The Charlotte News
Friday, December 21, 1945
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General George S. Patton had died at 5:50 p.m. this date of the injuries sustained in the automobile collision with a truck near Mannheim, Germany, on December 9, that despite reports earlier in the week that he was sitting up and responding well to treatment for his fractured vertebrae which had left him partially paralyzed, and statements of doctors that they expected him to recover. He had contracted respiratory infection, however, the previous day, which became worse by morning this date, returning his condition to serious. The report stated that he had died peacefully.
The final medical condition update issued just ten minutes before the death of the general, stating in part:
"Paralysis of one side of the diaphragm in the intercostal resulting from the spinal cord injury has made it difficult to get rid of these secretions [in his lungs] by cupping. As a result of the pulmonary congestion, the heart has become embarrassed."
General Patton had turned 60 on November 11. He had first earned prominence in Tunisia in March and April, 1943, following his predecessor's debacle at Kasserine Pass. He then led a swift four-week drive through Sicily, which ended in victory in August, 1943, followed immediately in early August by the two infamous slapping incidents which nearly cost him his command.
Relegated to the role of a decoy to the Germans, he sat out the ensuing eight months of the war before being assigned command in the spring of 1944 of the Third Army which, beginning in July, he led across France to Paris during the latter half of the summer of 1944, after turning the corner in late July to enable the bogged down forces in the hedgerows of Normandy to move into the open central plain.
Then, of course, during the Battle of the Bulge, his Third Army forces had opened a narrow corridor on December 30 to supply the stranded men of the 101st Airborne Division and elements of the Ninth and Tenth Armored Divisions under General Anthony McAuliffe at Bastogne, helping to close the bulge and successfully end the Nazi last-ditch effort at a breakthrough of Allied lines.
He then led the drive to the south across the Rhine, through southern Germany and into Czechoslovakia in the closing days of the war.
While there were certainly other generals within the European theater of command who were equally instrumental in the victory of the Allies, General Patton has come to be the best remembered among the field commanders for his derring-do and color—as portrayed by George C. Scott vividly in the 1970 film, having as much to do with the preservation of the Patton image as did the reality of the war itself.
According to the movie, he once said that he hoped to die from the last bullet of the last war. Even if qualified to include world war, he did not quite achieve the wish, but his death nevertheless had a certain poetic irony with its causative agent being a U.S. Army truck, not an enemy bullet.
It compares with the ironic death which Stonewall Jackson suffered, being shot in the dark
The Big Three foreign ministers conference appeared to be going well in its sixth day and expectations were reported to be optimistic that agreements could be reached on major issues, although it was stressed that the conference was not attempting to bypass the U.N. in any matter within its province.
As Congress departed Washington for the holidays, a note of acrimony with the White House had entered the winter air based on three developments the previous day: the President issued a statement that he would soon make a statement on the proposed legislation to return the U.S. Employment Service to the states, a bill which he had opposed; a release to key members of Congress a letter stating that he deemed unacceptable the House alternative to his full employment bill; and his issuing an order authorizing the Fair Employment Practices Committee to investigate and report on employment practices until June 30, effectively extending the life of the executive committee.
Some members of Congress, especially Southern Democrats, believed the President had blundered in these moves, especially with regard to extension of the FEPC, creating an open break in relations.
The Civilian Production Administration announced that the incentive program to obtain housing for veterans would go into effect January 15, ordering that dwellings costing $10,000 or less be offered first to veterans and that top rent on them would be $80 per month.
It was anticipated that the cold wave which had beset the South would begin to end this date.
Off Dover, England, winter gales blew mines against the rocky coast causing them to explode, in some cases near towns. Mine sweepers also exploded loose mines to stop them from being swept into shore. Heavy seas caused the worst floods in fifty years in County Cork in Eire.
The Empty Stocking Fund had risen by $430 to $6,205.54. The amount exceeded the target of $6,000 to insure a good Christmas for all of the needy children of the city.
A photograph appears of football Coach Peahead Walker of Wake Forest College presenting to the sports editor of The News, Bill Weisner, a check for $250 for the Empty Stocking Fund. The proceeds came from the Wake Forest-South Carolina football game of Thanksgiving Day in Charlotte. The two schools jointly made the gift.
On the editorial page, "An Isolationist Bypath" reports of North Carolina Treasurer Charles Johnson objecting to the 4.4 billion dollar loan proposed to Great Britain on the ground that the national debt of 275 billion could not afford such a loan.
While sympathetic with the sentiment, the piece argues that there was more at stake than balanced books, that it was necessary to make the loan to stimulate renewed British trade and insure its economic stability into the future. And the fiscal conservatives of business were more than willing to support billions for defense after Pearl Harbor when, prior to that time, they had complained of President Roosevelt's domestic spending policies, small by comparison.
It concludes that the average citizen's fear of national bankruptcy was inversely proportional to his desire for national security. It was distressing to see the State Treasurer induced to an isolationist position based on an unbalanced budget.
