Tuesday, December 4, 1945

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, December 4, 1945

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, Britain's Attorney General, began his opening statement at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, haranguing the 20 Nazi defendants as "murderers and robbers". He said that they were not merely willing tools of Hitler, but had actively stimulated support for him, the men who initiated the war and made possible the acts of aggression.

The British prosecution was to be focused on count two of the indictment, crimes against the peace, while the United States focused on count one, conspiracy to wage a war of aggression. The two remaining counts, war crimes and crimes against humanity, were to be jointly prosecuted by France and Russia.

The Russians had rejected the request of the State Department that they cease preventing the movement of Iranian Government troops into the north to quell the insurrection of the Insurgents out of Azerbaijan Province, and that the Russian forces withdraw from Iran. The British had not responded to the same request of withdrawal.

An American career diplomat, Tyler Kent, returned to the United States after being imprisoned in Britain for nearly five years for taking an embassy document to his home. He stated that he did so because the document dealt with British relations with the United States and he thought it ought be disclosed to the U.S. Senate.

As Congress was ready to undertake immediate hearings on the President's proposed labor-management legislation, to establish fact-finding committees to study labor-management issues and make recommendations during a 30-day cooling-off period before an announced strike would take effect, labor appeared ready to reject the legislation as a return to wartime restrictions on the right of collective bargaining. Labor also appeared ready to reject the President's call for an end to the autoworkers strike and that the steel strike not begin.

In Saginaw, Mich., a large log was hurled onto the porch of the parents of the general manager of G.M.'s Steering Gear Division, Plant No. 2, but no damage resulted. A similar incident the previous week involved the throwing of two bricks through the dining room windows of the general manager's home and the throwing of an object at the home of the manager of Steering Gear Plant No. 1.

Obviously, someone, being accustomed to a smoother ride, did not like the way the G.M. cars steered.

General Sherman Miles, acting director of G-2 at the time of Pearl Harbor, told the joint Congressional committee investigating the attack that the British, in January, 1941, had been provided by the Americans the decoding device for the Japanese military and diplomatic codes, known as "Magic". He could not recall whether the British shared any of the messages they decoded.

He also informed that President Roosevelt had, on November 26, 1941, warned the High Commissioner of the Philippines, Francis Sayre, that hostilities with the Japanese could soon occur and would likely start in Thailand.

On the morning of December 7, with the interception of the fourteenth part of the 14-part message from Japan to its embassy in Washington, directing Ambassador Nomura to deliver to Secretary of State Hull the message at 1:00 p.m., General Marshall and the General Staff had met and discussed the probability that the Japanese would strike in Thailand by 1:00 p.m., about twenty minutes before the attack actually would begin in Hawaii, at 7:50 a.m., Washington then being on special War Time, advanced by an half hour.

Captain Charles McVay of the ill-fated Indianapolis, which had been sunk on July 30 while returning from Tinian after delivering critical parts for the first atomic bomb, losing 880 men in the disaster, entered his pleas of not guilty to charges of negligence for not taking a zigzag course to avoid enemy submarines and for not taking appropriate action to insure orderly evacuation of the ship.

The Henry Ward Beecher, a Liberty ship carrying 541 homeward bound American troops, had lost its propeller 340 miles northeast of Bermuda after traveling from Marseilles. A Navy tug, Restorer, was on its way to assist. The ship was thought not to be in any grave danger. Whether there were any stowaways aboard was not clear.

The 24-hour National Maritime Union work stoppage, in protest of use of ships for commerce when troops awaited transport home, had ended. It had involved 40,000 workers, but had not impacted any troop ships.

General Lucius Clay, military governor of the American occupation zone of Germany, announced that the United States intended to ship enough food to Germany to enable by January 1 a 1,550 daily caloric intake for every German. He stated that the food would be paid by Germany when it was able to pay.

In Manila, four youths staged the largest bank robbery in Philippine history, making off with nearly $200,000. Eight hours later, they were caught with all but $15,500 of the loot. They had used U.S. Army pistols and a sub-machine gun to accomplish the heist while the bank was operating.

In New York, a proposal was floated by a real estate firm to construct on the West Side a massive industrial air terminal, the size of Central Park, comprised of ten-story buildings with a two-mile long carrier-type landing strip on the roofs. Streets would pass underneath.

