The Charlotte News

Monday, November 2, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Just as, we suppose, there ain't no Sanity Clause in any contract.

In any event, the Queen Mother, informed that Mrs. Roosevelt was interested in reforestation, promptly, to demonstrate simpatico proclivities, adduced photographs of herself chopping wood in the forest with Canadian soldiers.

Whether, in the process of this counter-intuitive means of reforestation, they came across any Norwegian blue parrots, is not elucidated by the report. Nor whether, if so, the parrots' eggs had ceilings. If so, it could explain the parrot's demise.

With war on all sides closing in, as the Nazis were making a move on Tuapse on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, as Rommel and Montgomery went head to head in the deserts of Egypt and Libya, the continued neutrality of Turkey, said its President, Ismet Inonu, was in greater danger than ever of being compromised by a confrontation with reality. It would, he said, remain faithful to its alliances when the point of final decision to enter the war came.

Problem was that its alliances were entangled with not only Russia and Great Britain, but also Germany. So, the statement, for all its seeming certainty, conveyed nothing more than continued fence-sitting, smoking the while the hookah.

The desert-savvy Australians in the British Eighth Army, it was reported, had surrounded with an iron ring several thousand Axis troops under Rommel. Each legion to its own talent acquired by adaptation to various climes within the former British Empire.

The Russians would ultimately do likewise to the Germans--and for years after the war. Who could really blame them? When you have a house of nuts, the best thing to do is to surround them with an iron ring and hold them in check until a new generation renders them less insane.

Frank Gannett, newspaper magnate who once in 1938 wrote The News providing both personal praise and exception to a Cash by-lined piece on Mr. Gannett, was now assistant chairman of the Republican Party, and in that capacity predicted that a Republican Congress elected the following day would prosecute the war more decisively and vigorously than had the Democratic Congresses preceding. Republicans predicted a pick-up of seven seats in the Senate.

Meanwhile Senator Elbert Thomas of Utah warned of a growing insidious movement in the country to undermine the progress made by the New Deal, reminding that Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points for post-war peace were undermined by the election of a Republican Congress in the election of 1918, the last previous war-time mid-term election.

And, as if things weren't strange enough in this wartime world, the sports page preview tells of a Halloween victory by N.C. State over U.N.C., involving trick plays and "electrified goal posts". In the meantime, it is also reported, the Carolina mascot had been "mistreated", presumably by someone from State. Whether the "electrified goal posts" were involved in the mistreatment is not told; but for a school such as N.C. State which specializes in engineering and agricultural sciences, we have to assume some special relationship of those arts and sciences with the entire matter.

In any event, without too many trick plays or any electrified goal posts, the present Tar Heels managed to upset formerly number four ranked Virginia Tech Thursday night by a last second field goal. Don't tell the Hokies but it is a fact that the Tar Heels' equipment manager brought along a special electromagnetic coil which, when turned on, set up a radiating charge between the uprights of the Hokie goal post, which naturally attracted the pigskin, itself statically charged from the sidelines with a special gun emitting invisible rays, so that the pig sailed perfectly through the center of the lines radiating the charge issuing between the uprights in perfectly balanced opposition.

That will teach the engineers not to mess with the Carolina mascot.

On the editorial page, "Who's a Patriot?" asks whether a person who can afford them and buys war bonds is really a patriot for doing so or simply an investor in the normal course, and whether a worker in defense industries earning twice or treble his or her normal earnings because of the war is nevertheless necessarily a patriot for the fact of being involved in the making of war widgets. It answers both legs of the inquiry with a decisive no. The true patriot, it opines, was the person who bought bonds when they were not affordable. The person who contributed voluntarily in aid of the war effort was the true patriot, not the highly paid worker.

Was it correct? Was such a notion, regardless of its probable truth in the abstract, good for morale, encouraging of war industry and purchase of the war bonds so crucial to help, along with higher taxes, to finance the war effort?

Paul Mallon takes another look at the decision by James Byrnes to impose the President's plan to halt after-tax income at $25,000 by executive fiat of the Treasury Department. And, reports Mallon, the decision was expressly made binding on the public without the right of appeal--that decision from an executive office head who had, until a month earlier, been a member of the United States Supreme Court. It was sure to prompt litigation, speculates Mallon, who believed that such a limitation would squelch American incentive and ultimately lead to a nation of slothful dullards, no longer possessed of a reason to work and work industriously.

"What? No appeal? Why, that's preposterous. It's--it's--why, it's highway robbery. We can't even hire our attorney to obtain exit from this jam. We shall sue these New Deal highwaymen, these, these socialist brigands, Doris, and recoup every penny, every last penny I say, of our lost salaries from daddy's trust fund. That's what we shall do. If this nonsense persists, we shall have to give up the apartment on the Upper East Side, our butler, our chauffeur, and, God forbid, even the Duesenburg. That damned Roosevelt! That damned Roosevelt! He'll have us all living in shanties as poor as Job's turkey and working with our hands as chimpanzees before this damned war is ever done."

Somehow, upon reflection, however, we posit that the opposite might have been the case. We're rather partial to the notion of such a limit, ourselves.

