The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 4, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note:

In the Senate, the Republicans gained nine seats to reduce a 66 to 28 lopsided Democratic majority, with two third-party seats, to a still-lopsided, but narrower, majority of 58 to 37, with one Progressive Party member. Notably, however, the necessary majority for cloture to break a filibuster, in that time requiring two-thirds of the voting members, was no longer available to the Democrats. On many measures, especially war measures prior to Pearl Harbor, the fact of Democratic solidarity had been for the most part in hibernation, as many Southern isolationist Senators, such as Bob Reynolds, voted with the Republican isolationists, making the concept of a filibuster-proof Senate in the 77th Congress largely an academic matter anyway.

In the House, the GOP gain at this point in the election counting was a net of 32 seats, with 47 contests still in limbo. By the final count, the Republicans had a net gain of fully 43 seats, considerably narrowing a previously wide Democratic majority down to a scant 13 seats, 222 to 209, with four third-party seats typically voting Democratic.

Even Ham Fish, from the silk stocking district where the President resided along the Hudson, was returned to the Congress. And that, despite both Thomas Dewey and Wendell Willkie of his own party having repudiated him in the primary and failed to campaign for him in the general election, notable for Dewey, the candidate for governor.

In the Senate, it was the narrowest majority of Democrats since the class which took office with Roosevelt in 1933 when there was a 59 to 36 majority with one third-party member. That majority had steadily grown through the 1936 election when the Democratic sweep piled up a whopping 76 to 17 majority, with three third-party seats, to reach the Democratic high-water mark. Similarly, in the House, this majority would be the slenderest by far of any which the Democrats had enjoyed during Roosevelt's ten years in office. The previous Congress, with a 102 seat majority for the Democrats, had been the closest thus far of the five Congresses during Roosevelt's tenure, while the 1936 election had provided a grand 334 to 88 super-majority for the Democrats, with 13 third-party seats.

What did the overwhelming turn of the tide to Republicans mean? Was the country fed up with Roosevelt, or was it fed up with the war and decided to blame Congress? Congress had taken tremendous criticism since Pearl Harbor in the press for its sloth and fractionalization, causing it to fail to act earlier on presidential recommendations for Lend-Lease aid to Great Britain, for instance, as well as general war mobilization, costing the country a precious year of preparatory organization and coordinated formulation of military strategy for a war in which nearly everyone but the most entrenched isolationists, by the summer of 1941 at least, knew America would have to fight. Or, was it repudiation of both the executive and legislative handling thus far of the war and the war mobilization effort, impacting every facet of American life? Was it primarily an adverse reaction to Congress's passage just before the election of the draft bills to lower the minimum age to 18, even if the Senate version retained an amendment to mandate at least a year of training before the young draftees could be sent into combat zones? Or, given the record low turnout, was it a matter of Republicans simply seeing an opportunity and better able to marshal their forces at the polls?

Whatever the reason, the tide largely would shift back to the Democrats in 1944, even if the Republicans did gain one seat in the Senate; they would lose 18 seats in the House and, of course, the presidency, once again to FDR.

Whether prophetic or indicative merely of self-fulfilling prophecy, the piece by William Beale, while incorrectly assuming that FDR would not run for a fourth term, correctly states the composition of the Republican ticket for 1944, Thomas Dewey and John W. Bricker, the latter just elected to his third two-year term as Governor of Ohio, the former to his first term as Governor of New York. Another successful candidate of the election, Earl Warren, who was elected Governor of California, would be the running mate of Dewey in the 1948 presidential election, the one which was successful for the Dewey-Warren ticket--at least by the early editions of the Chicago papers.

The counter-offensive operation by the Marines against the array of Japanese troops at the Matanikau River and at Point Cruz to the west of Henderson Field during Sunday through the previous day, terminated in the early hours of this day to concentrate on the landing of Japanese reinforcements at Koli Point to the east of Henderson Field, was reported this date. The prompt reporting was an obvious effort to answer press complaints of unnecessary sloth on the part of the military in reporting battle results, especially in the Solomons. The still unidentified Hornet, for instance, had nevertheless been described on Monday, just a week after its loss, as a sunk carrier from the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, October 26. That was a considerable improvement from the six weeks it took to report the September 15 loss of the Wasp while on convoy duty to Guadalcanal.

Montgomery's Eighth Army was now reported in high gear, re-taking territory apace lost to Rommel during June.

The Australian troops under the command of General MacArthur were likewise moving with celerity against the retreating Japanese in New Guinea, headed for the key harbor and Japanese base at Buna on the north coast, the Allies now capable of fresh reinforcement and supply by air via the just captured field at Kokoda.

"No Surprise" speculates on the cause of the Republican turn by the sparse electorate coming to the polls, offers that it was likely the result of widespread discontent with the Administration's too great discipleship of labor, allowing unions to be the boss of the country's destiny; and that he too often had exercised the Bully Pulpit to obtain from Congress by coercion what he thought best for the country. It does not example this latter component of presumed disenchantment, but certainly fresh in everyone's mind was the President's recent Labor Day ultimatum to Congress that it must act by October 1 to provide the executive branch authority to set wage and price controls or the President would act anyway on his own, pursuant to the power ceded to him by Congress previously by the declarations of war to undertake all necessary steps for the security of the country to prosecute the war.

Raymond Clapper lays out the case starkly and succinctly for eliminating from the Senate bill on lowering the draft age the provision whereby 18 and 19-year old draftees would be trained for at least one year before being sent into combat areas: that mechanics who, the military commanders had indicated, could be trained in a mere four months, would not be eligible under the Senate version of the bill to go to any combat area for at least eight months beyond their requisite training period when mechanics and other such support personnel were badly needed on the fronts, where wear and tear on the machinery of war was obviously most abrupt and severe, work for which raw recruits of 18 and 19 years old were ideally suited; that in order to fill out a division of men to be shipped overseas, young draftees were likely to become necessary in the near future, such that their being delayed for a year by legally required training would cause potentially whole divisions to be delayed awaiting their full complement as a unit, when simply all that awaited them in the combat area was further training, the regular regimen of the men transshipped currently to Northern Ireland.

A letter writer exhorts the continued use of the Army volunteer option for penal inmates in lieu of active time in prison--signed, unabashedly, Walter Ernest Stafford, No. 36488, N.C. Penal Institution. A little expression of self-interest never hurt anyone. As we said before, they were good eggs.

And, we could not let pass without recognition the fact that the front page contains in its upper left column a report that the capture by the British Eighth Army of Himeimat, a height which had provided the enemy with a coign of vantage over the breadth of the battle sands, now enabled the British the same observatory from which to spot down the enemy and, by equal strokes, took it away from the enemy, thereby improving "the Eighth Army's tactical situation at the southern end of the line". And that this reference appears on the same day as "Handle with Care" appears on the editorial page, regarding the wisdom of Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox's spur to the public that wary reception of ostensibly good news from the Solomons represented, notwithstanding the appetite for the bon mot being whetted by morsels of such news reaching hungry eyes and ears, the appropriate attitude. That we might therefore find on one of these two pages some reference, expressed or sublimated, to the Monkey Man would not be at all surprising. Oh, no, not Scopes or Darrow, Bryan, or even Darwin--though by some degree of extrapolation from a reference, you might locate the latter tangentially, should you pick it, through the dialogue of a film from just a few years back. No, you know who we mean. But, then, where is Tweeter? The Silver-man?

In any event, it was November again.