Sounds like a lovely, dark, depressing, smog-ridden, cacophonous echo chamber where crime would flourish as never before. At least, they did not appear to propose that anyone should live in the ten-story buildings onto which commercial flights would be landing.

—What was that?

—Not to worry. Go back to sleep. It's just the 2:00 a.m. arrival of the Concorde. Happens every morning. A little plaster in the afternoon and everything is fixed good as new.

Freck Sproles, with her column appearing beside the posed picture of a little girl acting her part well, replete with drawn tears, tells another heart-rending story of a broken family and needy Charlotte children at Christmas. The young boy wanted to be another Doc Blanchard on the football field and his three-year old sister wanted her first doll. The youngest, two years old, was to have her first real Christmas. Twenty dollars would do the trick for this family and enable Christmas to happen.

The Empty Stocking Fund had grown to $211.

And we hope the young girl feigning tears was able to land a job as an actress. First glance is pretty startling.

Well, if you had ever awakened as a child, assuming you are not Jewish, Buddhist, or Muslim, and expected presents on Christmas morn, only to find a cold, empty room, dank, full of spider webs and strange shadows, you would cry, too.

On the editorial page, "Where Is the Bottleneck?" finds in the wake of the National Maritime Union 24-hour walkout, that there was no apparent problem in shipping which ought be still creating delays in getting men home from overseas duty. The men were blaming the Army.

But the truth appeared to be that it was deemed necessary to maintain a large force abroad in case war should again erupt within the continuing trouble spots both in Europe and in the Pacific. Keeping the bad news from the public had become emblematic of the Truman Administration and, it predicts, would sooner or later lead to a blow-up.

"An Unfrocked Rabble-Rouser" reports that the Catholic Diocese of Mobile, Ala., had defrocked a priest for sending literature detrimental to the church, in the same vain of Father Coughlin, the anti-Semitic priest whose radio show had been popular before the war. The Rev. Arthur Terminiello, who enjoyed only a small following, had added attacks on blacks to his charged sermonettes.

The editorial supports the Church's action, saying that ordering a priest to refrain from racial remarks was not enough, that the Church would be seen to condone such statements if the priest were allowed to remain in good standing with the Church.

We feel compelled to add that the public should not become confused, as it appears too often it does. There is a great difference between an institution such as the Church and any ordinary citizen acting in such capacity, whether that person happens to be a member of Congress or a member of a profession or in any other special capacity, ancillary to the speech. We have the right to speak our minds, no matter how detestible the speech to some, as duly pointed out by the liberal Senator to whom Marquis Childs refers below, anent the racist notions of Senator Theodore Bilbo and the desire of many to have him removed from the Senate for it. That would have been practicing fascism to remove odious speech from the chamber, and disserved the notion of freedom and liberty. Because one is a member of a minority no more gives that person the right to frustrate another's free speech than a member of the majority has to chill the rights of the minority. It works both ways and either engaging in the insidious practice of denying free speech is equally guilty of that which gave rise to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It is the same thing. Be not deceived.

Nazis, after all, represented in the 1920's and through 1932, a very small portion of the German population.

When persons send in nasty remarks on social media pages regarding a truly harmless joke or prank by someone involving only speech, such as a harmless photograph taken at Arlington or by a sorority dressed in sombreros, and demand that the people involved be disciplined in some manner, through loss of rights, privileges, status or employment, for some ironic statement, the objecting persons, probably mostly twelve-year olds or of the same mentality, who demand such a despicable and fascist response are the Nazis, not the persons engaging in free speech which people might deem offensive to their tender feelings. Tough. Get a life. Move to Argentina, or at least bother to read the Constitution and understand it, that it applies not just to your ideas and those deemed sacred and reasonable by your family or friends, but to everyone's, no matter how repulsive and despicable to your precious notions, which, if you feel the need to squelch others, are no doubt born of fascist ideals, not democratic ideals.

Freedom and civil rights were not achieved through polite discussion. They were won in a Revolution and since in the streets, through nasty, open confrontations, not through suppression of free speech, not through cordial teas and debating societies, where everything is very prim, proper, and British. It was dirk and dagger nasty, the very result of confrontations with the prim, proper fascists who insisted on squelching freedoms of those they deemed disagreeable or unsavory. We are not British. We are American.

