The Charlotte News

Wednesday, January 14, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The editorial column begins with a story covered on the front page of the day, the appointment of a production czar, Donald Nelson, as America's version of the Beaver in Britain. Apparently, suggests the editorial, the President reacted, after long urging for such coordination by the press and industrial leaders, to the exhortation in this direction by Churchill himself during his visit to Washington two weeks earlier. So, after muddling through on production management since the passage of the Lend-Lease Bill in March, 1941 and the declaration by the President on May 27 of a national defense emergency, with duties of its two principal leaders, Leon Henderson of the Office of Production Management and William Knudsen, former G.M. Chairman, plus Sydney Hillman, Edward Stettinius, and others, left overlapping and overly de-centralized, the Navy and Army often left to form their own contracts independently with private industry and industries organized only on a local basis, now there was to be coordination from the top, leaving the President's former hands-on role in this regard otherwise filled so that he might concentrate fully on the war effort itself--as well as having someone to meet head-to-head with the Beaver and other such relatively autonomous centralized figures of industrial coordination within the Allied framework.

Even the centralization of authority in the President on matters of military command, however, had come under criticism in recent weeks as the strong sense of patriotism after Pearl Harbor began to become eviscerated slowly by a sense of the practical reality that Japan was a formidable foe and might well win the war. Even more, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox is quoted on the front page, as Paul Mallon intones on the editorial page, admonishing that reports out of Germany of internal revolt within some of the conquered nations, as well as some of the reports of the tattered retreat ongoing in Russia, could be the work of Goebbels's propaganda machine, to weaken resolve among the Allies, especially the United States, to join the war in Europe in full force, to distract the United States with the war in the Pacific. Indeed, the war in Russia was far from being a rout, was far from being over, was far from seeing its last of human slaughter. It would go on for another three years. Nevertheless, the great resistance there in the previous six months told the tale and Hitler would never again be able to afford to mount the kind of grand offensive in Russia which his armies had staged in July through October. The war was over there; Hitler simply had not obtained the message in his small brain.

The editorial column goes on to praise posthumously Billy Mitchel for his dishonored and harshly rebuked--even finally court-martialed--foresight of the need for a separate air corps and the need to build air defenses the equal of that of Germany and Japan. But the problem in those earlier times, prior to the war in 1939, even prior to the break-out of the war in China in mid-1937, was that conventional wisdom had it that maintaining strong defenses only encouraged other nations to build equally and exceed those defenses, necessitating trumping those increases, and consequently an ensuing arms race, finally bringing war to determine who had the most and best men and equipment to put up to accomplish empire dreams--the grand medieval sporting event. That conventional wisdom developed out of what had occurred in the decade and half or so preceding World War I with the coming of mechanization to propel the old cavalry units with relative celerity along the ground and even through the air.

It was very difficult to obtain a balance, as rogue nations would insist on violating treaties, just as Japan had violated the treaty coming out of the Washington Naval Conference of 1922-23, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, outlawing war as a means of settling disputes between its 62 signatory nations which included its original proponents, France and the United States, plus Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, had turned out not to be worth the paper and ink it took to write it up. But, unlike the United Nations after the war, there were no provisions in these agreements for punitive measures and sanctions in the case of breach; nor was there any international policing body to enable arms inspectors or separate military forces comprised of soldiers from the member nations. There were far too many hostilities still in a post-war world left in deepening worldwide divide by economic depression for such provisions to be realistically achieved at the time by mutual agreement.

Thus, though Billy Mitchel, with 20-20 hindsight was right and there is little doubt that he was unfairly treated by the military in busting his rank as Brigadier General down to Colonel and then essentially drumming him from the military for merely exercising his First Amendment freedom in time of peace, re-armament after the loss of 52,500 Americans in World War I was nevertheless a problem about which many talked but few had any practical solution. The solution unfortunately finally lay only in remembrance of the caustic truth learned from not abiding the mutual pacts, from not following President Wilson's lead in joining the League of Nations and giving it teeth with which to fight for peace, in the thousands and thousands of mounds across the fields of Flanders and Normandy and other places, such as the plains of Russia, the haunted beaches of the islands of the Pacific, awash in blood and mortal flesh, young laid last to rest without proper burial, remembered only by the smile which was their own, cast darkly stone grey in an instant, banished to the thin ether by a mortar round or torpedo shell's disintegration or strafing fire striking their hearts from above. Yet, their haunting spirits remained in their comrades and those at home left behind to recount them and remember their smiles.

And, as the President had insisted on December 8, they must never be taken for granted or forgotten, lest we repeat the mistakes of the past. Those who decry the United Nations today as some sort of harbinger of one-world government, an incarnation of the dreaded Biblical Beast with the name of wormwood, bearing its number, simply do not bother to study history, allow their emotions to be swayed by captious phrases of the xenophobic. It is not the Beast or one-world government, nor is it the least bit represented by prophecy in the Bible, except when it says: Beat your swords to ploughshares.

