The Charlotte News
Wednesday, October 21, 1942
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The latest German offensive inside Stalingrad was poetically reported on the front page to be dwindling, as "cold rain again drenched the cemetery streets". Before war’s end, practically all of the streets of Europe would be likewise drenched.
The map shows the approximate parallelogram formed to protect the Allied supply lanes from Hawaii by bases on the east coast of Australia, at Port Moresby on New Guinea, Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, and Noumea on New Caledonia, that against the roughly triangulated positions of the air and naval havens for the Japanese based at Lae and Buna on the northern part of the eastern New Guinea peninsula, Rabaul on New Britain, and Buka on Bougainville in the northern Solomons.
Because of the war indiscrimately taking sons of the rich, sons of the famous, sons of the poor, sons of the middlin’, and of all races and religions, labor shortage extended even so far as the Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona, where available manpower for rounding up cattle was down to 25 cowboys for herds stretching over an area the size of Rhode Island.
The editorial page reports that a major point offered by Alexander de Seversky in Victory Through Air Power, that American military leaders had placed too much reliance on water-cooled as opposed to air-cooled engines, thereby reducing the planes’ operational capabilities at higher altitudes, had been vindicated and verified as accurate by a report released by the Office of War Information.
Shortages of sugar, copper, corn, and manpower to distill the product had curtailed the preparation of mountain dew, says "Hard Times".
Says The Greensboro Daily News to Josephus Daniels, the sale of two million dollars worth of controlled liquor by the State in just a quarter of North Carolina’s hundred counties in a month was bad, but then so was prohibition, by its taboo discouraging rather encouraging temperance.
"Madame Roberto" takes the measure of the Vindicator’s proffered metaphor suggesting Robert Rice Reynolds as the divinely inspired prophet who had recommended fortification of the Aleutians. The editorial finds the yardstick short by thirty-five inches because Senator Reynolds had proposed the fortification as bulwark against invasion by Russia, not Japan, while he cozied up to Hitler and campaigned against the presence of aliens in the United States for their Communist affiliations being inimical to the country’s security.
"Second Hunch" offers the column’s predictions on the war for the ensuing few months, suggests that major offensive action by the Allies appears nigh. And it was right in that assertion, and right again as to an incipient offensive in North Africa against Rommel, if missing its guesses on the likelihood of a thrust from there into the Balkans and another from India into Burma.
Raymond Clapper puzzles defensively as to why President Roosevelt was, essentially, picking a fight with the press over their "typewriter strategy" when the newspapers had been mainly supportive of his war policies. There was, in other words, no reason to suggest that the press were nattering nabobs of negativism simply because they had of late offered some criticism of methods while remaining supportive of the substantive ends sought by the Administration. Clapper offers as example press questions raised on the constitutionality underlying FDR’s ultimatum provided to Congress after Labor Day to present a bill to his desk by October 1 for enabling control of prices and wages or accept that he would undertake, pursuant to executive war powers previously provided by Congress, to set the limits himself.
And: Crotchet’s faux pas, a figure of zen, oh what a bellows big-rig mud flaps tend, oh my, they lift higher than the heights buds can fly, scotch the coda, Hun’s gree aye bends nigh.
We recommend, incidentally, a series currently running in The New York Times by Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker who produced both "The Fog of War" and "The Thin Blue Line", titled "The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock", questioning whether photographs taken for the Farm Security Administration during the dustbowl era of 1936-38 were deceptively unethical for showing windswept, soil-leached poverty both as it was and as it wasn't precisely, inauthenticity accomplished merely by photographers physically re-arranging some of both the naturally and preternaturally occurring objects seeking the attention of the lens. As with "The Purloined Letter", the key to discernment of this ploy resides in careful observation of that which is hidden in plain view. If you wish to make a puzzle of it, examine the photographs first and determine that which you may, before reading the elucidatory text. As with the documentaries of Mr. Morris, this series is a brief stimulus to exercise one's keenest processes of descrying that which ought be obvious but for the blinks of the mind causing it to become lost in the myriad phantasms of light striking the retina in any given moment on collision courses painted invisibly before us during any day's resistless momentary clicks of the alarming ticker.
The two New Deal financed documentaries by Pare Lorentz he references in Part I, "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River", were mentioned in a piece by Cash on September 1, 1938, which we happened to put online a month after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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