That probably also applies to mothers who become unduly offended at mall Santa Clauses who make silly remarks to their children about their favorite hockey team, though that was in Canada. Regardless, that is not going to cause emotional trauma to the child. It might actually help the little one realize that he is not the center of the universe, to grow up straight and strong and next time, to ask Santa in response what his favorite hockey team is, upon being told, retort that their goalie plays like a girl, a fat girl with a beard.

Some of you just don't get it, do you? We do not live by the same rules of quaint "sensitivity" as the boys and girls who make their living on tv and radio. The networks do not recognize free speech. That has been known for decades. Get with the program. The after-school playground recognizes free speech and is usually the best arbitrator for adjusting bad attitudes toward it.

Nor should we feel the need to apologize for exercising free speech which might offend some precious little fool, twelve years old, whose parents cater to their every whim without question. Embrace your offensive speech. You said it. You meant it. Repeat it and say you were proud to be an American exercising the right of free speech, not given by privilege from the Queen, but by right of your being a human being.

Suppression of speech leads inexorably to violence, of which we have plentiful amounts in American society, not because of free speech, but because of some dope trying to suppress it and destroy the person with whom they merely disagree and are too stupid or lazy to contest in open debate. If the ideas being expressed are wrong, they are quite subject to being tested and disposed of in the open marketplace of ideas, whether communicated verbally or in writing. Often, the issue is not the correctness or incorrectness of the ideas, but a misunderstanding of that which is being expressed in the first instance. Debate, free-flowing debate, will usually correct those misimpressions and at least define the sides of the issue. Other times, the protest may be motivated by some hidden agenda which can only be revealed in open debate. But in suppressing the expression, only fascism, brute force and rude extroversion flourish.

While on the topic incidentally of freedom of speech and freedom of speech as it is related to violence, and specifically, gun violence, we were just listening to a recent discussion between two well-known television personalities regarding the Second Amendment. The more conservative and outspoken of the two appeared not to have the slightest idea what the Second Amendment actually does or why it is in the Constitution, proclaiming that it was put in there primarily because of the desire for individual self-defense against the terrors of the prairie, the Injuns, the need for hunting, and such. Not so.

So, we shall try to set the story aright, not with our own take on it, but rather that of the principal author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison, who stated in Federalist Paper No. 46, in 1788, the following:

But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm. Every government would espouse the common cause. A correspondence would be opened. Plans of resistance would be concerted. One spirit would animate and conduct the whole. The same combinations, in short, would result from an apprehension of the federal, as was produced by the dread of a foreign, yoke; and unless the projected innovations should be voluntarily renounced, the same appeal to a trial of force would be made in the one case as was made in the other. But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity. In the contest with Great Britain, one part of the empire was employed against the other. The more numerous part invaded the rights of the less numerous part. The attempt was unjust and unwise; but it was not in speculation absolutely chimerical. But what would be the contest in the case we are supposing? Who would be the parties? A few representatives of the people would be opposed to the people themselves; or rather one set of representatives would be contending against thirteen sets of representatives, with the whole body of their common constituents on the side of the latter.

The only refuge left for those who prophesy the downfall of the State governments is the visionary supposition that the federal government may previously accumulate a military force for the projects of ambition. The reasonings contained in these papers must have been employed to little purpose indeed, if it could be necessary now to disprove the reality of this danger. That the people and the States should, for a sufficient period of time, elect an uninterupted succession of men ready to betray both; that the traitors should, throughout this period, uniformly and systematically pursue some fixed plan for the extension of the military establishment; that the governments and the people of the States should silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads, must appear to every one more like the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy, or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, than like the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism. Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it. Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. Let us rather no longer insult them with the supposition that they can ever reduce themselves to the necessity of making the experiment, by a blind and tame submission to the long train of insidious measures which must precede and produce it.

The argument under the present head may be put into a very concise form, which appears altogether conclusive. Either the mode in which the federal government is to be constructed will render it sufficiently dependent on the people, or it will not. On the first supposition, it will be restrained by that dependence from forming schemes obnoxious to their constituents. On the other supposition, it will not possess the confidence of the people, and its schemes of usurpation will be easily defeated by the State governments, who will be supported by the people.

