The Charlotte News
Friday, October 26, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that to add to the labor strikes in the country, Montgomery Ward's 75,000 employees were threatening to go on strike after a vote to authorize the union to declare it.
Meanwhile, G.M. reported a 6 to 1 majority vote by union members on Wednesday to authorize a strike, albeit comprising only about a fourth of the eligible union members. No results had yet been announced in the Chrysler vote of the previous day.
Nationwide, about 223,000 workers remained idle.
As set forth in conjunction with The News of October 26, 1937, the Cuban Missile Crisis entered its eleventh day on October 26, 1962. The day's highlight was the receipt of a letter
The Kennedy Administration was seriously considering the offer, but it would appear as a useless gesture by Saturday morning when a second letter added the demand of removal of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. Such an agreement would be consistent with American plans already in effect to remove the obsolete missiles within six months, replaced by Polaris submarines in the Mediterranean—former Vice-President Nixon's public statement on Saturday that the deal would constitute a "horse for a rabbit" and would imperil greatly the defenses of the United States, notwithstanding. But, the United States could not be placed in a position of appearing to bargain away missile bases for the removal of missiles in the Western Hemisphere, lest the scenario be repeated again with the bargaining chips the next time being more significant, such as Berlin.
So, with some ray of light having appeared on Friday night, it had vanished with the rising sun Saturday, nearly bringing the world to the brink of annihilation once again. Quick thinking and a refusal to accept the fait accompli of war would save the day—the war by 1961, predicted in October, 1945 by the generals who had fought World War II, already being a year overdue within the Tempest.
A phone conversation between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain, updating the crisis at this stage, took place this date.
In London, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin warned that hunger and privation in Europe could bring about more death than from war or the atomic bomb. It was necessary, he said, that the United States contribute the remaining balance of 1.6 billion dollars to the United Nations Rehabilitation and Relief Administration fund to prevent it from going broke within a few weeks. He blamed the Nazis ultimately for the disaster, having left Europe in anarchy deliberately when it became apparent that they could not win the war.
He suggested that oil ought be sent to Argentina in exchange for its excess grain which was being burned for want of oil.
In Nuremberg, Robert Ley, head of the Nazi labor front, awaiting trial for war crimes, hanged himself the previous night in his cell. He left behind an apology for his anti-Semitism. The result would be exclusion from the trial of many critical documents pertaining to the labor front, as they had only been relevant to the charges against Herr Ley.
House and Senate confreres agreed to forgive all Federal income tax on service pay of enlisted men during the war years, beginning at the end of 1940.
In the seventeenth article in the series by General Jonathan Wainwright on the fall of Bataan and Corregidor in April and May, 1942, he states that during the terrible shelling of Corregidor by the Japanese on April 29 to honor Hirohito's birthday, he received word that the Navy rescue planes for the nurses had arrived at Lake Lanao and would reach Corregidor that night. Thirty nurses and twenty officers were loaded onto the planes and they were able to make their get away safely.
He next tells of his typical day on Corregidor and that the primary concern during the last two weeks before the fall on May 6 was adequate water and continued electrical supply.
In Lafayette, Ga., a Marine Captain married a woman he had physically met the day before, although having kept up written correspondence with her for thirteen months while he was in the Pacific. With his leave from his base in San Diego running short, the couple hired a cab for a cross-country ride, including a honeymoon tour of the Smokies. The cab fare was $750, about the cost of a new car.
The News prints a ballot for casting votes on civic improvement projects for Charlotte. Thus far, a new auditorium led the field, followed by purchase of Morris Field from the Federal Government as an addition to the airport, a parks program, and a new library. Be sure to send in your ballot.
On the editorial page, "German Preview" suggests that the squabbling in the public press of Germany between the Russians and the Americans was defining of democracy to the German population, even if it appeared to them foreign and confusing. The Americans recently had charged in Allgemeine Zeitung that the Communists were rehabilitating Nazis and admitting them to party councils. The Russians in Deutsche Volkszeitung contended that Americans were throwing anti-Fascists from their homes and replacing them with prominent Nazis.
While no model of a free press, at least the dissension within the country which had allowed none for twelve years was a step toward progress.
"Long-Range Bonus" comments on the campaign of the Disabled American Veterans in Chicago to obtain a bonus up to $4,500 for returning veterans after ten years, except in case of unemployment or being in school, enabling $100 per month payments.
While skeptical of the entire concept of a bonus for military service, the piece ventures that as long as a bonus was, as it appeared it would be, inevitable, then the plan suggested by the DAV appeared sound.
"Painful Progress" discusses the advent of technology which permitted Western Union to send out 1,080 messages at one time via radio beams rather than along wires. But with this progress would come loss of jobs. The argument in favor of it was that new developments opened the path to new industry and new jobs. While generally true, the transition was not usually smooth and the result would be an unstable economy as in the Depression.
The solution to the dilemma would be Government control through planning and spending, anathema to Washington conservatives, but nevertheless necessary to avoid the economic pitfalls of the past.
"Colossal Clambake" suggests that Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan may have uncovered a scandal more meaningful than the tax returns of Elliott Roosevelt, this one impacting President Truman. Mr. Hoffman claimed that lobbyist Russell Arundel had paid the tab for the Jefferson Island meeting of Democrats with the President the previous month and that it had cost $75,000.