"The Homing Congressmen" comments on the end of the 1945 session of Congress, the first session of the 79th, now in recess until January 14. The Congress during the year had in many ways reasserted itself after being subjugated to the will of the Chief Executive and the Executive Branch and military during the war.
When Harry Truman became President on April 12, he had reached out to the Congress for help in governing, having been a member of the Senate until less than three months prior to his suddenly being thrust into the presidency. The Congress, suddenly freed from the popular will of FDR, bit the hand thus extended and asserted their own path. Many Southern Democrats had jumped party lines in the months since to vote with Republicans against Administration proposals.
At the same time, the Congress had gone as far as a weak Administration had asked it to go but was equally to blame for the domestic mess. They were, however, to be pitied more than censured as their confusion was no less than that of the people, merely reflecting in the end the inability of the people to make up their minds as to what direction the country should take in the post-war. Added to that was a President who had been reluctant to assert his hand in directing, leaving the country in a largely rudderless state.
It hoped that the Christmas break would enable the Congress to touch base with home constituents and have a clearing of the mind to provide them with a definite path to follow into 1946.
"A Great Precedent" comments on the support by Harry Golden's Carolina Israelite for the appointment of former North Carolina Governor and Shelby native O. Max Gardner to the commission on Palestine.
Governor Gardner was following in a long tradition of North Carolina Governors by accepting the position. Governor Zebulon Vance, Governor during the Civil War and again from 1877 to 1879, and then Senator until 1894, had favored a rebirth for Jewish Palestine in his speech titled "The Scattered Nation". Governor Thomas Bickett, during World War I, had petitioned President Wilson to endorse the 1917 Balfour Declaration, expressing British favor for a Jewish homeland in Palestine without discrimination to the non-Jewish population.
The attitude of the North Carolina Governors reflected true statesmanship as the Jewish population of North Carolina did not form a substantial political bloc within the state.
The editorial agrees with The Israelite that Governor Gardner's appointment was a good choice and that he would contribute measurably to the settlement of the issue of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
A piece from the Winston-Salem Journal, titled "Juvenile Death Penalty", comments on the affirmance by the North Carolina Supreme Court of the imposition of the death penalty on a boy fourteen or fifteen years old. It expresses the hope that Governor Gregg Cherry would commute the sentence, as had been the past practice of Governors when capital sentences were passed upon juveniles.
The Journal, and other newspapers across the state, had long condemned such sentences for the immaturity of the defendant, rendering his capacity less than that of an adult under law. He was too young to marry, to join the armed forces, to quit school, even to work without a special permit from the welfare department. Such restrictions plainly set the teenager apart from the adult population.
That he was a menace to society did not alter the premise that his menacing behavior was founded in immaturity.
The crimes were crimes, in the end, of adults who had provided the young perpetrators a bad heritage or failed properly to offer them guidance.
Drew Pearson comments on the clothing shortage and the effort of the Government to insure that the veterans got first priority on new clothes. While there was enough wool for clothing, there was insufficient rayon and cotton for linings, as most of the material had been allocated to the military during the war, and the mills had to be reconverted to peacetime production. Moreover, most of the rayon and cotton had been going to clothing for women in the form of blouses, slips, panties and bras, and "other things they like to wear".
Men's suits, ordinarily lined with such things, were now stripped of the essentials, causing itchy skin if not intervened by those other things.
The hosiery manufacturers were receiving a lot of rayon poundage for stockings—to place by the chimney with care.
The reasons for women getting preference was that they were the source of higher profits, based in part, said the manufacturers, on restrictions imposed by OPA, and that the War Production Board had, the previous fall, placed priorities on cotton and rayon for medium-priced clothing but left out linings. The WPB had since been replaced by the Civilian Production Administration, but its policies had proved no better.
To adjust the situation would likely require raising price ceilings and hence prices either on women's clothing or men's, to alleviate the shortage.
He next tells of President Truman, when called upon by two supportive Democratic Congressmen, having been reluctant to declare any willingness yet to run for President in 1948. He was doing the best job he could, he said, day by day.
Finally, the column tells of the high inflation in Russia causing far greater problems than the average American was encountering economically in the post-war. There were no price controls in Russia, just discounts for selected persons, 15 percent for Communist Party members and 56 percent for top military leaders, with graduated percentages for others in between. Factory and clerical workers received no discount, relegating the workers to company stores which provided but the bare essentials at discount prices.
It was, in other words, much as America has become.
A special piece by William Howard Melish of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, Inc., seeks to remove some of the "fog" which had developed in the perception of certain problems in U.S.-Soviet relations. Recently, Josef Stalin had told Senator Claude Pepper of Florida on his trip to Moscow that Americans should view Russia objectively, on facts rather than rumors.
But instead, the professional haters of the Russians in Congress, together with the neo-Fascist organizations, had generated an unprecedented campaign of anti-Soviet propaganda since the end of the war. The flames had been whipped by the atomic diplomacy of the U.S., in sole possession of the bomb, and by guilt regarding post-war failures in Germany, Japan, China, and elsewhere.
