The Charlotte News
Thursday, June 28, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman had accepted the resignation of Edward Stettinius as Secretary of State, following the conclusion of the United Nations Conference and adoption of a Charter, yet to be ratified. The replacement, said the President, would likely be James Byrnes, former Senator, Supreme Court Justice, and War Mobilizer, from South Carolina. It was contemplated that the entire Department would undergo a shake-up in the appointment process.
The President also indicated that Mr. Stettinius, who had been Secretary of State only since latter November when Cordell Hull had resigned for health reasons, would become the first American representative to the U. N. Organization, following the ratification of its Charter by the Senate.
Assistant Secretary Dean Acheson would succeed Joseph Grew as Undersecretary. Both Archibald MacLeish and Nelson Rockefeller would be replaced as Assistant Secretaries. As anticipated, Will Clayton would be retained as an Assistant Secretary.
Senator Tom Connally of Texas returned to Washington to urge his fellow Senators to ratify the U. N. Charter, expected to clear the Senate with the necessary two-thirds vote, with room to spare.
Chinese Premier T. V. Soong, back from San Francisco, had left China for talks with V. M. Molotov in Moscow anent Soviet-Sino relations, presumably on whether Russia would enter the war soon against Japan.
Eventually, Russia would enter the war, on August 8, two days after the first atom bomb had been dropped. Better late than never.
They now have even better rocket bomb.
The campaign for Northern Luzon was officially declared won, as the 37th Infantry advancing from the south joined with guerrillas and 11th Airborne troops moving from the north near the town of Alcala, finishing the liberation of the island, begun with the landing at Lingayan Gulf January 9. The Cagayan Valley campaign had lasted four weeks. General MacArthur informed that the remaining 20,000 Japanese had removed into the mountains and would be difficult to find and eliminate.
The entire Luzon campaign had cost the Japanese 113,593 dead against American and guerrilla losses of 3,793 dead, 31 missing, and 11,351 wounded.
An additional 7,226 casualties were reported for the week in the armed forces, bringing the total American casualties for the war to 1,030,679 for both the Army and Navy. Of the 908,025 Army casualties, 190,277 had been killed. Of the wounded, 339,646 had returned to duty. The Navy had suffered 46,456 killed and 60,986 wounded.
Allied land fighting had now virtually ceased everywhere except on Mindanao and on Borneo, the latter fighting primarily being waged by the Australian Ninth Army.
General Mark Clark, commander of the 15th Army Group in the latter stages of the Italian campaign, after earlier having commanded the Fifth Army, was named the chief of United States occupation forces in Austria.
The Navy disclosed that the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill had survived a pair of closely-spaced kamikaze attacks on May 11 off Okinawa. As the ship had begun to list, the captain ordered that all fuel and thousands of tons of water be dumped off the flight deck, saving the ship from capsizing and preserving hundreds of lives of men caught below decks who had been suffocating from the fire and smoke. The dangerous maneuver had been accomplished with the aid of the cruiser Wilkes-Barre and three destroyers. Fully 656 of the crew became casualties of the resulting fires, including 373 killed and 19 missing. The Bunker Hill had been the flagship of Vice-Admiral Marc Mitscher's Fast Carrier Task Force.
In Baltimore, a small boy testified of being burned on his feet and ankles by cigarettes and scalding water by a male friend of his mother. The man was bound over to the grand jury by a magistrate on a charge of assault, and the boy's mother was bound over as an accessory.
Over Santa Ana, California, someone fired a small-caliber bullet at a Navy blimp, wounding the pilot in the leg. A search was afoot by Naval Intelligence, the FBI, and local authorities for the assailant.
At least he didn't hit the blimp itself.
On the editorial page, "Old Story" remarks that the Grand Jury report on Solicitor John Carpenter's shoddy prosecutorial performance on drunken driving cases, for instance, allowing one defendant to have been brought before the bar thirteen times on drunken driving charges since 1937 without ever having been tried, called for an investigation by the State and perhaps impeachment. But it believed it unlikely that such an investigation would take place.
Superior Court judges traveled a circuit in North Carolina, as they still do, and so were loathe to take to task prosecutors within an individual judicial district.
The district covered both Gaston and Mecklenburg Counties and so Mr. Carpenter was the Solicitor in both counties. He had political backing in both, indomitably so in Gaston, and so none of the local lawyers ever wanted to run against him, despite heavy criticism of him by the Gastonia Gazette, as well as longstanding criticism by The News.
"The Corpse Lives" reports that Foreign Economic Administrator Leo Crowley, along with General Eisenhower, had told the Senate that Germany, despite its having been destroyed by the war, could easily rebuild and begin to rearm itself if not strictly controlled. Great factories still existed underground and sources of supply to them were also still quite extant. Most of its industrial and economic strength remained, said Mr. Crowley, out of which it could make war again at some point in the future, even if not immediately. He recommended that Germany be kept stripped of war-making capability and monitored for it, that Germany had only been superficially deprived of its war-making ability following the Armistice of 1918.
