The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 20, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that eventual Senate Republican Minority Leader, then Congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois, had proposed a resolution to form a joint committee composed of 21 Senators and 21 Representatives to hold hearings and formulate recommendations to the Congress on all war issues, that the time spent by military leaders jockeying between committee hearings in either house on the same bill was being needlessly consumed.

To save time, Mr. Dirksen suggested, the country should streamline its procedures. His example of wasted time was the hearings the previous week on the bill before the House, now before the Senate, to lower the draft age to include 18 and 19-year olds--a bill which would have far-reaching effects on the next generation, those who were infants in 1942, as well as the ones coming of age during World War II.

We shall see whether this resolution was adopted.

Whether it should have been is another issue. Do we compromise the Founders’ bicameral legislative process in time of war, when no immediate emergency, that is to say one which requires action within hours or days, rather than weeks, is in the offing?

We offer no criticism of Mr. Dirksen’s proposal. At the time, it certainly was a logical one to offer. But whether it should have been adopted raises a question whether the society at any time can afford, amid the swirl of exigent events, to sweep aside established, time-honored process in exchange for expediency.

From now on in New York City, another report informs, whether dining at the Astor or at Bellevue, there would be, on stupid, bloody Tuesday, eggs, fish, and poultry in lieu of steak.

Now, you can’t even have good red meat on Tuesdays. No sugar most of the time in your tea. No coconuts for Christmas. No rubber, no gas by which to run out for a nice plate of fish and chips. No refrigerator to replace the old one which quit working last week.

Oh, bleeding hell, we might as well just volunteer for the Army and get it over with. Life ain’t worth livin’ nohow.

On the editorial page, Raymond Clapper touts Wendell Willkie as a potentially new, independent force in American political thought, free from party and special interest taint, free to engage the public in a spirited debate on the post-war world and what shape it might take. Mr. Willkie would publish a widely read book in 1943, One World, in which he favored the same sort of post-war harmony via a United Nations platform which was being increasingly set forth as the model for the post-war world, that which Vice-President Wallace had counseled in his speech of May 8 and which Undersecretary of State, and occasionally acting Secretary of late, Sumner Welles, had advocated in his Memorial Day speech at Arlington. That Mr. Willkie joined the chorus, provided a patina of bi-partisanship to the concept, even if Mr. Willkie had, until a few months before his 1940 nomination for the presidency, been a Democrat, himself.

The question, of course, thus begged in 1942, similar to the one begged today, was for what did the Republican Party stand, that is to distinguish it as a party from the Democrats. Were both parties, in the main, simply ad hoc forces of constituencies spread around the country--whether separated by regional lines, boundaries of states, counties, towns, or blocks--, in the final analysis, signifying little or nothing which actually governed the thought patterns of most citizens after passing the age of majority?

Again, we merely ask the questions.

In any event, Mr. Willkie settled back into his law practice, bringing a case before the Supreme Court, decided in 1943, Schneiderman v. U.S, 320 US 118, holding 5 to 3 that an alleged Communist sympathizer who allegedly withheld, and falsely averred to the contrary, his sentiments when applying for naturalization, could not have his naturalization papers revoked by the I.N.S. a dozen years after having been granted them, absent "clear, unequivocal, and convincing" evidence of the merit of the charge. The case erroneously had been decided, said the Court, on the basis of the significantly lower standard of proof, preponderance of the evidence, that applicable in ordinary civil cases.

Most of the predictions ventured by Max Werner set forth in his column were incorrect as to their timing, even if their overall notions were sound, that Japan would fall easily once Germany was defeated and that Germany could be defeated only upon establishing a two-front war, from the East and the West. Of course, everyone at the time, including school children, understood those basic generalities. And so it is a little unclear as to what this expert set forth to lend to the Allied cause or to the public’s perception as to how the war ought be fought.

Analysis of the points also must take account, in assessing Werner’s equations, the unpredictable factor of the atomic bomb’s deployment in finally obtaining Japan’s surrender. It was simpler to consider on paper that the defeat of Japan would be relatively simple and quick after the defeat of Germany than it was in the final doing of it.

So it had been a year earlier when predictions had surfaced to the effect that, with the inception of the inevitable war with Japan, would likely come an equally inevitable finish of it within a matter of weeks, every bit as overweened in confidence as the German predictions of a six-week victory in Russia had been during the summer of 1941. Some, therefore, including The News, had then counseled immediate and pre-emptive offensive attack, bombing Tokyo. But again, all of that was easier said than done, just as the Doolittle Raid proved by the time and careful planning it took just to launch a relatively small and mostly symbolic attack on the Japanese mainland on April 18, 1942. And the Pacific was simply too expansive adequately to patrol with the primitive radar then available and the limited ranges over which ships and planes at the time were capable of extending observation.

Prediction by supposed military "experts" was nothing new, of course, in warfare, catching the fancy of the public and sometimes even the more impressionable journalists of the time. In November, 1914, for instance, Armgaard Karl Graves, a self-proclaimed former German spy, turned Anglophile reporter of Germany’s military capabilities, came to America with a report which he disseminated publicly at Carnegie Hall, replete with press agentry, that thirty German submarines would provide passage across the English Channel for up to 500 large barges, each carrying up to 750 men and a month’s supplies, constituting an invasionary force to land somewhere along the English coast, while, from the air, fifteen Zeppelins would protect the invasion as another fifteen would drop incendiary devices on London; the German Navy, better equipped for the November storms of the North Sea, meanwhile would draw the British Navy into a fight, thus distracting the latter’s ability to ward off the invasionary force, all to begin by November’s end. And exactly none of which ever happened, of course.

