Thursday, September 6, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, September 6, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman sent his message to Congress seeking a 21-point program including the recommendation of retention, through the period of reconversion, of the President's war powers, granted in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declarations of war. He also sought a limited tax cut during 1946 and proposed measures to enable full employment. He urged that prompt action could usher in the greatest era of prosperity the nation had ever known in peacetime. He stressed that the 66 billion dollars of anticipated Government spending would exceed presently estimated tax revenue by 30 billion dollars during the ensuing fiscal year, and so a pervasive tax cut was not in order.

The proposals included a recommendation to the Congress that it double its members' own salaries to $20,000 per year. He stated that he would recommend later a national health program and an expanded Social Security program.

War Mobilization and Reconversion Director John W. Snyder set forth the nine phases to be followed in reconversion, as laid out on the page. The first was to cancel war contracts to release factories and other war facilities and manpower back into the civilian marketplace. Contracts then were to be settled, factories cleared of war machinery and Government-owned inventories, etc.

OPA told Congress that most rationing would end by the end of 1945. Meats and shoes would be on that list, although fats and oils might still be rationed into 1946, with sugar impossible to predict. Truck and passenger car tires would likely be rationed through the end of the year, production not having reached the predicted goals thus far. Rent controls would remain in place for awhile.

Bob Brumby broadcast from Tokyo that Joseph Meisinger, the "Butcher of Warsaw", who had reportedly escaped to Japan, had been captured by five Americans who had traveled for the purpose 65 miles into unoccupied Japan on a tip that Meisinger was living among a hundred German militarists. Meisinger, the Americans had been warned, was heavily armed, was found in a hotel, whereupon a note was sent demanding that he surrender, that he would be better off than with the Russians. He soon appeared. Later he stated that he had determined initially to shoot the five Americans and then himself, but then changed his mind when he considered American fair play and justice.

Meisinger was executed in Warsaw in March, 1947 after a fair trial.

The first reconnaissance patrols of the occupation forces entered Tokyo, set to receive the first of the occupation troops in force on Saturday. General MacArthur estimated that by mid-October, seven million Japanese would be disarmed, the largest force ever in the history of mankind to capitulate. Three million of these troops were in the home islands. Some 300,000 to 400,000 Allied troops would be used to occupy the home islands.

Domei broadcast that Japanese who purchased or traded goods with American soldiers would be subject to execution or twenty years imprisonment.

That Emperor, he's a card, isn't he? Stick with him. Your days will be long and fruitful, for a day or two. He rides the White Horse.

The Senate voted unanimously to hold joint hearings with the House into the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Truman approved of the action. A ten-member board, five from each body, six of whom would be Democrats, was to be named by Speaker Sam Rayburn and the Senate president pro tem, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee. A report would be required by January 3. Senator Alben Barkley, the Majority Leader, informed the Senate that the resolution required the inquiry to be non-partisan and apolitical. It would not seek to gratify "the misanthropic hatreds of any person toward any present or past public servant, high or low, living or dead."

Saburo Kurusu, the special Japanese envoy in Washington negotiating with Secretary of State Hull at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, stated, through ABC radio correspondent Frederick C. Opper, that he had known nothing of the pending attack and was hurt that it was suspected that he had been used as bait for the trap. He contended that when he had departed Tokyo in November, 1941, General Tojo had been more optimistic than he regarding the chances for peace. He had told both Tojo and FDR that a single spark might ignite war.

Mr. Kurusu was confident that Ambassador Nomura, also a party to the negotiations, likewise had not known of the pending attack plans. He did not believe that he or Nomura had been used by Tojo. He believed that Tojo had genuinely hoped that the effort at negotiation—which, from the Japanese perspective, demanded that they be allowed to keep possession of Manchuria and Indo-China as well as resume full trade with the United States, a hopeless set of demands with no chance of fulfillment—would prove successful.

