The Charlotte News

Monday, February 23, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

And he was not alone. The editorial column echoes the sentiment in both "Honesty", criticizing the lack of candor on the war, and "Impatience", on the public's craving for a steady, decisive hand at the tiller, not finding it thus far in FDR. The latter does not square with our most usually understood understanding of the history of the war, but here it was, disunity and evaporating confidence in the country's leadership less than three months after Pearl Harbor.

The feeling was neither just local. Paul Mallon writes of the same theme, and had been intermittently for the previous couple of weeks. The people were prepared for the worst, and yet were being given sugar-coated deception, lulling them into false security. Archibald MacLeish, publicity man for the government, comes in for the worst personal criticism on the point, but the dry basting is spread generally on the entire Administration.

At base of this criticism, of course, was the unrelenting bad news blasting across the front pages without respite since Pearl Harbor. Things were not getting any better. The Doolittle raid on Tokyo, now being planned secretly for mid-April, was becoming more important as a potential psychological stimulant to rekindle and sustain positive public opinion as the days passed.

Raymond Clapper takes the opposite view, that the criticism of the Administration is not only without good footing so early in the war, but that it is bad psychologically for those with the responsibility of prosecuting it. He draws an imperfect analogy to a capable child in school who is nevertheless not living up to potential. Whether that statement was supposed to be a psychological boon to under-achieving schoolchildren, their comparison to the President, or to parents of same, we don't know; but it could not have done much for the morale of the President and his executive officers in the government. The President, for the back-handed sympathy, might have sent Mr. Clapper a beanie.

The conclusion for the month of February, 1942 is that the country was listing badly on its side, as surely as the Normandie in New York Harbor. After the drubbing at Pearl Harbor, the country and its Allies had taken haymaker after haymaker, with little ability to land anything on the other side. The Fifth Column propaganda mill within the country had started again in full force, even if abated still from pre-Pearl Harbor levels. It was hard to muster patriotic zeal out of devoting the country to full military industrial production.

Plainly, the country had changed. No sugar, no new cars, no tires for the old ones stood as reminders, of increasing notice daily, that drastic measures were demanded to win the war. But thus far, that was the only thing markedly noticeable outside the daily headlines repeating the drone of disastrous results in the Pacific. In less than three months, all of the Far East except Australia and India was either in Japanese hands or, in the case of the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, rapidly and without respite, coming ever closer to defeat and complete occupation.

And, in keeping with the sour mood of the day, while we truly hate picking on anyone's salutary poem, we cannot resist saying that the little ode to Mom among the letters to the editor is, without question, Hackneyed.

The man reported by The New Yorker as being in the steam bath in San Francisco when a blackout occurred, thus causing him unexpectedly to find himself without a fig, japanned as it were, in the very co-occupied lobby when the lights resumed, surely needed more than defense bonds for his freighted succor. He needed, we opine, a French palm frond and mated tucker, maybe a frundel of bunewand to insulate his friskin from the bandersnatch's frumious frumpery at the exhibition.