Just for whom "Dr. Graves" (in 1916 reported to be instead one Max Meincke, knight-errant or jailbird charlatan, depending on the account deemed reliable) was spying and delivering propaganda, incidentally, is subject to question historically. Was he providing dire warning to spurn the Americans to help the British, and the British to be on their guard for such a fight? Or, was he seeking to debilitate any effort to encourage delivery of aid to the British by way of suggesting that the outcome of the fight was a foregone conclusion against them? Or was he simply a soldier of fortune out to hawk his own vastly superior inside knowledge to a gullible public for a fee?

Candidly, we shall take the very accurate assessments of the present and likely future actions of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan ventured between November, 1937 and May, 1941 by W. J. Cash over those of anyone else set forth at the time, or at any subsequent time through to the very end of the war, both as to their accuracy and their patriotic motive. And, of course, we are by no means alone in that belief, The News itself having recognized the fact as events occurred. Anyone else who has ever studied Cash closely, including both of his biographers, offer the same conclusion. Thus, those attracted to his accuracy were not provincials marvelling at that within their midst which without was providing the same level of informed analysis elsewhere. It wasn’t so, notwithstanding some very accurate and good analysis of the war and its causes offered on occasion by the three syndicated columnists, Dorothy Thompson, Raymond Clapper, and Paul Mallon, being carried by The News at this juncture.

But, that was an academic proposition, of course; as is evident from the absence of much prediction of value any longer finding its way into the editorial column of The News, Cash was gone from the scene, now for a year and a half.

"Men and Boys" points out that among the 16 Congressmen who voted against the House bill to extend the draft to 18 and 19-year olds, there were three from the North Carolina delegation. Bob Doughton had argued before the Congress that it should not be sending boys to war who had no role in fashioning the society which was fighting that war. In other words, while unstated, he predicted the argument of 1970-71 for amending the Constitution to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. That it took so long to do, through Korea, through the bulk of the Vietnam War, is a tribute perhaps only to the resistance to any but glacial change generally inherent in society's traditional conventions.

The editorial opines, however, that the dilemma, as impliedly posited by Mr. Doughton, was whether the country would simply run short of able-bodied men to fight the war, not whether anyone wanted to send such youthful members of the society to become the "cannon fodder" which Mr. Doughton described as their inexorable fate.

"Comeback" registers three lynchings in Mississippi in just four days of the previous week—that after a relatively docile and declining period for lynching since 1937. What had happened suddenly to boil the raging fires of race hatred into the commission of the overt psycho-sexual act of lynching again? The editorial does not offer any explanation, instead counseling patience in bringing about a more just and integrated society.

Was the sudden outburst the result of hatred regularly being vented nearly every day throughout the country against the Japanese, thereby providing example to the ardent Southern racist to follow, no longer therefore susceptible of being properly abashed by his fellows to relent from the act? He was a person who never went away, of course, only had his fires dampened during the previous four years, in large part, though certainly not wholly, the result of courageous journalism within the South itself.

What had happened?

Were the journalists, the progressive, the noble and scholarly, population of the land, now too preoccupied with the war effort, either reporting on it or participating in the fighting of it or the planning of it, to address these formerly pressing domestic issues?

As reported by Time, two of the lynched persons were fourteen years old, hung beneath the M. & O. Railroad trestle at Shubuta, on October 12, site of their alleged attempted rape of a 13-year old white girl, site also of three lynchings during the previous two decades.

Howard Wash, in Laurel, was the other, on October 17, found hanging from Welborn’s Bridge over Tallahoma Creek, after being tried and found guilty of murdering his farm employer, a white man, escaping otherwise the imposition of the death penalty by virtue of a hung jury on the issue of punishment--a form of civilized justice not deemed by murderous jungle-bunny white-trash savages in hoods to be sufficiently applicable to murderous niggers.

Additionally, J. E. Person was lynched in Paris, Illinois in October.

Only two other lynchings had been reported during the entirety of the year prior to October, one out of Texas in July and one in Missouri in January.

Four lynchings had occurred in all of 1941.

What suddenly had happened?

As Time also subsequently reported, thanks to a progressive governor, Paul Johnson, and the outspoken journalism of the Laurel Leader-Call, a Federal grand jury had issued indictments for the four leaders of the lynch mob which grabbed Howard Wash from the custody of the local sheriff’s deputy, the indictments thus extending as well to the deputy himself, only the third time in the entire history of the South that Federal grand juries had indicted alleged lynchers.

Apparently, nevertheless, as there is no follow-up report in Time, the whole thing did peter out, with no active prosecution following—just as the locals, yawning, had practically foreordained with accurate self-fulfilling prophecy.

The editorial in The News had said that there is no time for lynching—but especially not at the outset of America’s involvement in the war, with the necessity of unity beckoning the land to lay aside its racial divide for the duration.

This was a time to kill, a time to kill Japs.

What had happened?

Framed Edition

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