Elsewhere on the page, "No Rivals" tells of how FDR handled contrary voices, announcing the bringing of Wendell Willkie, a former Democrat, Roosevelt's 1940 opponent for the presidency, onboard with the Administration. Willkie had already and would continue to act as the President's personal envoy, visiting Britain, Russia, China and the Middle East. This was not a time for partisan politics. Roosevelt had brought into the Administration Republicans Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy and Henry Stimson as Secretary of War for that very purpose, to stem the tide of discontent and partisan dissent. In 1941, when Charles Evans Hughes retired as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, one of the "nine old men" populating the Court during the Thirties, the President had looked to the Republican appointees remaining on the Court to elevate Harlan Fiske Stone to Chief, a New Deal supporter as Justice, but originally appointed by Calvin Coolidge. What would the country think today if a President appointed a member of the opposing party as Chief Justice? or even as a Justice? The last time it happened was the appointment of Byron White in 1962 by President Kennedy. (And to paraphrase President Kennedy on another subject, given the decisive majority held by Republicans among appointees to the Supreme Court in the last forum decades, we do not recommend the practice to anyone anytime soon.)

Paul Mallon remarks that the resignation of von Brauchitsch as military commander of the Russian armies had been perhaps overblown in the West, that Hitler's military mainstay was in fact General Heinrich Jodl. As we suggest, we think more probably it was his doggy--even if the doggy probably learned to yodel in the Bavarian Alps there with his insane master, the Reichsfuehrer--filled with the spirits of the lost dead, Siegfried and Brunhilde and the other Nibelungen of the icy North.

Amy Bassett echoes the suggestions beginning that all was not as unified as presumed after December 7, that the America Firsters, while reflecting the country's general sentiment of unity, were not necessarily yet in the long run to be trusted to that end--indeed, following sentiment expressed a week or so earlier in a News editorial counseling an attitude of wariness toward Colonel Lindbergh's sudden offered penance by volunteering for the air corps, that he should not be trusted with any combat assignment for fear that he might turn out in fact to be the quisling he had appeared in the previous two years of public pro-Nazi sentiment, even speaking at overtly anti-Semitic public rallies. Nevertheless, as the war dragged on, as more news such as that populating the front pages of January persisted, as more bad news poured in from the Pacific while the Philippines fell, while Singapore appeared now about to fall, while the British retreated ever closer to that last crucial foothold for repair of ships, staging of operations, and conduit to supplies in the region, while the Dutch East Indies appeared about to fall, unity would persist for the duration to V-E and V-J Days as never before in the country's history and as never since.

But, it should always be reminded that in a democracy, too much unity in time of peace can become a dangerous thing. It is one thing to be divisive for the sake of political gain; it is another to argue honest differences of opinion and voice them, the only way to bring about constructive change.

At this stage in history, however, in 1942, there was little room for dissent on the grand issues. Unity was required to sustain democracy in the world against rapid decay and destruction from without by the forces of fascism and feudalism.

The Pan American Conference, as reported on the front page in the Washington Merry-Go-Round, continued on page two, and discussed by Raymond Clapper on the editorial page, was about to begin. As indicated, it was the first such serious conference ever so undertaken by the Latin American countries, though not the last. Post-war, the Organization of American States would become a vital forum for supplementing the work of the United Nations, as in the Cuban missile crisis when President Kennedy insisted upon, and received, unanimity in that organization in denouncing the Soviet missile emplacement in Cuba and supporting efforts at blockade of the island until their removal.

On this occasion in 1942, as the Merry-Go-Round and editorial indicate, the member countries started out on a bad foot with Ecuador insisting that its border dispute with Peru first be resolved before other business could be initiated, and Argentina resisting any alliance with the warring nations, desiring to sit on the fence before casting its lot until the winner was apparent. The countries of the Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as Mexico and the countries of Central America and northern South America, those bordering on either side the Panama Canal, had already declared war on the Axis and thus become part of the "United Nations", the new nomenclature being applied to the Allies. The rest of South America, however, had yet to commit, though all save Argentina and Chile, had indicated favor to the Allies, with Brazil leading the way.

And, on the front page, is a little item which indicates British celebration, through the German-language version of the BBC, of the 50th birthday of Reverend Martin Niemoeller, Lutheran martyr imprisoned in Dachau, the concentration camp in Bavaria, for daring to profess Christian beliefs which might undermine the Reichsfuehrer's imago: himself, in the mirror unreflecting of light. As a Lutheran, Reverend Niemoeller reflected some irony in his own plight, as best stated by W.H. Auden, as we quoted in association with "Next", April 25, 1940. But the type of irony he reflected in this plight was a Nazi's idea of perverse justice: let the Jew-lover who preached against notions promulgated by the founder of his own sect, 400 years earlier, die in the camp with those for whom he fought to achieve tolerance in a society gone insane, turned only to worldly pursuits, turned to pagan gods of war and harvest, abandoned of the spiritual, with their anointed chief demi-god as their intermediary with their Teutonic ancestors, reached through listening to the strains of Wagner, while reading someone else's simplified digest of Nietzsche, never bothering, perhaps unable for his insanity, to glean even a hint of the art of either in the process.