The Charlotte News
Saturday, December 29, 1945
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that in Essington, near Philadelphia, the previous night, a wreck of a trolley with an oil truck had left five dead and seven injured when the oil truck exploded. One of the dead was a five-year old girl whose death was witnessed by her mother. The oil truck had hit the trolley near its front section.
In Jerusalem, British authorities had arrested 38 persons from the all-Jewish village of Ramth Gan, out of 2,700 detained for questioning, in relation to the bombing and shooting deaths of ten law enforcement officers. Thirty others were under arrest for violation of the round-the-clock curfew. The previous day's report had quoted witnesses as saying that there were six assailants who had entered the police headquarters building where the bombing and shootings took place. Every male under 60 had been arrested in the Bezalel section of Jerusalem, including all of the guests of the Eden Hotel.
The curfew imposed also on Tel Aviv was lifted.
In Nuremberg, Third Army headquarters announced the seizure of the original marriage contract, dated April 29, 1945, between Hitler and Eva Braun. The document, witnessed by Martin Bormann and Herr Doktor Goebbels, was found among the effects of arrested Friedrich Wilhem Paustin, aide to Martin Bormann. A "political testament" of Hitler was also found with the document, witnessed by Goebbels, Bormann, and Nicolaus von Below. The documents were supposed to have been conveyed by Herr Paustin to Admiral Karl Doenitz, successor to Hitler.
In Pineville, Ky., nine of the 31 trapped coal miners had been extricated from the mine following the explosion on Wednesday, one having died of his injuries just before removal and one other being in serious condition. Twenty-four serious fires had hampered rescue efforts.
In Bridgeport, Conn., five children, between the ages of one and nine, died of suffocation in a home fire, believed caused by a Christmas tree igniting from hot lights. The children were alone in the house at the time. It was the third deadly fire in Connecticut in a week, bringing the death toll to 30.
In New York, Captain Eugene Dale, survivor of the Bataan Death March in April, 1942, passed away at Roosevelt Hospital after he had been wounded the previous day in the head, chest, and abdomen by gunfire over a love triangle with an "attractive blonde model". Captain Arthur B. Miller—no, not the playwright—who served in the European theater, the estranged husband of the model, was held without bail on a charge of felonious assault, about to become murder. The prosecutor, Edward Murphy—another guy—, termed the murder the result of "one of the usual triangle affairs".
Detective John Kennedy—a different one—said that before he died, Captain Dale identified the assailant as Captain Miller. The witnesses, who included the blonde's sister and her fiance, told of Captain Miller coming home to the apartment, finding his estranged wife talking with Captain Dale and the other couple in the living room, entered the bedroom, retrieved a German Luger and then shot Captain Dale.
Captain Miller's wife had previously informed him of her love for Captain Dale, formed while her husband was overseas, and her intent to file for divorce; the erstwhile husband was living with her temporarily because of the housing shortage. The Millers had been married 25 months earlier, but had only been together seven months when Captain Miller was ordered overseas. Now, he might be overseas for much of the remainder of his years.
Her name? Well, they said, for the record, it was Fay Hancock Miller. But we all know that the names, even the ages, were changed at times to protect the innocent. There are eight million stories.
Near Eugene, Ore., the Willamette River flooded causing the evacuation of a thousand residents.
In Florida, Governor Millard Caldwell stated to Encyclopedia Britannica that, in his personal opinion, the death of Jesse James Payne in October, taken from an unguarded jail by a mob and shot, was not considered a lynching. Mr. Payne had been charged with sexual assault on a five-year old white girl. As there were no witnesses to the shooting, the Grand Jury could not find an indictment. The Governor said that he could not remove the Sheriff merely for being stupid and inept. He also asserted that bringing a young victim into the courtroom and subjecting her to examination could prove as traumatic as the original assault. He intended, however, to awaken the people to action and stimulate civic responsibility so as to make democracy work.
In Portsmouth, England, the previous night, harbor police broke up a knife fight between members of the crew of the American ship Anna Dickinson, Chinese versus white.
In Charlotte, Piedmont Distributors of the Carolinas announced its plan to build a $125,000, 45,000 sq. ft. furniture storage warehouse and office building.
Secretary of State Byrnes would provide a radio address on the Moscow conference at 10:00 p.m. Sunday.
Don't miss it.
On the editorial page, "'Be Careful, Harry...'" quotes President Truman's mother in urging the President to be more wary for his own safety. It takes issue with his having traveled in inclement weather to Independence for the holidays and then flying back to Washington when all other air traffic, save essential military traffic, had been grounded. Even the press plane which normally followed the presidential transport, "The Sacred Cow", had been refused permission to fly.