Major General Albert Jones, who had just returned to the United States, told of his captivity for over three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp after having been captured on Bataan on April 11, 1942. He and his men were part of the Death March and he had personally witnessed the beating and slapping of General Jonathan Wainwright. The men were daily forced to bow and pray to the Emperor, were forced to bow to privates and civilians alike, regardless of rank. They were given no food, were systematically starved, denied water and medicine.

A decree was published in all Berlin newspapers stating that the landed estates in Saxony, in the Russian occupation zone, would be broken up and redistributed. The policy would likely extend to Junker-owned lands in Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, and Thuringia. The decree extended to all land which had been in the hands of the hierarchy of the Nazi Party and Federal Junker land, that land which had been provided to the military caste in Germany. Churches, experiment stations, city administrations, and farm co-operatives were exempt from the decree. Farmers to whom the land was to be re-distributed would pay for the land with a year's income, spread over ten to twenty years in installments.

On this date, a report of which would be on the front page the following day, Admiral John S. McCain, "Popeye" to his men for his resemblance physically to the spinach-loving hero, who had led Task Force 38 at the Battle of Okinawa in late March through June 23 and since the previous October, died at age 61 in Coronado, California, from a heart attack. Admiral McCain had just returned stateside after witnessing the signing of the surrender the previous Sunday aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. He had undergone a severe weight loss from the stress of battle.

He was, of course, the grandfather of Senator John McCain of Arizona, and the father of Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., with whom he had been for a time at the signing ceremonies on Sunday.

The coincidence has occurred that, this night, September 6, 2012, 67 years later, in Charlotte, the Democrats have re-nominated President Barack Obama as the party nominee. Senator McCain, of course, was the opponent to Senator Obama in 2008, and, from our vantage point, both fought a laudable and clean campaign in that year.

It is the first time in the country's history that a major party political convention has come to the South proper to a medium-sized city to hold its quadrennial meeting to select the party nominee. It is usually more likely Chicago or New York, Philadelphia or Los Angeles, Miami or a city of that size. The Republicans this year chose Tampa, also a medium-sized city, as their site. We hope that Charlotte treated the Democrats well and that it left a good memory.

It was, regardless, an historic occasion, for many reasons.

We like the President's ideal that it was the American people who accomplished the goals which he set forth with a leadership vision four years ago. We may not agree with everything any given administration does, but, above all, we respect a vision, and dedicated, tenacious leadership to the end of accomplishing that vision for the sole benefit of the American people, not personal aggrandizement. And we believe that our current President has admirably met that test.

May the campaign ahead between the President and Governor Romney, somehow a contest freighted with prophetic fulfillment on both sides of the political divide from the days of 1963-64, which we remember well, as it was only yesterday, be clean, informative, fun, and, above all, inscrutably honest in elucidation of the parties' and candidates' stands on the issues, those which are most important to the country and its future, immediate and long-range.

We would suggest to Governor Romney a program whereby everyone in need of an automobile be promised a free Rambler.

We used to drive one back during the war, until both front wheels fell off, fortunately at low speed and on separate occasions, three months apart. We don't know, therefore, whether we would want another one. But they may be okay for some people.

And, let us hope that we see no more discussion with an empty chair, a rather boring thing to witness if we do say so. Anybody can talk to an empty chair and have a genuinely thrilling conversation.

Anyway, Mr. Eastwood, you may be a hell of a Harry, but you are no James Whitmore.

On the editorial page, "Just Wimmen, Maybe" reports that it had been dispatched from Germany the previous week that Nazi males were pliable while females remained intransigently indoctrinated Nazis, refusing to accept that Nazidom was done for.

The piece finds it hardly surprising, that in any situation where large numbers of females were of a certain mind, they would remain intractable. Henry Mencken had opined that women took to the Nazi mindset and remained within it because of their superior intellect. The piece doubts it—as likely so, too, did Mr. Mencken, given to much literary irony—but suggests that women had taken to it because they understood the advantage of an authoritarian regime, as in running a home, and that their own rule would not be challenged by the Nazis.

So, the apparent problem suggested itself as being more the age-old conflict between men and women, in this particular instance, not the United Nations versus the Nazis in occupied Germany.

