The Charlotte News
Thursday, October 22, 1942
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page tells finally of missing crews from the Doolittle raid of April 18, two of the sixteen five-man crews having been captured by the Japanese upon their landing in China. Two of the ten died on impact and the other eight were held in captivity and brutally tortured, four surviving until the end of the war. The eight were tried by military tribunal on August 28 and sentenced to death. Five had their sentences commuted. The other three, including the pictured Lieutenant William Farrow, along with Lieutenant Dean Hallmark, each pilots of the two missing planes, and Corporal Harold Spatz, a gunner, were executed on October 15, as reported in Japanese broadcasts of October 19, the source of the U.S. government disclosure. One other of the crews, Robert Meder, died in captivity in late 1943.
The first winter snow fell on Stalingrad, hampering German offensive operations. On the 59th day of the siege, General Winter officially arrived to aid the valiant of the city and the valiant under the command of Marshal Timoshenko.
The North Carolina Office of Price Administration warned that retailers who continued to hawk coffee at the outrageously inflated price of 75 cents per pound, violative of price ceilings, would be prosecuted, facing up to a year in jail and $5,000 in fines. Legal ceiling prices were in the range of 21 to 35 cents per pound.
Adjusted for inflation, the maximum legal rate equates to today’s $4.57 per pound against a gouging price of $9.80. If you go to the store today, of course, you will find the equivalent range of prices, right on up and even beyond $9.80 per pound for equivalent coffee, that is to say whole beans of roughly the same origin. Is the difference the brand on the package, or do you truly taste the difference between whole-bean coffee costing $5 per pound and that at $10? Take the old blind taste test at home and see for yourself. You don’t taste the difference. Only your eyes do.
There is a decided difference, however, between the stuff which they label "coffee" at the average restaurant not specializing in coffee and that which you buy as whole beans and cook up yourself, or on which you waste your shekels by going to one of the coffee shops and spending four times that which it costs to blend your own espresso or latte.
These coffee shops don’t even have live music.
The photograph shows the enveiling of a church by a loosed and punctured barrage balloon, one of hundreds lofting over England, which were designed to entangle and intercept enemy bombers via the dangling cables holding the balloons to the ground.
Was the preternaturally occurring coincident intersection of the balloon and the church suggesting, in its resultant thusly melded extant symbology presented by the photographic image, that barrage balloons were more popular than religion in England at that time? And if England swung like a pendulum, could the barrage balloon have been swapped for a flying saucer hovering above Birmingham with equal consequent discouragement of the Luftwaffe? We are not knocking the barrage balloons or putting them down; we are just asking about it, for it may have been a fact.
Two hundred acres and thirty cows had been purchased by the State for the mental hospital at Morganton, to enable milk for the patients and cultivation of suitable food, one of the chief problems cited at the institution, along with inadequate medical care and cruel treatment by staff, which had fostered inhumane conditions converting the hospital instead into a virtual prison.
Nevertheless, the more pressing question on the tip of everyone's tongue at the time, no doubt, was likely which shovel to use, and whether its utility was properly suited to the task, for digging holes for the posts on which to hang the new fencing to enclose the curtilage of the newly acquired acreage and to keep the cows from wandering away in their imaginations while studying the zen of posthole digging.
"Our Day", a special editorial by The News editors without a by-line, indicates its considerable discomfort with the two-faced treatment of Eleanor Roosevelt’s "secret" trip to England, treated as "confidential" to avoid the prospect of U-boats finding her position along the way, while nevertheless affording newspapers the tip of the trip through the syndicate which distributed her "My Day" column, an apparent sales trick to stimulate newspapers not already carrying them to bring her daily pieces of correspondence with the public onboard. The News didn’t bite.
But should The News have protested so much? Granted, the syndicate had no business leaking the news to anyone and then insisting that it be kept secret. "Pssst, here’s a secret, but don’t tell anyone." But, wasn’t it of significant interest to a lot of readers, men and women alike, to glean the First Lady’s subjective impressions of England during the thick of the war, every bit as much or more than reading the perceptions of professional journalists such as Dorothy Thompson and Raymond Clapper, both of whom had visited Great Britain during the late summer of 1941?
Perhaps, the truth was that after ten years, many journalists were growing somewhat tired of covering the same First Family.
Hence, the renewed interest in Wendell Willkie? That, despite his inglorious and undiplomatic performance in Russia and China, appearing to call the hands of Britain and the United States to open immediately a second front for the benefit of taking the pressure off both of those hard-pressed and starving nations, implicit in the statements from China being Mr. Willkie’s call for the opening of an offensive front in the Pacific as well as in Europe.
Regardless of how the press and the nation perceived him, Wendell Willkie would die just before the next election, having been eclipsed anyway by 1944 by Thomas Dewey as the Republican’s rising star.
In any event, here is the "My Day" of that day, datelined New York.
