The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 13, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: From Los Angeles, comes a report on the front page that women now comprised 50 to 70 percent of the workforce in airplane factories. Putting a canopy on a fighter couldn’t have been much different from placing a bonnet on baby’s head. Riveting together bomb-bay doors couldn’t have been that much of a separate challenge from diapering baby. Assembling the various pieces of the wingspan could not have been vastly distinguishable from bathing baby and then dressing baby in little baby’s gown. Whether the women employees were also hard at work riveting the aluminum on the fuselages was not reported.

Contrary to the promise of labor in the spring to submit to government mediation to resolve all disputes and forego strikes for the duration, a three-day old strike by AFL-affiliated workmen is reported from the Western Cartridge Company ammunition factory in Alton, Illinois. But don’t think of them in hindsight too harshly. The boys needed rest from making all of those bullets for the war effort abroad.

And a preview of the inside of the newspaper offers a glimpse at a story of four Yugoslav refugees driven from their homes, arriving separately in the United States in 1939 and since, re-developing their former trade in Yugoslavia, paprika production, now having made a thriving business in Dillon, South Carolina.

This story echoes one of February 5, 1940, presumably by Cash, of an Austrian Jew who escaped Hitler’s ghettoes to arrive in America with the first paprika seed ever to be brought from Europe, disseminated to farmers through L.S.U.

Apparently, the subject of the story out of Dillon, S.C. dovetails the previous one, and the Yugoslav refugee paprika manufacturers were able to work in symbiosis with the Austrian refugee’s paprika seed to bring about a thriving business in seven South Carolina counties, all to the consternation of the Chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee who believed that all aliens were secret enemy agents of Soviet Russia in the United States, here to spread com-mmm-unism over the land, not paprika—which, however, is red.

Why paprika? We couldn’t tell you. It could have been thyme, for instance. That it was paprika is proof enough of some vague form of conspiratorial plan by these probable agents of foreign intrigue and desperation to infiltrate and assimilate, unnoticed, into American life, fundamentally upsetting the average American’s dietary plan and thereby slowly inculcating, by the oldest trick in the book, the stomach, their subtle, serpentine ways, to guide us away from traditional American values consisting of beef, pork, butter, eggs, bread and coffee at every meal—plus, for dessert, some nice custard.

As indicated two and a half years ago, we don’t care for paprika. But others are entitled to differ, as long as we may have our salt and pepper free and clear, without the intrusion of the red nemesis. Don’t put paprika on anything you serve to us, or we shall reserve the right to throw it onto the floor, or across the room against the wall, as the mood strikes us. We like salt and pepper and butter on our corn; not paprika.

Attorney General Biddle announced that restrictions on the movement of Italian aliens in the country would be removed for their demonstrated loyalty to the country. Meanwhile, however, on the West Coast some 100,000 naturalized and born citizens among the Japanese-American population remained in internment camps, stripped of their worldly possessions.

But that was because of the ongoing offensive operations against Japan in the Solomons and New Guinea, those at Guadalcanal being described in greater detail to Pete McKnight of The News by the young sailor from Charlotte, R. J. Focht.

The offensive operations into Sicily and upper Italy would not begin until the spring.

German-Americans, alien and naturalized alike, also were largely unrestricted in their movement, obviously because of their tender, caring attitude toward the country.

That Mayor La Guardia was an ally of the Administration, despite being a Republican, probably had nothing at all to do with the Administration’s decision to lift restrictions on Italian aliens.

On the editorial page, Dorothy Thompson suggests that a bill of particulars of war crimes committed by the Axis is in order so that the Allies will not forget that for which they are fighting. She suggests the list of atrocities which ought be included.

Paul Mallon explains that Czar Petrillo’s musicians’ union antics are only echoing the Building Trades Union which is supporting him within the AFL. He whispered sweet things and they all came running to him: "You, yous got to pay me your dues if’n ye want to sing the blues. This is Chicago, pal. It ain’t Duluth."

He goes on to indicate that there is dissatisfaction and grumbling among the remaining seven Roosevelt appointees on the Supreme Court, that James Byrnes left to become head of the Office of Economic Stabilization because, after only one full term, he simply could not abide the Court any longer.

Mallon also predicts that the New Guinea front would be stable and quiet for awhile because the lines of supply for the Allied offensive had run thin at the Gap in the Owen Stanley Mountains. As the front page pointed out, from there down the other slope was a 5,000 foot drop in a mere 12 miles, suggesting a lot of switchbacks and consequent opportunity for ambush, plus a rugged way back up to replenish the supply line each circuit.

Raymond Clapper looks back at the decisive leadership which Roosevelt had displayed in 1940-41, and finds the post-Pearl Harbor mode, by contrast, wanting.

"Clean Sweep" gives praise to the President’s speech of the night before, calling it his best in months, finds it especially laudable for his having come out squarely for the extension of the draft to 18 and 19-year olds, thus astutely taking away this thorny problem from the Republicans in the mid-term election campaign, the argument that it was being laid away for a surprise early Christmas gift after the elections.

"Bottlenecks" addresses the issue which the front page detailed the day before on rubber czar William Jeffers’s insistence that the heavy tires be made of rayon, not cotton, and that the manufacture not be delayed, per the desires of Senator McKellar and others, so that the matter could be studied by scientists.

Rather than "Bottlenecks", perhaps it should have been entitled "Glass Onion" or "Oh, Darling, You’ve a Run in Your Rayon—Why Did We Ever Embargo the Silkworm? (Or, Sunday’s on the Phone to Friday Night without a Suitcase and Lucy’s in the Kitchen with Dinah Looking for Richard and Nikita in the Cabinet, While Private Paprika’s Stitching Socks at the Stockade in Bootcamp; Gee, Cows Are Fun)".

The missing quote of the day: "That is as well said as if I had said it myself."—Jonathan Swift