the rain at 60 mph, and allowing the plane dubbed the "Sacred Cow" to land in Paducah, Ky., on a short landing strip with a but few inches of runway to spare. But the truth was that Mr. Drescher was overruled by the President on these matters, the President insisting on informality with everyone around him.

After he had dropped the news of intention to retain the atomic bomb secret while standing at one end of Widow Morris's porch at Reelfoot Lake in Western Tennessee during the evening hours, press secretary Charlie Ross sought to minimize the importance of the announcement. After the President had seen newsmen rush to the telephones following the statement, he had stated that he sometimes forgot that he was President.

At one point during the trip, a local woman spent ten minutes of his time inquiring as to how she could obtain a birth certificate. (Let us hope she wasn't born in Hawaii.)

At the last stop on the trip, at Gilbertsville, he finished his speech by saying, "Let's all cut the foolishness, go home and get to work." Mr. Pearson remarks that he was not referring to himself.

Marquis Childs suggests that labor was heading for a fall based on the politics of reconversion. Veterans were wondering whether they could obtain jobs. And so the forces opposed to organized labor could now use the current climate of strikes to mold opinion against it.

He then lists several defects in the collective bargaining system. They remained as impediments to the efforts of the Administration through Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach to effect reconversion.

He suggests to labor that it not overplay its hand as the winds of public opinion were shifting against it and, while labor still enjoyed great power, it might be a different story in 1948—a good bit of augury being displayed by Mr. Childs, as in 1947, Taft-Hartley would be passed by the Congress and enacted over President Truman's veto.

Dorothy Thompson comments, using the trial in Paris of Pierre Laval as example, on the farcical justice which had grown up around the trials of war criminals, not far from the condemned system employed by the Nazis, pre-determined outcomes set behind facades of rudimentary process, the People's Court, simply to provide some appearance of authority to a foregone conclusion. The Allies were becoming that which they hated.

There was danger that the Nuremberg trials might become victim of this same trap.

When she had visited Italy in May, Ms. Thompson found prisoners who had been arrested when Mussolini fell in July, 1943, still under lock and key, without formal charges or access to trial. Many had never even been interrogated.

Many anti-Nazis accepted the notion without question that Germans were guilty by virtue of their nationality, just as surely as the Nazis had condemned Jews for their religious heritage.

In Berlin, the military occupation government had re-initiated the practice of banning books, stressing the books of Nazism, as Mein Kampf, but also including the works of Oswald Spengler, Sven Anders Hedin, and Knut Hamson, the latter authors having lent support to Nazism but their works nevertheless stood aloof from its tenets. All of these works, including Mein Kampf, should be available for judgment on their merits, not banned, just as works Hitler had found to be antithetical to Nazi dogma.

As with the bootlegging within the universities of banned works during the Nazi era, there would also be such bootlegging, in all likelihood, of the books banned by the Allies.

None of these limits on freedom served well the times, fraught with moral and intellectual crisis, a deepening problem.

"...[A]nd seldom have Americans been less free, effectively to defend what needs defending and to check what wants checking."

A letter writer trumpets the praises of Dr. George Crane's advice column, as syndicated nationally, finds it had merit in arresting drinking habits. A previous letter writer on October 9 had objected to his advice for stressing sex too much.

This author finds the WCTU to be narrow and not truly Christian in that they campaigned for abstinence rather than only temperance, the latter implying moderation. He suggests that texts from the Bible be called forth on the subject and that the WCTU change their name to WCAU. (Parenthetically, we feel compelled to note that the lyric, we believe, is correctly stated: "...meeting in the dawn, in the John...", although someone may have heard it also as "with the Don", or, "kneeling in the dung", as we thought it.)

Anent, incidentally, "Our Brothers' Keeper?" of October 18, 1937, the reference is to Matthew 8:28-34, which reads:

28 And when he was come to the other side into the country of the Gadarenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way.

29 And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time?

30 And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding.

31 So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine.

32 And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

33 And they that kept them fled, and went their ways into the city, and told every thing, and what was befallen to the possessed of the devils.

34 And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts.

Or, Mark 5:1-17:

1 And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes.

2 And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit,

3 Who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains:

4 Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him.

5 And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.

6 But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him,

7 And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not.

8 For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

9 And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.

10 And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of the country.

11 Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine feeding.

12 And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.

13 And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea.

14 And they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city, and in the country. And they went out to see what it was that was done.

15 And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.

16 And they that saw it told them how it befell to him that was possessed with the devil, and also concerning the swine.

17 And they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts.

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