General Eisenhower had stressed that military research had to be carried on into the future on a permanent basis. The huge stockpiles of weapons left from the war could not, he assured, wage war effectively into the future without more and continuing development of weaponry.
By early 1961, however, shortly before he left office, President Eisenhower gave his well-known warning of "the military-industrial complex".
Woh, boys. You've gone too far. Capability to destroy the earth once is quite enough.
"A Prescription" tells of the recommendations by War Labor Board chairman Dr. George Taylor, speaking in Hendersonville, that after the war, labor and management should work out their differences locally rather than resorting to Washington for arbitration of all disputes. He recommended the establishment of local arbitration boards for the purpose.
The piece thinks his suggestions worthy of consideration.
"In Lower Voice" finds Congressman Joe Ervin, brother of Sam J. Ervin, Jr., to be on the warpath against making permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee, used during the war to prevent employment discrimination in businesses with war contracts. Mr. Ervin contested the bill on the basis that it would require the employment of aliens and Communists in every endeavor, would reach into every aspect of American life, including politics, the courts, and fraternal orders, and would result in an un-American dictatorship.
The editorial thinks the approach of Mr. Ervin overripe with rhetoric, that the real issue was the extent to which the FEPC could eradicate discrimination in employment, a worthy goal, and whether, in fact, it would not turn into a means by which unqualified persons would seek to complain of discrimination in being turned down legitimately for employment. It asserts that the FEPC would exacerbate the problems of discrimination rather than ameliorate them, that government regulation could not alter ingrained invidious attitudes.
Perhaps not. But, had a start not been made, we would still be seeing a society beset by apartheid, as it remains economically to this day in much of the country, despite all of the many advances brought by court action and statute through the decades since the 1957 and 1964 Civil Rights Acts and 1965 Voting Rights Act.
President Truman laid the cornerstone during his term on the ground broken by President Roosevelt, ground which had lain neglected largely in this controversial area since the Civil War and the end of slavery, always opposed by the hue and cry of "states' rights"—meaning, in plain English, "No Niggers, Spics, Jews, Japs, Chinks or Commies neither, allowed".
It is well and good, as the piece did, to pronounce it a moral evil to engage in discrimination. But it does no good to make the statement if there is no means for those who have suffered discrimination to obtain redress in the courts or before regulatory agencies against private employers engaging in the conduct. That it comes with a few snags is inevitable. No legislation is perfect in addressing every human vagary. But human beings, being as they are, full of variations, imperfections, neuroses, and psychoses, cannot be trusted of their own good will as a body to resist the temptation to discriminate based on differences in physical characteristics.
Government employees have been regulated by the civil rights laws passed in the wake of the Civil War since the 1870's, to prevent deprivation of protected liberties under the Constitution, not extending to employment discrimination, even if, as a practical matter, lawsuits or criminal prosecutions could scarcely be brought in the Deep South pursuant to those statutes and redress obtained in the face of all-white juries "dripping with the words of interposition and nullification", as Martin Luther King phrased it so well, with specific reference to Governor George Wallace, on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Edward Arthur Hall of New York discussing the passage several years earlier of the $5 automobile tax, requiring a sticker of certification be pasted in the window of every vehicle before it could be driven on the highways. The stamp was purchased at the post office and supposedly enforced by Internal Revenue agents.
Some abided the tax law, some did not. But, during the war, when rationing had severely limited the use of automobiles, the law had grown more unpopular than ever before. Citizens were forced to pay the $5 tax though they hardly were able to drive their automobiles at all, and only for short distances each week.
So, Mr. Hall was introducing a bill to repeal the $5 tax. Only half of the owners bothered to purchase them anyway, he noted. The other half were not being enforced. Anyone who bothered to purchase the stamp, he further stated, was a sucker. It was bad enough to be unable to buy gas without compounding the insult by forcing the motorist to pay a fee to drive on the road.
A transcript appears of the exchange between Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a fixture in the Cabinet since 1933, and reporters asking him whether the rumors were true that he was about to resign and be replaced. He stated that he had tendered his resignation six times and, most recently, after FDR's death, but that it had never yet been accepted. He further indicated that his trip to the White House while President Truman was out West was not for anything more interesting than seeking treatment from the White House doctor for a cold. The reporters wanted him to sneeze to prove it, as he did not appear to have a cold. Mr. Ickes refused.
As indicated, lending credence to the rumors, he would be replaced by J. A. Krug in February.
Drew Pearson reports that indications were that the Lublin-Warsaw Polish Government would not be a mere Russian puppet regime. The Warsaw Government was becoming as independent in its statements as the London government-in-exile.
The leader of the Warsaw Government, Ungot Morowski, had launched into an attack on the Czechs during the recent Moscow conference of Polish leaders, saying that the Czechs had no right to Teschen, a small coal-mining town taken by the Poles from traditionally Czech territory following the Munich Pact. Soviet Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Andrei Vyshinsky disagreed, comparing the Poles to Nazis in their aggression in the situation.