The divide-and-conquer technique of Josef Goebbels was being used again on the United States to cause the average American to believe that world war was again in the offing, this time with Russia, because of its perceived failure of cooperation in the post-war period.
Objectivity was the anodyne. For through such an altered perception, one could see that Russia had far more to fear from bilateral action by the U.S. and Britain than the other way about, unilateral action by Russia. It was the former two, he suggests, who had brought about a lack of cooperation between the Big Three by seeking to dissolve the wartime alliance through use of the atomic bomb as a tool of diplomacy, treating Germany with kid gloves and Japan with velvet gloves, and the advocacy by Ernest Bevin of a world assembly which would end Big Three anti-Fascist collaboration.
Mr. Melish asserts that no world organization could be any better than the relations occasioned by the Big Three. It was France, he asserts, not Russia, which was responsible for the failure of occupation of Germany.
The British were shooting Indonesian natives on behalf of the Dutch in Java. The Russians, by contrast, were preventing Iranian troops, equipped with American arms, from shooting Azerbaijan Insurgents—suspected, he neglects to inform, of being armed by the Russians to enable a satellite for Russia in the northern territory of Iran. When the U.S. demanded that all Allied troops depart Iran, it failed to inform that there would remain, after full evacuation of the British and Russian military, five American military and economic missions. The U.S. also agreed with Russia that Turkey's grip on the Dardanelles should be relaxed to afford to Russia access to the Mediterranean.
The present impasse was to be resolved, he suggests, only through the good offices of the Big Three, based on an objective appraisal of the aims of the Soviet Union. During the war, the old anti-Bolshevik bogeys had been abandoned in favor of unity among the Allies, as daily, after turning of the tide in Russia in latter 1942, Americans read reports of German defeat at the hands of the Russians. Winning the peace was as important as winning the war had been.
He asks whether it was not possible for Americans to view Russia with the same objectivity as during the war. If not, not only the peace was lost, but also the war.
Marquis Childs discusses the rush to buy up consumer goods during the Christmas season, with the Commerce Department estimating that total 1945 sales would exceed by 4.5 million dollars those of the previous year, nearly twice that of 1938. A large part of the increase was the result of increased prices, not volume of sales.
Service stations were enjoying a 20 percent increase in business because of the end of gas rationing in August. There appeared on the horizon a potential shortage of fuel oil, raising questions of whether price controls were lifted prematurely.
The boom in the fourth quarter, he warns, could end in a bang if consumers, faced with spiraling high prices, suddenly decided to continue to do without, as during the war, and hoarded their money.
Samuel Grafton informs that, according to the Wall Street Journal, OPA's determination to restrict use of cream in ice cream had caused a shortage of butter. There were other such oddities as well, as the country readjusted to peacetime.
The housing shortage could have been predicted two years earlier.
One of the few foresighted aspects to reconversion had been the provision by the Congress of corproate tax breaks to speed production. But it had backfired by providing incentives to delay production until after the first of the year when the excess profits tax would end.
Moreover, the entire system was not only poorly planned domestically but with respect to the world at large. For instance, 63 million chickens were to be destroyed in the coming quarter to meet demand and because of limits in feed supply.
The overall effect was that there was no centralized plan, only a series of ad hoc responses to individual situations, leading to a slow, fumbling effort at reconversion.
A woman writes a letter anent the letter written caustically in response to the two striking ladies of the Erwin Mills seeking contributions for Christmas gifts for the children of the strikers, responding first to the letter of December 18 by two gentlemen written in response to the responding letter. She observes that the two gentlemen, in raising the Christmas spirit, caused her to wonder if only a few understood the Christmas spirit, that it celebrates the day the world was given a Saviour.
She hopes that the gentlemen were not two of the slime balls who struck at the Entwistle Mills and then displayed pusillanimity in not finishing what they had started, apparently an inchoate strike.
She favors the mill owner working for a week beside the workers to see how the mill was running, so as not to have to rely solely on the mendacious overseer of the slave operation who likely would paint a false picture to protect his own position, lazy and shiftless though he was, every bit so as the malingering labor force whom he oversaw.
She had worked in a cotton mill her entire life, or for 25 years, and thus knew whereof she spoke in saying that work had been stretched out in the past decade more than at any other time in her experience. While wages had increased 18 percent, work had tripled in its difficulty.
When she had started at the mill, Christmas was Christmas. On Christmas Eve, a big black horse and a wagon would bring gifts for the people of the mill village, and work generally was not so hard as it was presently. So she was brought up to believe that if you did not like the pay or the work, you simply quit the job. And the owner was sensible and empathetic enough to keep work and pay balanced sufficiently to maintain his labor force intact.
She then asserts that President Roosevelt's "democracy" meant simply honesty, that it did no good to gain the world and lose one's soul.
Thus, we assume that the nasty, rotten strikers, protesting the stretch-out system at Erwin Mills, and their children, would receive nothing from this woman this Christmas of 1945, embodying the very essence therefore of the Christmas spirit
Framed Edition
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