The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 6, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Returning a moment to yesterday’s News, we pulled this page as well and then almost forgot about it. It originally drew our eye amid the whizzing-fast print on the roller machine for reason of the photograph of the cotton pickers, who turn out only to have been wealthy ladies "having fun", out to demonstrate how much they were willing to get their hands dirty to help their neighbor, the ill farmer—at least as long as a newspaper photographer and reporter were summoned to the scene to cover it. So, we pass on that one, even if the ladies’ activity was laudable in the abstract, especially if it was the case that they returned for each of the ensuing thirty days or so to pick the cotton. Anyone can do it as a lark for a day and have "fun". It isn’t until probably around the thirtieth day that the fun begins to wear off and turns to work.

But, nevertheless, we thank the ladies through the mists of time for drawing our eye to the page, as it turns out that it is remarkable for its containing a story which did not originally catch our eye. It is one not dissimilar to a recent story of heroism occurring January 15, 2009, that of the US Airways Flight 1549 having to ditch in the Hudson River shortly after takeoff from La Guardia on its way to Charlotte when suddenly both of its engines failed upon sucking in a flock of geese, with all 155 aboard surviving the treacherous landing on water and the perilously freezing subsequent rescue of passengers and crew standing tenuously on the wings, remaining still and calm as, one by one, the Coast Guard, and New York firemen and police officers plucked each to safety.

This 1942 story pertains to a Charlotte native, Army Air Corps 2nd Lieutenant Gales McClintock, who managed to effect a landing of his fighter plane safely on the Hudson, albeit off Yonkers, a little north of the Flight 1549 touchdown locus in central Manhattan. Lt. McClintock likewise climbed out of his cockpit unscathed. For unknown reasons, his plane’s engine had also stopped in mid-flight. It was not a jet obviously and so the prospect of birds having fouled its engine seems unlikely.

Parenthetically, we have to wonder whether it isn’t feasible, at a minimum cost, to fit passenger jets with a conically extruded screen which would funnel birds away from the intakes and prevent such fouling incidents, while not inhibiting the jet’s flow of air or causing drag or significantly added weight, perhaps one constructed of a lightweight, rigid plastic mesh material, strong enough to withstand the inhaling thrust of the engine, or of a flexible mesh material riveted to an aluminum substrate frame as a tent. Get to work on it, engineers, and save some lives. The next flight upset by a flock of birds might not be so fortunate to describe a safe landing on water or even have an adequate waterway sufficiently proximal on which to attempt it.

The front page this date carries little not already discussed previously: Churchill deferred questions in Commons on Russian-British relations, in response to Stalin’s demand that the Allies fulfill immediately their promised obligation to Russia to open a second front; trouble for the Nazi über-lords appeared afoot in the Norse country, in Demark and Norway, with political rumblings evident on the horizon in both Sweden and Finland as well.

On the editorial page, a piece suggests consideration of local native, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John J. Parker for the recently vacated seat on the Supreme Court of James Byrnes so that the latter could assume leadership of the newly created Office of Economic Stabilization for the purpose of implementing price and wage controls to head off war inflation.

Judge Parker, a Republican, had been previously nominated to the high court by Herbert Hoover in 1930; but his nomination ran into trouble after problems surfaced over his prior segregationist statements and anti-labor positions, ultimately causing his defeat for confirmation in the Senate.

Not surprisingly, he would not be FDR’s ninth and last appointment to the Court, all since August, 1937 with the appointment of Hugo Black; it would be instead a liberal educator, former Dean of the University of Washington law school and, since 1939, a member of the D. C. Court of Appeals, Wiley Rutledge. To that degree, selecting someone from the judiciary, the President would nevertheless follow the editorial’s advice.

But FDR had already considerably tipped his hat to the Republicans by nominating in 1941 as Chief Justice to replace retiring Republican Charles Evans Hughes, Coolidge-appointed Justice Harlan Fiske Stone. He had also appointed an ideological conservative, Robert Jackson, and one apparent moderate from the South, Black, who turned out to be a civil libertarian in the liberal tradition, while, an ostensible liberal, Felix Frankfurter, turned out more moderate.