Yes, we remember that, four years ago, we suggested something to the effect, re the Republican affair, "Fwiends, Womans..."

It just happens this way. We do not read ahead.

Anyway...

"One to Go" comments on the remaining Fascist in the world still in power, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who, while expressly frowned upon by both President Truman and Prime Minister Clement Attlee of Britain, neither had shown any willingness to intervene in Spain's internal affairs, both only stating the hope that Spain would overthrow Franco and hold democratic elections, an unlikely prospect without outside help. Mexico had condemned the Franco regime and Russia wanted to do more than merely counsel his overthrow.

It might be, it predicts, that Russia would prevail upon the Spanish in Mexico such that they would bring pressure to bear on Britain and the United States to aid in the ouster of Franco.

"Would that not be a classic joke upon the great forces of democracy in the Western world?"

"Japan's Terms" cautions that the words of Harvard-educated member of Japan's foreign office, Toshikazu Kase, be taken seriously when he had stated the previous week that, while Japan was prepared to accept the full cost of defeat, if treated too severely, the people might "react", arise from their supine, dumb-staring, spineless seat.

The piece interprets it as a threat to try to obtain less stringent terms of occupation, especially with regard to war criminals. He had said that the Japanese would submit to the trial of those formally charged but would not cooperate in wholesale searches for war criminals.

It concludes by asking whether there was any reason to believe that Japan had learned its lesson.

"Another Step" suggests that efforts by the garden clubs of the state to beautify the sides of the highways might prove premature given that roads through the state in the coming few years were going to be considerably widened, some, in the case of super-highways, to a clearance of 200 feet, thus obliterating any immediate efforts at roadside beautification.

It adds that, in addition to planting of vegetation, it would be salubrious to start a war against billboards.

While the roads of North Carolina fare pretty well, and have for many decades, in the roadside beautification aspects, the billboard part never was undertaken with any dedication. Indeed, they get uglier and gaudier all the time.

It ought be a crime, in fact, to put on a public highway such an outrageous billboard as, "Abortion Is Murder", which, until at least a very few years ago, donned one of the major arteries of Winston-Salem for quite some time. Whether you support or don't the sentiment, brandishing it in that way is hardly conducive to anything but complete contempt for the notion. It is anything but a billboard-type decision, dummy.

How would you react if it had said: "Abortion Is Cool; Do It at Your Whimsy"?

Support one such billboard, and you better be certain that someone could erect the latter. Free speech is not based on community standards.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland offering criticism to the Washington Merry-Go-Round column of Drew Pearson, or, as Mr. Tydings suggests him to be known in the Washington cloakrooms, "Pew Smearson".

One of his columns, the Senator says, titled "Philippines No Place for Visiting", had appeared in the Washington Post on June 17—27 years to the day, incidentally, before the break-in at the Watergate.

In it, says Senator Tydings, Mr. Pearson had presented more about the Senator's trip to the Philippines than he realized had been the case, including a slant against General MacArthur. So, to the Senator, Mr. Pearson was a "worm masquerading in the physique and the clothing of a supposed man"—in other words, a good journalist doing his job well in the face of a pompous ass.

He resorts to personal attack, saying that Mr. Pearson had avoided the draft in World War I by volunteering for SATC, "and the only powder he ever smelled was in the presence of ladies who might have adorned the windward side of the parade ground."

He goes on to celebrate General MacArthur as, undoubtedly, the greatest Man who had ever lived, then proceeds to quote President Roosevelt, five months in his grave, that Mr. Pearson was a "calumnist", a typical twist of words by the late President, and a "chronic liar".

Mr. Tydings also charged Mr. Pearson with engaging in blackmail and seeking to buy influence, claiming that he had affidavits and checks to prove it, that the columnist had been associated with a gambling racket.

"I shall not undertake to tell Mr. Pearson what I think of him, because if I should, I should perhaps describe him as lower than the lowest form of animal in the world."