The piece suspects that Mr. Hoffman may have an added a zero or two to the bill, but that even if the cost had been $75,000, it did not prove anything adverse to Mr. Truman save that he did not select his company very well and that the honeymoon of his presidency had ended.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman John Taber of New York discussing cutbacks in appropriations for the Army and Navy and urging that no repeat occur of the period following World War I where junior officers were retained in service far beyond their usefulness.
Representative Albert Engel of Michigan then presents statistics on the number of men in service stateside in fiscal year 1945-46.
Mr. Taber points out that the large number of men still in service was why the committee had made a cut in appropriations to force the Army to discharge four million men by Christmas.
Congressman Joseph O'Hara of Michigan then inquires as to how many men were employed at the Pentagon, to which Mr. Taber responds that he did not have the information.
Mr. Engel suggests that it was all the building could hold and then some, as many were in other rented space outside the world's largest building.
Drew Pearson returns to his suggestion a couple of weeks earlier that the Government establish a Department of Peace to teach the world to get along as an alternative, the only alternative, to the atomic bomb.
The Appropriations Committee of the House had recently cut the budget considerably of the State Department, the nearest thing the Government had to a Department of Peace, curtailing thereby the efforts of Secretary Byrnes to raise salaries of diplomats and continue the work of the Office of War Information, disseminating positive information abroad about America.
He next tells of the bitter resentment of Navy reservists toward Annapolis graduates. Said a Navy reservist who in civilian life was a professor at the University of North Carolina: "One skipper, a regular Navy officer, was drunk and missed his ship. I was forced to take the ship into battle. Was anything done to him? No. He was an Annapolis graduate."
The column next reveals that Senator Happy Chandler of Kentucky would resign his seat effective October 31 to devote full time to his new duties, undertaken earlier in the year, as Major League Baseball commissioner.
He then tells of the virtually empty House chamber recently, with only five members present before full galleries of spectators. And of the five, only two were engaged in any debate, on the full employment bill. But it was nothing new. The Congress had so behaved for generations.
Samuel Grafton addresses the crying need for food in Europe, that the average European was not sitting around comfortably thinking about whether to become a Communist or a capitalist, but rather simply awaiting a square meal. The Congress had still not authorized the remaining 550 million dollars of the 1.35 billion share of UNRRA to be footed by the United States.
Current voting patterns did not suggest that Europe was moving toward Communism and, in any event, the delivery of UNRRA aid would not prevent it if it were.
The United States had stored 280,000 tons of food in Germany to raise the German diet to 2,000 calories per day. Sample members of the German population were being weighed each month to insure that they did not suffer from too much malnutrition. The group with the least loss of weight were females of sufficient age to be attractive to U.S. troops.
Under the Potsdam agreement, Germany would not be permitted a diet greater than that of liberated countries of Europe. But the problem with the scenario was that the occupation forces were not weighing the populations of the liberated countries or busying themselves seeking to raise the level of calories there.
Mr. Grafton cautions that Europe was weighing America even as America was weighing Germans.
A letter writer who had received criticism on October 2 for her having implied that Pearl Harbor might have been a Roosevelt trick, responds that it could have been "because the New Deal gang have lied us into a three hundred billion dollar debt"—the cost of the war, not the New Deal.
She adds that President Truman was going to allow everyone to freeze to death to appease the "labor union gangsters in order to get their votes".
She encloses editorials from other newspapers which differed from those of The News, which she believed smelled.
She asserted that the New Deal had sought to blame former President Hoover for the cigarette and other shortages of daily life.
She takes offense at a News piece which she perceived as an attack on William McKinley, a great American.
"Yes, McKinley was an American. He was not a Communist, or a lover of them. I'm sure if he were alive today Russia could not tell us what to do."
She closes by saying that if the News, in its spreading of "Ediotatic propaganda", wanted to air skeletons in closets, they should pick on the Roosevelts who, according to columnist Westbrook Pegler, had plenty.
"Their closets are just like your paper. They smell."
The editors respond that they realize the author did not like the New Deal but that she still had not answered their query adequately as to whether she thought Pearl Harbor was an FDR trick.
Marquis Childs discusses the President's recommendation to Congress earlier in the week that all males between 18 and 21 out of high school undergo a year of compulsory military training, with stress on how such a program would impact training in science, so essential for keeping pace with the war-making ability of the world.
Mr. Childs thinks it a faulty argument that mandatory training would undermine democracy as Sweden had tried the program for many years with an increase of democracy. Its 600,000 trained reserves may have prevented the Nazis from attacking the country at two critical points during the war.
Moreover, as the President had indicated, the country would not have the luxury of time to prepare in the next war as it had in World War II, afforded by the fighting resolve of both Britain and the Soviet Union.
Continuation of American strength was essential to a stable world and the demobilization at the speed it was occurring was dangerous and ill-advised.
But the question arose as to what constituted strength in the new age of the atom bomb and guided missile. After the last war, the generals professed to know, but Germany's new technological advances had swept away the Maginot Line constructed in response by the French.
The most disturbing aspect of the President's speech was its tacit acceptance of the next war and that the way to peace lay in the "better days to come", which appeared not on the horizon anytime soon. It appeared that he had adopted the conviction of those generals who believed that another war in the not too distant future was an inevitability.
Mr. Childs wonders where the President was who had spoken of a world state with vision and foresight at San Francisco on June 26. That message appeared to have gone by the wayside. There was no longer an assertion of world leadership and it appeared that Washington was drifting.
"Perhaps universal training is the answer to the military security of a great democracy. But as phrased in the Truman message, it seems a dusty answer that yields so little to the needs of this hour."
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