Her day would co-exist with the streets of London for the first time on Friday, dated Saturday. (The "Miss Thompson" to whom she refers was her secretary and regular travelling companion to whom she often referred in the column.)
Raymond Clapper urges the citizenry to exercise its franchise in the forthcoming mid-term elections lest the political machine control them. He signals a turn in favor of women congressional candidates across the nation, urges more women such as Clare Boothe Luce to run for Congress, as the available supply of men for public offices was, as with everything else, quickly becoming depleted by the war.
A letter writer suggests that more African-Americans should be drafted to fulfill the needs of the Army rather than extending the draft to 18 and 19-year olds. Otherwise, colleges and universities would need to close their doors, hospitals would be without trained doctors, and the urban areas of the country inevitably would erupt in racial tension, argues the writer.
The only problem with his solution, however, derives from the old saw: too many cooks spoil the broth. Given that in this early stage of the war, most of the African-Americans in the service were being used in that or similar non-combat capacities, drafting more African-Americans would not very easily have translated into resolution of the shortage of manpower available to send into combat on the various fronts.
Paul Mallon reports that James Byrnes was proceeding quickly in his new post as head of the Office of Economic Stabilization. To achieve the $25,000 cap on salaries favored by the President since January, he was apparently endorsing to Congress a limit of the corporate tax deduction (as only Congress may enact deductions) to cap the available tax break at $25,000, (the equivalent of $327,000 in today’s dollars).
Not a bad idea, Congress, to get those extravagant corporate salaries into line with reality. We favor a cap of $100,000, beyond which no deduction is allowed the corporation for the salary.
Capitalism’s basic premises would be thus satisfied; it would simply be that the average taxpayer would not implicitly have to foot the bill for the bloated corporate salary of someone who shuffles paper and paperclips all day while complaining about how hard they have to work, making all of those phone calls to arrange sweetheart deals for their companies so that the economy will grow and they can help feed and clothe the "little people" with all of their charitable contributions and employment at minimum wage, of those that is they don’t first place on unemployment lines by downsizing or shipping jobs overseas for yet cheaper labor to expand profits to make a bigger company to employ and provide charity for more and more "little people" until 99.9% of the population are little people—whereupon all the little people then go to the big, big mansion on the hill with torches in hand and set fire to the monster-dictator-fascist who owns the entire country.
With all the problems afoot in the country in 1942 with respect to labor and labor shortages in both war industries and on the farm, especially on the farm with lower wages than in the city, still the United States had not resorted to the mandates imposed early in the war in Great Britain, compulsory labor, frozen hours, wages, no strikes allowed; and certainly neither country had devolved to the point Germany had, mandating that its satrapies, France and Norway out of the gate, deliver up impressed workers as slaves to the German economy, to be promptly transported to Germany for work in the munitions factories. Failing to work for the Reich, of course, meant death.
"Axis at Home" decries Governor Paul Johnson's apparent attempt at first to suggest that the three lynchings in Mississippi in a four day period in October were the result of Axis influence. Instead, says the editorial accurately, the actuating force for these acts lay in the back yard of the South, not abroad.
Yet, it is not clear that Governor Johnson meant what the editorial assumes, that the proverbial "outside agitators" were directly responsible for this sudden outbreak of lynching. For unlike many of his contemporary Deep South governors who alternately either condoned lynchings by passive and quiet acceptance of the practice or ardently offered their express support of the fiery segregationist intransigence which every so often boiled over to incite the mob to lynch, Governor Johnson in fact did call for arrests and prosecutions of the lynchers in these cases. And in January, his demands bore fruit with the unusual Federal indictments of four of the alleged lynchers of Howard Wash in Laurel on October 17, as well as the deputy sheriff who gave him up to the mob without a fight.
The quoted part of the governor's statement is ambiguous enough to suggest that he meant only to imply that the sudden pitch of fever toward lynching had been the result of news of Axis endeavors to the same end, brutal killing stimulating in kindred bestial spirit the brutality motivating the lyncher--that, or the inevitability of death on the horizon from the war, Armageddon at last imminent, enchanting the lyncher to join his mystical brothers in arms abroad to engage in race war, not unlike, in its psychological constructs, the cult of seppuku in Japanese culture, merely turned on the other rather than self, in satisfaction of the divine spirit of sacrifice within the totemic religious ceremony.
Or, as we suggested on Tuesday, that the newspapers and official policy of the time were so full of vitriolic condemnation of the Japanese, implicitly or expressly, unabashedly so, that the racist drew from it the fiery ardor anew to turn again to the night rides of old, the shame endued him from condemnatory discourse ordinarily tempering and tamping down his otherwise whetted appetite, nurtured by the still, sufficiently absent of moral force to restrain his tendentious free reign to whoop once again the violence into himself and his fellow avenging archangels.
What did the governor mean?
Framed Edition
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