This from a United States Senator on the floor of the Senate about a journalist merely exercising the First Amendment. The Senator or General MacArthur was perfectly free to sue Mr. Pearson for libel, had there been any such genuine false statement uttered in the column, rather than engaging in such calumny and vilifcation on the floor of the Senate of the United States. Conversely, because of Senatorial privilege, Mr. Pearson had no right to sue the Senator and so Mr. Tydings had cowardly hidden behind his knowing shield to make statements which, in all likelihood, would have assured him a large lawsuit for slander had he uttered them outside the chamber.

Drew Pearson discusses the nudging of President Truman, at the press conference on the Pearl Harbor Board report, by Mae Craig, North Carolina-born White House correspondent, later to become a favorite of President Kennedy, especially when she asked him about Mrs. Murphy's Boarding House.

Ms. Craig, the only grandmother who had served overseas as a war correspondent and representing several New England newspapers, wanted to know—as the President sought to defend former Secretary of State Hull against the charge by the report that he should not have provided an ultimatum to the Japanese on November 27, that it had hastened the attack, and could have been held up for weeks and thus delayed the attack, a completely nonsensical charge of course, given that which we now understand about the Japanese irrevocable decision to undertake the attack once reaching a certain point in the mission across the Pacific, something which any dunderpate could have intuited without benefit of that enemy information—whether "the two privates who actually tipped off their commander to the approach of the Jap planes [had] been rewarded." The President responded to Ms. Craig that they had.

She referred to the two radar men on duty at the new and as yet not fully operational radar post on northern Oahu on the morning of December 7 who caught a blip of something and reported it to an Army lieutenant who believed it to be either a flock of birds, a ghost signal common on fledgling radar of the time, or a flight of B-17's coming in from the Pacific coast, due, by fatalistic collision of circumstance, just at the hour of the attack.

Ms. Craig had shot back at the President that the lieutenant who had told the two men to forget the sighting was now a lieutenant colonel.

The President mumbled under his breath that he did not know that, or something like that, and then turned to receive other questions. White House assistants stated that this reminder of military promotion for incompetence weighed on the President's mind the rest of the morning.

Mr. Pearson then suggests that the report ought be read by every American, that its findings militated in favor of three inescapable conclusions: that the Articles of War ought be revised forthwith to penalize officers who would show such incompetence as to lose half the fleet and fail to secure a vital military installation; that, in the post-war, the Army and Navy ought be headed by "young, strong, democratic men, not Wall Street bankers or oldsters living on their past reputations"; that secret diplomacy, as carried on between 1935 and 1941 with Japan, had its penalty in the lackadaisical attitude toward preparation for war demonstrated by the country.

We have to remind Mr. Pearson that eight years earlier, the President had issued his Chicago statement, urging that the "outlaw nations", meaning, at the time, Germany, Japan, and Italy, had to stop their aggressive actions in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Nine Powers Treaty or face severe economic sanctions from the United States and the other peace-loving nations. That was not only not secret diplomacy but front page news. Unfortunately, the President was not able at the time to muster any support within Congress, coming as it did right on the heels of his fight over the unpopular court-packing plan to expand the Supreme Court with up to six additional "assistant justices", one for each justice reaching age 70.

Mr. Pearson suggests that when scrap iron and oil was reported to be continuing to go to Japan from the United States, the public was lulled to sleep. But again, this sustained flow of product occurred in the sunshine, not behind closed doors.

In his "Capital Chaff", he remarks that the atomic bomb may have changed Navy tactics henceforth. Rather than sailing in convoys, ships would be set miles apart from one another to be less vulnerable to atomic attack in a combined force. He also suggests that navies, per se, may have been rendered obsolete by the bomb.

The food storage cave at Atchison, Kansas, would continue to be used after the war, with carloads of potatoes being sent by the Department of Agriculture to the facility for storage.

Army training and educational films, which Mr. Pearson had revealed in May were destined to be destroyed, were now being turned over to the nation's schools along with millions of dollars worth of projection equipment and sound equipment, as well as Army radio equipment.

The State Department did not like the fact that "Know Your Enemy—Japan", a film by director Frank Capra, was still being shown, because its depiction of the Japanese supplication to the Emperor was so stressed that soldiers viewing the film came away asking why it was that the United States had determined to permit the Emperor to remain on the throne.