Two letters to the editor pick up the squabble over whether there should be prohibition in and around military bases. A New York father of a Navy volunteer calls the moralists favoring prohibition "termites", indicates that the leaders of the temperance movement benefited substantially from speaking engagements and direct contributions from bootleggers, as in the 1920's, eager to keep the temperance movement in business and liquid to maintain their own trade likewise and in high cotton, that is, sugar.

The other writer finds definition of the issue in the symbol conveyed by a beer truck barreling down the highway at 50 mph while he was doing the rubber-conserving speed limit of 35. Someone must have been dying for a beer, he cracks with wry punned wit, the truck driver simply rushing to save a life. He wonders at the wisdom of plucking 18 and 19-year olds into the service while allowing young men to drive in such willy-nilly manner in beer trucks down the highway. And, while everything else, including coffee, was being rationed, he complains, there was no rationing of beer.

Well, we have to conclude that the truth of the matter was that the President was in the pay of the beer and liquor lobby, wanted everyone, especially young soldiers in training, to be drunk and stay that way for the duration of the war, so that they could not understand or perceive the importance of the fact that the war was originally prosecuted by a tee-totaling vegetarian moralist in Berlin who saw himself as the ultimate and only arbiter of morality and the behavior of others.

It is noteworthy that the quote to the right of the letter, from Winston Churchill, sounds on first reading as that of a raving lunatic or a ravenous drunk gone on a blathering blinding binge of insatiable bumping of the jib. Yet, as we have pointed out, he, the occasional tippler, had the better of the argument in the end over the tee-totaling moralist of Berlin.

And on Saturday, Gandhi had set forth the following letter to America:

India Today, October, 1942.

As I am supposed to be the spirit behind the much discussed and equally well abused resolution of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress on independence, it has become necessary for me to explain my position, for I am not unknown to you.

I have in America perhaps the largest number of friends in the West--not even excepting Great Britain. British friends knowing me personally are more discerning than the American. In America I suffer from the well-known malady called hero worship. Good Dr. Holmes, until recently of the Unity Church of New York, without knowing me personally became my advertising agent. Some of the nice things he said about me I never knew myself. So I receive often embarrassing letters from America expecting me to perform miracles. Dr. Holmes was followed much later by Bishop Fisher who knew me personally in India. He very nearly dragged me to America but fates had ordained otherwise and I could not visit your vast and great country with its wonderful people.

Moreover, you have given me a teacher in Thoreau, who furnished me through his essay on the "Duty of Civil Disobedience" scientific confirmation of what I was doing in South Africa. Great Britain gave me Ruskin, whose "Unto This Last" transformed me overnight from a lawyer and a city-dweller into a rustic living away from Durban on a farm, three miles from the nearest railway station, and Russia gave me in Tolstoi, a teacher who furnished a reasoned basis for my non-violence.

He blessed my movement in South Africa when it was still in its infancy and of whose wonderful possibilities I had yet to learn. It was he who had prophesied in his letter to me that I was leading a movement which was destined to bring a message of hope to the down-trodden people of the earth. So you will see that I have not approached the present task in any spirit of enmity to Great Britain and the West. After having imbibed and assimilated the message of "Unto This Last" I could not be guilty of approving of Fascism or Nazism, whose cult is suppression of the individual and his liberty.

I invite you to read my formula of withdrawal or as it has been popularly called "Quit India" with this background. You may not read into it more than the context warranted.

I claim to be a votary of truth from my childhood. It was the most natural thing to me. My prayerful search gave me the revealing maxim "Truth is God" instead of the usual one "God is Truth." That maxim enables me to see God face to face as it were. I feel him pervade every fibre of my being. With this Truth as witness between you and me, I assert that I would not have asked my country to invite Great Britain to withdraw her rule over India irrespective of any demand to the contrary, if I had not seen at once that for the sake of Great Britain and the Allied cause it was necessary for Britain boldly to perform the duty of freeing India from bondage.

By that supreme act of justice Britain would have taken away all cause for the seething discontent of India. She will turn the growing ill will into active good will. I submit that it is worth all the battleships and airships that your wonder working engineers and financial resources can produce.

I know that interested propaganda has filled your ears and eyes with distorted visions of the Congress position. I have been painted as a hypocrite and enemy of Britain under disguise. My demonstrable spirit of accommodation has been described as my inconsistency, proving me to be an utterly unreliable man. I am not going to burden this letter with proof in support of my assertions. If the credit which I have enjoyed in America will not stand me in good stead, nothing I may argue in self defense will carry conviction.

You have made common cause with Great Britain. You cannot therefore disown responsibility for anything that her representatives do in India. You will do a grievous wrong to the Allied cause, if you do not sift the Truth from the chaff whilst there is yet time. Just think of it. Is there anything wrong in the Congress demanding unconditional recognition of India's independence? It is being said: "But this is not the time." We say: This is the psychological moment for that recognition. For then and then only can there be irresistible opposition to Japanese aggression. It is of immense value to the Allied cause if it is also of equal value to India.

I want you to look upon the immediate recognition of India's independence as a war measure of first class magnitude.

Framed Edition

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