On summing up the considerations stated in this and the last paper, they seem to amount to the most convincing evidence, that the powers proposed to be lodged in the federal government are as little formidable to those reserved to the individual States, as they are indispensably necessary to accomplish the purposes of the Union; and that all those alarms which have been sounded, of a meditated and consequential annihilation of the State governments, must, on the most favorable interpretation, be ascribed to the chimerical fears of the authors of them.

Future President Madison therefore, often quoted out of context in this regard as if plumping for the broad view of the Second Amendment, that it allows unrestrained personal possession of firearms for personal use, was speaking entirely of the concept of organized militias within local communities for the purpose of resistance to some outside force. He spoke fancifully of the Federal Government posing such an inimical force, for the fact that it is subject to the people's choice by vote. In short, he was addressing an hypothetical, which he regarded as a preposterous hypothetical, "the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy, or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal", insofar as the supposed need of citizens to take up arms against their government.

The right to bear arms was, in fact, as it is worded plainly to anyone who can read, for the purpose of forming militias to resist, on a local basis, the potential for encroachment by a foreign force organized within the land at a time when there was to be no standing army. In any event, it was designed for an organized force, a militia, not individuals acting on their own whimsy and discretion. And, of course, it is the one thing remaining within the Constitution which has become completely outmoded by time, just as the implicit recognition of slavery was eventually discarded for more reasonable and just concepts consistent with changing economic times.

With all of the daily gun violence besetting the country, creating with it a climate of fear, chilling freedom of speech and movement, causing essentially a military lock-down mode of living, where metal detectors have become a standard of daily life, there ought be a national referendum on the matter. And the only way to have such a referendum is to have legislation introduced in Congress, or within the individual states, to amend the Constitution to repeal the Second Amendment or to clarify its meaning, and then to hold a vote in each state during the course of seven years as to the true will of the American people, not just a bunch of loud, obnoxious gun-toters who bully their way into the courts behind well-heeled lobbies supporting their legal bills to endanger all of us with their loud-mouthed, obnoxious, fascist, dictatorial methods.

We are tired of seeing, nearly everyday, news of some mass shooting somewhere. The only way ultimately to stop it, over time, is to repeal the Second Amendment. It must be done. Hunters and gun collectors be damned. If you don't like it, move to Argentina, or shoot yourselves and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

Yes, we shall take it from your cold, dead hand.

And to those bullies who would seek to deprive people of their jobs and the like for exercising free speech or for any other reason not directly concerned with job performance, beware that, even though you are not a functionary of the government, you are still subject to civil suit for damages for tortious interference with an established economic relationship.

"The Senate's Pure Air" reports of the condemnation heaped by colleagues on Senator Tom Connally of Texas for stating on the Senate floor, in regard to the U.N., that he did not like those who said it would not work, that "it isn't worth a damn". Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska had immediately stood and proclaimed such use of language to be beneath the dignity of the Senate. The chair then admonished Senator Connally.

Yet, remarks the piece, it was deemed alright for Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi to smear others with "Wop", "Dago", "Jew", and "Communist", to which a member occasionally objected without effect.

A piece from the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled "The Scientists Outdistance Us", comments on the report of destruction by the Army occupation force in Japan of the country's cyclotrons and the rebuke from Oak Ridge scientists for doing so, saying that the military had not been capable of distinguishing between weaponry and a research machine.

The piece takes the side of the scientists and asks them to be patient while the rest of the world caught up.

Drew Pearson reports of a proposal put forth by future Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, Surplus Property Administrator, to Senator William Knowland of California, that profit sharing plans be offered employees in lieu of wage hikes. He had successfully settled a strike at his own plant in St. Louis with such a proposal, and currently the workers received 30 percent of all the profits made by the company.

As we have previously noted, in 1960, former President Truman would support Senator Symington in his bid for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, causing a temporary rift in the party just ten days prior to the start of the Democratic convention in Los Angeles when President Truman publicly called into question, based on relative youth, Senator John F. Kennedy's readiness for the presidency. The rift was deftly handled and healed, however, by Senator Kennedy, proving in the process his mettle for the task of carrying the party banner into the fall and for the presidency itself.

Mr. Pearson next comments on the fact that the confusion and exigency of battle had caused many men who performed heroic deeds in the field to go unnoticed, without decorations. By contrast, the spinach on the chests of officers was sometimes obtained by politicking through channels or was simply the product of ruse, such as a brigadier general who had obtained many of his foreign decorations while protocol officer for the 1939 New York World's Fair.