There was no need to go overboard with bi-partisanship—especially as the Republicans, and among them conservative Republicans to sit alongside several Southern conservative Democrats, had dominated the Supreme Court’s constituency since the end of the Civil War and the death of Lincoln. Such one-sided jurisprudence, as it never does, did the country no good, arguably prolonging the lagging atavisticity of apartheid, extending its bonded stripes and bars a hundred years beyond the Civil War with the regrettably backward decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896; not to mention the pro-business stance its conservative majorities too often maintained against the protections of individual rights, arguably leading the country down the primrose path to the unrestrained laissez-faire economics which resulted in the Great Depression, necessitating the reforms of the New Deal to reel in all of the untoward results which congregated under a string of Republican administrations from Grant through Hoover, intermitted only by Cleveland and Wilson.

Results which were the wild imaginings of power-hungry, money-mad capitalists, largely uneducated men save in the practicalitudes of "makin’ money fast, partner, before they catch on", off on a rosy adventure somewhere in never-never land, nose stuck inside an Horatio Alger rags-to-riches novel—wild-eyed, fatcat, myopic troglodytes, rationalizing the while their self-immersed, egoistic proflicacy with emphasis on employing the People at good, sound jobs, while paying them practically slave wages to work in Dickensian sweatshop conditions, necessitating the advent of labor unions in the latter nineteenth century.

Roosevelt did not invent the resulting multifarious problems; he only sought to ameliorate and prevent further outbreaks of them out of his own economic class, problems which, not incidentally, had led at least partially to two world wars, almost wholly to the second.

Present Justice John Paul Stevens, incidentally, appointed by President Ford in 1975, served as one of Justice Rutledge’s law clerks before the Justice’s untimely death in 1949 at age 55.

Judge Parker’s replacement nominee was Owen Roberts, who in 1942 was the only non-Roosevelt appointed, or, in the case of Chief Justice Stone, elevated, member of the Court remaining.

The fact that the column supported this nomination of Judge Parker lends some doubt to our former assumption that it was Cash, rather than the more conservative J. E. Dowd, who had written the editorial of January 28, 1941 recommending Judge Parker then for the position to which James Byrnes shortly thereafter was appointed, replacing retiring conservative Justice James McReynolds. Yet, we cannot be certain of the 1941 editorial’s author.

Dorothy Thompson, Raymond Clapper, and Paul Mallon each tackle in different ways the President’s publicly secret trip around the country, ostensibly undertaken to inspect defense operations. Mr. Mallon justifies the concept of an open, critical press, questions whether the President’s trip was truly without political intent, as contended by the White House.

In contrast, Ms. Thompson offers praise to the President for going "incognito" among the people of the country for two weeks, (however the capability of his going anywhere "incognito" was eclipsed obviously by the reality of ten years as President and a dozen years before that as a prominent politician), escaping the overly insular confines of Washington’s daily life, the "Beltway mentality" of contemporary description, paradoxical in effect to its original intended neutrality of locale, apart from industrial centers. She ends by comparing his circuitous secret odyssey to that of Harun al-Rashid, out of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, who went disguised as a commoner among the people, a sort of earlier version of Henry Brubaker, to study their conditions unadorned by deceitful pretention arrayed to impress the leader.

Raymond Clapper, having the previous day already overtly criticized the secrecy of the President’s trip as appearing unnecessary, withdrew into the comfort of obliquity by discussing more generally the press’s consistent role in supporting government policy whenever it could, whenever it received the story straight with the facts, accompanied by the rationale for a particular policy or action so that it might form its opinion and coverage premised on reason rather than speculation.

Though the news was not mentioned, the Cardinals won the World Series, four games to one, winning the previous day’s game in the last three innings 4 to 2, scoring the winning pair of runs in the top of the ninth. The Yankees, however, would return the favor to the Cardinals in 1943, even if without the services, for the duration, of Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and Red Ruffing, each having joined the armed forces.

As to the little piece from The New Yorker, we first had a notion a week ago Sunday, in askew torpor, to drop into our Saturday note the following phrase: "Baby Ruth wrapper". We decided though that, while a little clever, it really didn’t quite fit, except as a rhyming roo's tether, yet without enough reason for the foot’s cobbled seisin; thus without so much as a turn of a feather, we pretermitted it, lest its too mined finesse come a cropper, an elision thought altogether fitting and proper. You may try to discern the potion of the place to which we thought to make motion to position its Black Mountain burn, oh luscious hills, indefinite trio-face, indecision's thrills, a dolce far niente; in a stone's ocean, Crazy Horse still kills.

And, "War and Cash" informs that the Continental Army, the rebuilding of the White House after its 1814 burning by the British, and the building of Harvard, Princeton, and William & Mary, were each supported by lotteries. Place your bets, gentlemen and ladies, take your chances. The News reveals all, eventually.

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