Thursday, September 27, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 27, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Emperor Hirohito lost his face in a 35-minute fireside chat at the American Embassy with General MacArthur, a precedent setting event in the history of Japan where face was everything. General MacArthur forbade to those present any disclosure of the topics discussed.

As the Emperor had driven up in his aged automobile with the back curtain drawn, he sat "bolt upright" in the seat, with his Grand Chamberlain, Admiral Fujita, sitting opposite him. When the car arrived and the door was opened, the Chamberlain backed out, continuing the while to face the Emperor.

When he approached General MacArthur, the Emperor removed his silk hat, bowed, and shook hands.

Well, isn't that special?

Didn't you bring any poetry along from the little woman back at the palace?

Morrie Landsberg reported that at least some Japanese expressed sadness that the Emperor had lowered himself so, but also that the meeting might effect better relations with the occupation forces, that it might help the United States and Japan to become friends.

Yeah? Well get used to it, pal. Your Emperor is a toad.

War Department officials stated that by July 1, 1946, the Army would likely be cut to 1.63 million, seven million less than its full strength, that three million would be discharged by Christmas. The current rate of discharge was at 26,000 per day.

The House Naval Committee recommended that the Navy have a minimum of 1,079 fighting ships post-war, including three large aircraft carriers of 45,000 tons each and 24 of 27,000 tons, with ten light carriers of 11,000 tons.

President Truman had invited Marshal Georgi Zhukov, commander of Russian occupation forces in Germany, to the White House in early October and he had accepted, would arrive in New York on the 4th.

Perhaps, the President could explain then to him of the Berlin V-dance with the picture of Stalin. We shall see.

The Government was seeking to avoid a nationwide oil workers strike which would push the number of idle workers past two million from its present 650,000. Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach invited the confreres at Chicago to adjourn and join him in Washington to try to resolve the labor-management impasse.

Because of the oil refinery strike, Toledo had returned to gas rationing, resulting in gas lines stretching two miles long.

Couldn't blame that one on OPEC.

Lower grades of beef, lamb, and veal were to go off rationing on September 30.

In Miami, the 77-year old wife of multi-millionaire physical culturist Bernarr Macfadden testified that he had insisted that she do 200 deep knee bends or forfeit his love. She complied, though suffering from a muscular rupture from giving birth. She produced a photograph from 1914 of her husband standing on his head, that he would likely still be standing on his head were it not for her putting him on his feet with the suggestion that he begin publication of True Story Magazine. Their daughter testified that it appeared, after an argument in 1931, that her mother had slugged her father in the mouth. He had told her at the time that her mother had tried to kill him.

Whether Mr. Macfadden strategically held a picture of Stalin, or perhaps Czar Nicholas or even Rasputin, at the time of the 1914 photo, we do not know.

A Tulane University professor, involved in recruiting for the Manhattan Project, revealed that husbands of bridge-playing wives were rejected from work on the project because of security risk. It was thought that the wives might obtain the secretive nature of the work from their husbands and then leak it over the bridge table, perhaps through coded tricks.

The rejection cards of those applicants bore the code "BPW", for "Bridge Playing Wife".

What about the PPW's and the PWH's?

Incidentally, the former is obvious; the latter stands for Pinochle Winning Hags. But don't tell anyone. That is Oh So Secret.

Hal Boyle, aboard a Navy transport in the Western Pacific, discusses the exchange of twice-told yarns between sailors and correspondents aboard ship, regarding their travels. A Naval officer at such a session imparted the story of a soldier who died for a crime he didn't commit.

As the sea rocked "uneasy and fretful as a weary child", the lights of Japan visible from shipboard, the officer began. It had occurred on one of the stepping-stone islands after all the Japanese had been cleared out. A field hospital had been set up close to shore. A nurse had fallen in love with an Army officer and they were walking along the beach on eventide in the moonlight. As they came to a secluded stretch of sand, they sat down and looked upon the eternal sea.

Thinking themselves alone, they kissed, whereupon someone or some thing reached out of the darkness and struck the Army officer, killing him. The nurse was then slain as well. Both bodies were buried in shallow graves in the sand. By morning, the tide had exposed the officer's hand.

Sharks...