Marquis Childs tells the story of the success of the O.S.S. during the war, its mission being to seek intelligence from behind enemy lines or commit acts of sabotage behind enemy lines or destroy enemy morale through propaganda. Mr. Childs believed that their contribution to the war, while being kidded about their cloak and dagger operational methods, would prove, under the microscope of time, invaluable to the victory.

They had organized the parachute teams to enter the prison camps in Europe and Asia to provide relief to the starving prisoners, and that alone would be sufficient to place them in the rank of heroes.

The O.S.S. would soon disband and its officers returned to civilian life. Its Director, William Donovan, believed that there was a role in peacetime for the organization, to coordinate information received by the State Department, the Treasury, Army, and Navy, from capitals around the world. Previously, each would obtain a piece of information, but no one had the whole puzzle before them, the problem which had led inexorably to the debacle at Pearl Harbor.

The O.S.S. had been created on June 13, 1942. General Donovan had, since July 11, 1941, been the Coordinator of Information, a precursor organization to O.S.S.

Creating a unified Department of Defense, as being recommended, might help coordinate strategy and tactics, but would do little, says Mr. Childs, regarding coordination of information.

But General Donovan's suggestion of a peacetime version sounded to some too much as a super-spy agency which might ultimately seek or obtain control over the press and opinion in the country.

Mr. Childs cautions that such an agency would have to be scrupulously monitored and circumscribed by law. It should be involved only in intelligence analysis from Washington, not intelligence gathering around the world, the job for the Army, Navy, and State Department.

General Donovan suggested that the peacetime version ought have a staff of 2,500 persons, but Mr. Childs thought that too large for a coordinating function.

The United States, at the turn of the century, had assumed the responsibility for the Philippines in the wake of the 1898 Spanish-American War, and since then, had been engaged overseas, it being long past the point where the country could pretend to be an island in the stream of the ocean tides.

"If our democracy is not strong enough to keep a peacetime OSS within proper bounds, then it will go down anyway."

A letter writer finds salutary the message which appeared in Monday's News from the Reverend Herbert Spaugh, whose column still appeared regularly in the newspaper, albeit not since December on the editorial page. He had written, says the author, of the fight being waged for right over wrong and that the great sacrifices in the war should never be forgotten. He had urged that re-dedication to principles of righteousness could come about only when each individual American would get down on their knees in repentance before God.

An Army private stationed in Germany writes a letter hearkening back to the July letters of the gentleman who found it unacceptable that Charlotte laundry workers, earning as little as 15 cents an hour, would dare go on strike and ought be immediately sent to fight the Japanese at the front with minimal training. This author agrees, saying that any Americans who would participate in a strike ought be ashamed to call themselves Americans. He thought that the fighting was done in vain, should the veterans have to come home only to see strikers walking in picket lines.

To the contrary, young citizen, to the contrary. You fought so that they would have that very right, among others, not the converse. Stay over there, if that is the way you feel, and find yourself one of those nice Nazi wimmen. The woods are full of them.

Samuel Grafton suggests that there were two lines of thought regarding reconversion, one believing that if the Government controlled it, business would be too skittish to go into full production, worried about socialism, while the other had it that, without Government control, Labor would be reluctant, and a depression would result. The whole program appeared to be premised on fear by one side or the other.

Business witnesses believed that the full employment bill would create panic as the required Presidential warning of unemployment would send ripples through the marketplace and start a depression in motion.

Such, suggests Mr. Grafton, was akin to the fears that the unemployment compensation bill would work as a disincentive to work. There might be some who would find that a reasonable response, but overall, that was not a genuine concern. And, as far as being unduly reactive, as scared rabbits, to the President's advice, for years the President had served as a weather-vane of optimism for the economy, even in the face of plain unemployment. That had not worked.

Fear, if used in the right direction, could be productive.

"But to be afraid of catching a cold in a hurricane does not come under the head. Look to roof, men: she blowing."

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