The Charlotte News

Thursday, October 15, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Today’s front page carries a rather remarkable story—no, not that of the flying saucer balloon supposedly carrying the little boy across ninety miles of Colorado, instead found empty with the boy eventually discovered safely at home.

Rather, it is the report that the German news bureau had accurately predicted that a second front would be initiated at Normandy—the only difference, of course, being that the invasion would not occur for another nineteen and a half months. The report had followed much German speculation of late as to the probability of an attack along the west coast of Africa at Dakar, or, in another report, along the southwestern coast of France, or in an even earlier version, along the coast of Norway. Nevertheless, aside from clever guesswork, it would be of interest to understand how the Nazis came to pin down Normandy as the presumed site of invasion. It is especially intriguing because, though alternative plans for invasion of France both in 1942 and 1943 had been assembled, the actual designation of Normandy as the place of landing was not finally chosen until the spring of 1944.

Perhaps, it came from the very mysteriously mystical Heinrich Himmler, reading the tea leaves while visiting Il Duce in Italy.

Or, perhaps, there was a traitor among the general staff of the Allied Joint Command who provided contingencies under consideration to the Nazis so that they might neutralize or at least delay the implementation of such plans by announcing them aforehand in the press.

Or, perhaps, it was just a lucky guess among many such guesses ventured.

The front page also reports of the October 13 attack on Henderson Field, on which we made comment October 2. The Haruna, supposed by the Allies to have been sunk December 10, and the Kongo, both stationed off Lunga Point on the north coast of Guadalcanal, managed to score hits on the airbase and, through combined air attack, destroyed 48 Allied planes. The extent of these losses is not described, suggesting instead only two Allied planes lost.

The editorial column again lauds the valiant people of Stalingrad for their courageous stand in the face of mounting odds against them. But now, as the days steadily wore on into autumnal mists, was on their side General Winter--as both Hitler, in his September speech at the Sportspalast, and, before him during the previous winter, Herblock, had called the mercurial ally, one impressive beyond all fault to the Russians.

"Free Elections" reports of a bill just passed by the House to abolish the poll tax in the eight states still not manumitted of it, all of the old, original Confederacy, save North Carolina. Eleven states had enacted them after the Civil War. Despite five bills to abolish it passed in the House and three in the Senate between 1939 and 1962, it would still take a constitutional amendment, the 24^th Amendment, proposed and ratified in 1962, finally to end this scourge on freedom. For none of the bills so passing either house of Congress had ever finally made it into law, and five states by 1962 still retained the offending impingement on the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote. Among them was Virginia, whose modified version was struck down by the Supreme Court in Harman v. Forssenius, 380 U.S. 528 (1965).

A letter writer takes issue with the notable letter of Elwyn Dunbar of October 10, on which we saw fit to make note ourselves. But, this responsive letter writer, articulate and wise though his expressions were in the abstract, seemed to have missed Mr. Dunbar’s point entirely: Mr. Dunbar did not, as the letter writer assumes, blame Charlotte’s high murder rate on the foes of prohibition, but rather merely criticized The News, to the point of invoking Biblical admonition upon the newspaper’s soul, for having presumptively made the bootless error of blaming the abundance of bootleggers in the community on its dry forces, while condoning the bootleggers’ proclivities to boot.

Mr. Dunbar only referenced the murder rate in relation to his initial point of refutation, the reductio ad absurdum inherent in the notion of blaming the citizens who enacted a murder statute for the high murder rate in Charlotte--even if, under strict analysis, the analogy breaks down at the outset for its fallacious assumption that the "citizens of Charlotte", per se, "enacted a murder statute"; that being of course instead the responsibility of the Legislature, and, in any event, so well-ingrained in the law, without, for time immemorial, controversy or challenge except by savages, and in virtually every civilized society on earth, as to devolve to an absurdity when utilized as a mode of comparison to prohibition laws as the root of bootlegging, most of which having been accomplished in the boot.

The better analogue for Mr. Dunbar would have been any one of a number of statutes peculiar to the jurisdiction of the county or to the state vis á vis other states of the country, especially statutes or local ordinances which had as their basis religious and moral considerations. But, we shall not name any such offenses for concern of being offensive to someone.

And whether "The Thing Was Fixed" has reference to Boss Hague in Jersey City or some other Boss, to determine the fate of the sergeant meeting his angel with the trumpet, the sergeant who had been "born in the U.S.A.", we couldn’t say.

But, candidly, we don’t see God as a Boss, exactly. For, were it so, there would have been no war to begin with, nor, we suggest, any Nazi Party. Boss Hague, on the other hand, as with Hitler, insisted on compliance with His Will. God seems to afford us a choice, a free choice.

Yet, we do not mean to carp at the Twin Citian’s poetic offering, well meant for the troublesome times. (And should you not know what a "Twin Citian" is, or why it is thusly spelled, don’t blame us. We assume it is sort of akin to "Martian"; but we mean by that not to disparage any Twin Citian, either in North Carolina or in Minnesota.)

And whoever the objector was at the Strand, he or she stole our line, and not just once but twice over, the while offending Churchill’s admonition. Thus, we want the return of the line which first we thought first we thought of.

And the initial little piece culled from The New Yorker, repeating the correction offered by the Regional Civilian Defense Office in Washington State, reminds us of this one, eerily so.

Existential question of the day: Was the sergeant meeting Gabriel to be ushered up to the Boss, in the Twin Citian’s poetic offering, the same one, promoted, pushing on there in the Big Muddy in 1942?

In any event, we’ve met a few such in our time, haven’t we?