It suggested that the casual disregard for his own safety implied a lack of understanding that the people had an investment in the security of their President and that, while the sentimentality displayed was charming, it was out of place for the President.
"The Job Is Done" pays tribute to the job well done by the Enlisted Men's Club on South Tryon Street in Charlotte which, having opened in September, 1941, was to close on December 31. It had served as a place to meet socially for a half million servicemen during its four years of existence. It had been staffed by 25 senior hostesses, 50 junior hostesses, and over a thousand Victory Belles serving voluntarily.
"The Four-A-Day Atom" finds it inevitable that a local vaudeville routine would center its usual jokes, juggling, and dancing girls around the atom. A show, advertised as "The Atomic Scandals", promised "weird and beautiful girls" along with vaudeville acts.
The editors had found the radio jokes on the atom lame, did not like the atomic perfume ads, with its "Uranium 765" and "Evening in Hiroshima", conjuring aromas of that which could only depress the imagination.
When the flashing lights were at work in clubs and the dancers dancing, "The ultimate fate of the world, the moment when the planet disappears in a flash of blue flame, fades into a dream, a dream as bad
A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "Petrillo Builds a Wall", comments on the latest edict issued by Musicians Union Czar Caesar Petrillo, banning from broadcast on radio stations any musical programs originating in foreign countries, with the one exception of Canada.
The piece comments that such bans had existed during World War I in the United States against the playing of music by German composers, that the Nazis had banned Mendelssohn and other German classical composers from the available national repertoire.
Music had shown itself to be the best medium of exchange for promotion of international harmony
The move would likely prompt foreign nations to ban American music.
Mr. Petrillo, offers the piece, appeared now to be in alliance with the conservative interests which had put forth the Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Twenties, now seeking protectionism for the music of Americans.
"It remains to be seen whether public opinion will permit one man to erect such a barbarous edifice."
Drew Pearson discusses the debate and ensuing vote, based on the transcript of the proceedings had at the U.N. Preparatory Commission in London, to locate the U.N. in the United States. The Chinese had opposed Geneva as the site for its conjuring images of the failed League of Nations and Munich. The British preferred Geneva, that locale had nothing to do with past mistakes, that the U.S. was too distant from world capitals while 28 international capitals were within 2,000 miles of Geneva. The French wanted the seat still in Europe to inspire European nations to maintain the peace. The Netherlands favored same. Australia favored San Francisco, site of the Charter Conference in April through June, a city which External Foreign Minister Herbert Evatt had found to be one which "breathes the very spirit of freedom".
Then Andrei Gromyko stated the case of the Soviets for the U.S., located centrally between Asia and Europe and a part of the new world.
Former Secretary of State Stettinius, representing the United States, indicated that the country was not seeking the United Nations be located in it, but would welcome it if the delegates so chose. He added that there were several sites avaliable in the U.S. other than San Francisco.
The final vote was 9 to 3 in favor of the United States as the locus. France, the Netherlands, and Britain opposed while Canada and the United States abstained.
Marquis Childs examines the aftermath of World War I, giving rise to World War II, as Germany began to seek to re-arm shortly after Versailles. A secret agreement with the Soviet Union permitted the Germans to carry on arms manufacture, research and experimentation in derogation of the terms of Versailles. German experts likewise worked in Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium to the same end.
The Foreign Economic Administration had recently issued a report warning that Germany could repeat the process via the experts who left Germany in 1943 and 1944, when defeat was plainly only a matter of time, and fled to neutral countries, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Argentina.
Spain, in particular, had purchased substantial equipment from Germany, and German technicians were on the scene to supervise its installation, along with managerial and administrative personnel. Many of these Germans were fervent Nazis.
The FEA report recommended forced repatriation of Germans to Germany.
Mr. Childs urges the Government to consider the FEA recommendations to avoid the post-1918 pattern.
Samuel Grafton again addresses the advocacy by some, primarily industry, to remove price controls regardless of the prospect of rampant inflation in the wake of such a move. Oranges had recently suddenly jumped from $5.25 to $10 per crate when price controls were released; home prices had tripled as demand suddenly increased with returning veterans and displaced war workers.
Some of the year-end reviewers were trying to charge the White House with re-establishing price controls by its establishment of priorities on building materials and housing, with veterans getting the boost. Mr. Grafton wonders whether such views helped or hurt free enterprise, posits that, with the excess of cash in circulation from the wartime profits and high wages coupled with shortages from the release of wartime controls after V-J Day, the only way to insure security was to look at the problems of reconversion to peacetime squarely with a view toward reality.