Other developments inside Poland likewise showed such independence from Russia: the publication of twelve Catholic newspapers; the expressed desire for a strong alliance with the United States and Great Britain; demands that the Red Army and the Soviet secret police withdraw from Poland; criticism of a pro-German attitude by the Russians in the wake of the surrender; resentment to Russian opposition to the Lublin Government's desire to take over Stettin; and resentment regarding Stalin's promise to Harry Hopkins to bring in representatives from the London Polish government-in-exile as part of the new representative government in Poland.
Mr. Pearson next relates of a secret campaign appeal prepared by Winston Churchill the previous fall, urging the American people to vote for FDR. The appeal had never been made public as President Roosevelt had stopped it, thinking it would be resented by Americans as coming from an outsider. It appeared to have been intended as quid pro quo for the President having sent to London Harry Hopkins in 1942, who let it be known, at a time when Mr. Churchill was undergoing problems with Parliament, that the President appreciated the Prime Minister's cooperative attitude and would not wish to see a change in British government.
Washington was staying out, however, of the 1945 British election. President Truman did not have the personal relationship with Mr. Churchill that President Roosevelt had enjoyed and, indeed, appeared somewhat unsympathetic to the Prime Minister. Moreover, many Senators had been quietly critical of Churchill's recent performances as to Greece, Belgium, and Italy, all erupting during the previous fall and winter. The feeling had been that Mr. Churchill had played on the distrusts of the United States for the Soviets in an attempt to stir up trouble to maintain Great Britain's place in the balance of power.
Query whether this motivation was behind Mr. Churchill's Fulton, Missouri "iron curtain" speech the following March at Westminster College, with President Truman sitting behind him, a speech which many attribute historically as the font of the Cold War attitude—even if, in fact, the Cold War attitude was beginning even before V-E Day, during the last month of the war, becoming ever more pervasive following FDR's death April 12 and the failure of the Soviets initially to live up to promises made at Yalta, or at least so perceived by the Americans, with respect to Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, access to Berlin, as well as the issues erupting at San Francisco regarding the veto on the Security Council. But, for the nonce, those several issues had been amicably resolved through the offices primarily of Mr. Hopkins and former Ambassador to Russia Joseph Davies.
Was, in short, Mr. Churchill merely engaging in some deliberately disruptive politics at Fulton to preserve the place internationally of Mother Britain? Was that, a type of new version of the old Cliveden Set, with which Mr. Churchill had flirtations before the war, the true origin of the Cold War, fueling existing paranoias in both the United States and the Soviet Union, in the tradition of Perfidious Albion?
Finally, Mr. Pearson reports of the intention of the Office of War Information to purchase time on Franco's Spanish radio network to supplement that already being broadcast across the Mediterranean to Spain from North Africa, that despite the San Francisco Conference having voted to denounce Franco's Spain.
Of course, OWI was not promoting Franco but merely seeking to tout the benefits of democracy to those in Spain who might undertake an effort to overthrow El Caudillo.
Marquis Childs again addresses, as he had the previous day, the shortage of doctors in the country growing from the Selective Service policy of not granting deferments from the draft for pre-medical students and students of the pure sciences and technological fields. The deferments had ended in the spring of 1944. The program contrasted with that of Britain which continued to grant such deferments. The Soviets had continued their program of research and development in the sciences throughout the war.
With inductions being reduced in July to 30,000 men per month, it was, opines Mr. Childs, reasonable to assume that the Army could now spare students seeking to enter scientific studies.
Modern warfare, he offers, depended on much more than merely a trained Army. It depended on scientific and technological development, and on the health of the general population.
Of course, if you cannot afford a doctor, you have to maintain your own health or go fish. Now, as of today's 5 to 4 Supreme Court ruling, an opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, upholding the constitutionality of the health care law of 2010, at least we all have, perhaps, a fighting chance, that is, if the tax does not get us before death does.
Samuel Grafton looks at the British election campaign, finding it violent in its rhetoric, that it was as if the British were now saying all of the things aloud which they had maintained in silence during the course of the war. Both right and left expressed fear of each other.
Prime Minister Churchill had said that if Labor were entrusted with power, a totalitarian state would result, making him sound less Shakespearian than during the European war and more as a "third-rate editorial writer".
Meanwhile, Labor demonized Lord Beaverbrook, accusing him of providing reactionary advice to the Prime Minister, which the P. M. was lapping up without any hint of disagreement.
The Conservatives attacked Professor Harold Laski of Labor as its chief totalitarian conspirator. Mr. Grafton remarks that Professor Laski impressed as too much of an academic to be a part of any conspiracy.
Overall, the climate of mutual fear and divisiveness was remindful of America, not the picture of unity which Americans had attributed throughout the war to Britain. The divisions were those which Hitler had exploited and on which he had ridden to power, and those which had led to the abandonment of Republican Spain to Franco and the Insurgents in 1936-39.
Framed Edition
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