An anonymous old crabby nurse, writing a letter to Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper, contended that American servicemen had been spoiled by their amorous successes in Europe, enticing by gum and by Hershey, and were in for a rude shock when returned they home, again forced to woo.

Oh yeah? Who'd want to woo you, you old bitty?

She contended that the officers were repulsively forward, that, without subtlety, she had received passes at a party, and when the efforts had gone unrewarded, the nurses were left to walk home alone as the officers went back into selective service to seek companionship.

She preferred British and French army personnel "whose gallantry, subtlety, suavity and glib phrases not only establish the proper setting but practically make the results a foregone conclusion."

Candygram.

On the editorial page, "Running Loose" suggests that, while most Americans were probably not without sympathy for the desires of auto workers in Detroit to achieve the equivalent of wartime wages, there was considerable reason to be concerned about the methods being utilized by the UAW to get its desired wage increase. The method was to tie up each manufacturer, one by one, so that the competition to produce new cars would motivate settlement of each strike in seriatim.

That process was going to tie up reconversion, and the Government, it posits, needed to establish a rational procedure, so that the strike could not show the way to other industrial unions. Congress had reacted by killing the unemployment compensation bill for the time being, but other, more effective methods needed to be found.

"The Inquisition" hopes that General Eisenhower would get to the bottom of the situation regarding General Patton's command of the occupation in Bavaria. The reports had been unfavorable, indicating that Patton was retaining in high office Nazis while merely rooting out the small fries. Moreover, his comment comparing Nazis to Democrats and Republicans had been disturbing to Americans.

It was apparent that, while valuable as a fighting man, the General had only been fighting an enemy in the field and not, per se, Nazis, that his value as an occupational commander was now suspect.

The piece remarks that Mississippi Congressman John Rankin had, a few weeks earlier, promoted General Patton to be the next Secretary of War, and apparently the two men had much in common in their political outlook.

"Better Late" praises the City Council for endorsing the Planning Board's report on post-war projects rather than simply following the advice of Mayor Baxter. While foresighted, the Mayor's pet projects might not receive support from a future administration, and thus the Planning Board could afford continuity through time.

"By-Product" finds the evidence to be damning against the welfare superintendent of Davidson County in relation to the voter fraud case arising there in 1944. A Washington handwriting analyst had determined that the superintendent had forged 198 signatures on absentee ballots which the superintendent admitted taking to Democratic headquarters. The State Bureau of Investigation was investigating, and the piece hopes that prosecutions would ensue in the voter fraud case, thus far whitewashed, but, regardless, that the welfare superintendent ought be removed unless he could challenge the evidence against him.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky commenting on the criticism of the $25 per week unemployment compensation bill, that if it were enacted, the Congress would never end it, that such was an indictment of the Congress. The Congress had created the emergency and should take the responsibility to catch the employees once severed from war industries. Once the emergency was over, the unemployment compensation act could be withdrawn, a date of June 30, 1947 having been fixed in the bill for its expiration.

Senator George Aiken of Vermont agreed, stated that the Congress had shown its judgment by returning the Employment Service to the states, though Senator Barkley had objected to the action.

Senator Barkley then engages in a colloquy with Senator Clyde Reed of Kansas regarding the former being rough-housed by the Senators from time to time, saying that he expected it as part of the legislative process, whether he liked it or not—to which his colleagues provided laughter.

Drew Pearson reports that the controversy between State Department Undersecretary-designate Dean Acheson and General MacArthur had grown from the fact that the War Department had for months been after the General to provide a realistic assessment of the number of troops needed for occupation of Japan and had not received a reply until the sudden disclosure the previous week that he would require no more than 200,000 after six months and hoped that occupation would be complete within a year, though since backing off that rosy picture to state that it could last a long time.

Then in response, Mr. Acheson had stated that it was not General MacArthur's place to formulate such policy as to the length of occupation.

Administration advisers believed that General MacArthur wanted to be pushed into a position where he could resign as a martyr and then run for President.

Mr. Pearson next describes a visit by Willkie-Republican Milt Polland of Wisconsin with President Truman, in which Mr. Polland stated that Mr. Willkie had always referred to Thomas Dewey as "that little mustachioed so and so," to which the President readily agreed. Mr. Polland was determined to mount a fight to liberalize the GOP and eliminate the isolationists. He and other former Willkie supporters wanted to rally around the new blood of the party, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, Senator Aiken of Vermont, and Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire.