Dorothy Thompson examines the address by Pope Pius XII urging peace in peacetime rather than the extant condition of simply post-war. He had stressed three "fundamental prerequisites" for a just and lasting peace: first, that any motives of hate, vengeance, and rivalry be eliminated from the post-war table; second, that heed be given to the majority will of the world's citizens; and, third, that totalitarian tyranny be eliminated.
She suggests that the preliminary reports from the Moscow foreign ministers conference indicated an absence of these three principles. Instead, compromises were being made. Russia would get what it wanted in Yugoslavia, with Tito left in power to facilitate the presence of a Soviet satellite, in exchange for compromise on the Russian desire for unilateral veto in the proposed four-power arrangement in administering Japan. The majority will of the people in Yugoslavia, rejecting Tito, was not being considered.
General De Gaulle was attempting to internationalize the Rhine and Ruhr, but France's desires to this end were not being considered in the Moscow conference. (In fact, the German western border issue was not determined by the Moscow conference, concluded and a report issued on it obviously only after Ms. Thompson's piece had been written.)
Britain was being increasingly shoved aside in its interests. The future of Germany remained unsettled, with a growing tendency of the people toward nihilism.
She suggests that the Nuremberg trial rang hollow, for the war crimes continued, committed now by the Allies: millions being used in forced labor, expelled from their homes, and left, in many cases, to starve in the cold of winter. "The massacre of the innocents—the children at least—is criminal."
She suggests heeding the words of Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck, concentration camp survivor and chief rabbi of Berlin, who had advised that the right to punish had as its handmaiden the willingness to aid.
She quotes John Donne: "Never send to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
There was as yet no haven found for a hundred thousand Jews still in Allied detention camps—which she termed "concentration camps". In Indonesia, the British made new Lidices—implying the wanton slaughter of whole villages, an exaggerated statement.
She concludes that all were to blame for the failures, that injustice to any person was an injustice to all. Only through justice could there be peace.
The executive secretary of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax writes a letter urging that the 55-year history of the effort of Southerners to be rid of poll taxes inhibiting free exercise of the franchise in seven remaining states proved it not to be a race issue but one involving all Americans. For seven million of the ten million disenfranchised by the poll tax were white. (In 1940, W. J. Cash had recorded in The Mind of the South that 60 percent were white.) In 1944, 16 Senators and 79 Representatives from these poll tax states were elected by only two and a quarter million people. The effect was that a single voter in a poll tax state wielded the equivalent power of four in states where there was no such restriction on the franchise.
She references the pending bills in each chamber of the Congress to abolish the poll tax and indicates that a small minority of Southern Senators, led by Theodore Bilbo, had threatened to filibuster the legislation to death.
She urges Americans to push the effort to pass the bill and stop any filibuster in the Senate with a cloture vote.
A woman from Rock Hill, S.C., writes a brief letter wondering why the editors worried so much about the investigation of Congress into Pearl Harbor: either FDR knew of the impending attack and did nothing, making him a "criminal", or he did not know, making him an "imbecile". "Nothing that these poor beknighted Republicans can do will further besmirch the memory of our martyred President."
The editors respond that they worried precisely because of oversimplified views as this letter presents.
Indeed, 4,000 miles of ocean, with primitive radar in its infancy, thus only the ability to patrol by ship and airplane, and the unprecedented convoying of a whole fleet across that vast expanse to launch an air attack on Pearl Harbor, intervene, for starters, to suggest the writer as a person who liked to reduce everything to "common sense" aphorism, in the end, proving nothing but a lack of sensitivity to the obvious, staring anyone of ordinary common sense in the face, but for being benighted at the time by Republican Party propaganda for the sake of making inroads in 1946 on Congress and getting back the White House in 1948 after 16 years of being on the outs with the American people. The Devil is always in the details, but, in this case, one does not have to delve too far into them to understand clearly that no one in the Government or the military could be reasonably faulted for the debacle at Pearl Harbor. The only persons at fault were those who planned and executed it for the Empire of Japan. Anything else not only misstates the case, but tends to ignore and therefore excuse the ultimate perpetrators for their singularly heinous act of international terrorism.
Moreover, if one had to have been an idiot not to foresee the attack in 1941, then why didn't she tell someone? Treason?
It wasn't her job. Must be a warmonger then.
Then again, on re-reading her brief missive, it is conceivable that she was making a somewhat beclouded attempt at irony, intending her disjunctive paragraph to be sardonically in persona.
In any event, such were the trends, tragedies and occasional triumphs on the Fifth Day
Framed Edition
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