General Patrick Hurley had obtained his Silver Star on Armistice Day, 1918, for "voluntarily making a reconnaissance under heavy enemy fire". In fact, he had gone with a colonel to view the signing of the surrender documents, was stopped 2,000 yards short of the front lines and told that the surrender had already occurred, but ventured forward to the front anyway, thus wound up decorated, along with the colonel accompanying him. The colonel had been adjudged insane in 1936 and some in the State Department had recently mused that they wished General Hurley were in the insane asylum as well, rather than pestering them about alleged Communists within the Department.

The column next reports that it was rumored that Senator Bilbo had paid a war veteran to picket his Senate office to make him look persecuted, a role in which he thrived.

Among his Capital Chaff items, Mr. Pearson tells of Broadway producer Billy Rose serving on a committee with Senator Bilbo to lay plans for a Washington stadium. But the association had caused him to be held in contempt by blacks of New York, believing that he was a friend to Mr. Bilbo. Consequence was that Mr. Rose could not obtain black labor.

Marquis Childs reports that the Jewish War Veterans had called for the impeachment of Senator Bilbo. Others had also sought his removal from the body. Recently, a liberal Senator had responded to one of the requests by saying that, while he profoundly disagreed with the prejudices voiced by Senator Bilbo, it would be a mistake to try to remove him for such statements, would set a bad precedent of seeking removal for personal views rather than misconduct. To do so would backfire ultimately on minorities.

While the unnamed Senator had not so stated, Mr. Childs adds that it would have turned Senator Bilbo into a martyr, enabling him to garner support among his colleagues who might actually have despised him personally. While the Senator was a nuisance, he was not yet a martyr. He did not actually represent the South. He represented a failure in democracy, the product of a small ruling clique, as with Boss Frank Hague in Jersey City. As long as the voters permitted such pols to be elected by default, they would persist on the landscape.

The poor pay of Congressmen caused the loss of good men, such as Representative Robert Ramspeck of Georgia, to private enterprise, while the Bilbos stuck around.

Samuel Grafton muses on the myriad of forms being suggested by which to improve American foreign policy, while providing short shrift to any substantive ideas. One suggestion had been for the President to meet with Secretary of State Byrnes everyday at a certain time. Another was to clean house at the State Department. General Hurley and his supporters wanted to get rid of the career diplomats, while others, equally conservative, wished to sweep away the amateurs and replace them with more trained personnel. A third proposition was that foreign policy considerations ought be more widely disseminated. But the problem was that one or more parties to such negotiations were often desirous of confidentiality. Yet another suggestion was to have a foreign policy council consisting of the President and several Cabinet members and Congressional leaders.

In the end, Mr. Grafton finds all such proposals vacuous, a matter of producing efficiency rather than action. The issues were whether the United States would seek unity in China or back one side or the other in the developing civil war. There had to be a decision also in Europe as to whether the country would join the Western bloc or seek the former Allied unity, extant during the war, inclusive of Russia.

In the end, he asserts, it did not matter a whit whether the decisions were communicated by a man from Groton or one from Greenpoint.

It was time to forget about the bottles and discuss the wine.

Speaking of which, the president of the Dilworth WCTU writes a letter to the editor again, having written also on November 7, this time "to respectfully request you to say what I say when you quote me."

The News had reported, she says, that when the Dilworth ladies had requested the City Council to reinstitute the ban on Sunday movies now that the war was past, that they had instead made "demand" for it.

Moreover, and worst of all, The News had reported that the president had stated as the Dilworth WCTU main 1946 objective, the resistance to bringing legal alcohol to Mecklenburg, when, in fact, she had stated three objectives, none of which she had labeled as "main", among which had been the resistance to alcohol legalization, but also included alcohol education for the churches and schools, and a systematic effort to bring Southern comfort and cheer to the sick and sorrowful of the community.

"Now, Mr. Editor, I don't mind you quoting me, but I do insist that, in doing so, you be accurate."

The editors responded by saying that they stood on the accuracy of their point in the first instance but duly apologized for the grievous error in the second.

Whether, when she would retire as president of the Dilworth WCTU, the lady remarked that The News would not have her to kick around anymore, we could not say.

Quote of the Day, from Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd: "The thing I'd like to do most is to go back to the South Pole."

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