He next turns to housing and the prospects for inflation which the Administration was not adequate taking steps to prevent. John Snyder, the Reconversion chief, had determined to release all controls on the building industry on October 15, abolishing the War Production Board's limitation that new houses could not cost more than $8,000 during the war. The result already was producing inflation, with the price of houses in Florida having jumped from $5,600 to $6,500 in a week.

There would be a temporary housing shortage with the returning servicemen, and nothing would prevent builders from taking advantage of the situation by raising prices. The Government housing projects used during the war were to be sold, leaving servicemen's families to pay high rents or buy a home.

Complicating the scenario was the fact that farm prices were 57 percent higher than in the period 1937-39.

Among his "Merry-Go-Round" items was the bulletin that 1944 vice-presidential nominee John W. Bricker, former Governor of Ohio, would be a dark horse for the Republican nomination in 1948, now that he could run for the Senate seat of Senator Harold Burton—a seat he would win in 1946.

He would, however, not be on the ticket in 1948, the top spot again going to Governor Dewey, this time to be joined by Governor Earl Warren of California.

Marquis Childs writes from Louisville, finds that though Kentucky cherished its old traditions, it found itself near the bottom of the states in rank of industry, education, health, number of libraries, and the like.

So the Committee of Kentucky had been formed to try to bring progress to the state educationally, culturally, and socially, modeled on that undertaken recently in Georgia under the leadership of Governor Ellis Arnall. Vice-president of the committee was the brother of the late Wendell Willkie, H. Fred Willkie, a Republican. The president was a New Deal Democrat. The Committee was apolitical in its orientation. A minority of the state, the bankers and lawyers, did not wish to participate, but for the most part everyone was on board to see that the state, with its preserved traditions of colonels and juleps, might be made better.

Samuel Grafton comments upon two meetings taking place in Washington, one between the British and Americans regarding provision of aid to Britain for the winter to avoid rampant hunger, the other between Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson and Farm Bureau Federation officials regarding curbs on production of eggs, potatoes, vegetable oils, rice, and perhaps corn. The two meetings appeared at contrary purposes.

The United States had ten billion dollars worth of military supplies scattered across the world outside the country, six billion of it in Europe. And these were fungible goods, not fixtures. Armed guards stood watch over these supplies though America did not want them, did not want to glut the market at home with these goods, too expensive to transport anyway. So, the astute move would be to sell them where they lay, but other nations had no means of barter or money, wanted long-term credits. The Administration wanted to obtain for these goods trade in exchange from Britain, but America's needs from overseas were few. Thus, for the present, that solution made little sense.

Mr. Grafton suggests that the country face its peculiar pre-eminence over the other nations rather than dodging the fact, as it appeared the country was doing. If the attitude continued, America would be without friends, unacceptable even in the Western bloc of nations to counter-balance the Russian bloc. If that day should come, then Americans would no longer be able either to get along with each other, for the fact that those who wanted to squeeze the former Allies also were resistant in domestic politics, "and in the fullest sense we are offered the choice of whether to live with the world or to die with the die-hards", that is, the isolationists.

Dorothy Thompson discusses the fact that domestic concerns determined ultimately foreign policy and, at the moment, the domestic concerns were attuned to reconversion. Civilians, labor, and industry alike, and therefore Congress in response, all had their eyes peeled to that end, not the Balkan situation, the extension of Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe, or the Italian colonies.

The United States Government wanted to prevent a Western bloc as preferred by the British and French and an Eastern bloc as desired by the Russians. It was counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom, with America being the only country intact in the world with a major industrial economy and in sole possession of the atomic bomb, that the other of the Big Five nations would resist substantially any policy determination desired by the United States. Yet, the London Big Five Foreign Ministers Conference was deadlocked over these issues.

Most of the country was reliant on the atomic bomb now to do its talking. The attitude was: since America had the atom bomb, why worry about the rest of the world? But that was no policy for world power, more one of isolationism, of deprivation of power of other nations—not based on ratiocination but patiocination.

Most of the country wanted the soldiers home, while realizing that bringing them all home meant that occupation could not be undertaken.

"Satisfied with our potential power, we leave the political field to less self-confident nations."

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