The Charlotte News

Monday, March 16, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page begins with an unusual editorial, perhaps unique in the history of The News, stating what it perceives to be the vox populi, that war production was being hampered by undue bureaucratization in Washington, disorganized government, a Congress too willing to endorse Administration proposals, and an Administration too eager to maintain the social reforms passed in the wake of the Depression, such as wage and hour laws, collective bargaining protections instituted through the NLRB, and WPA programs. The piece urges the population of its readers to write their views to their Congressmen, while recognizing that it was a hopeless proposition to move Congress en bloc to do much of anything--excepting of course that which had occurred en bloc on December 8 and 10, the declarations of war on the Axis nations.

A Nazi U-boat struck a U.S. tanker, its flames visible off Wrightsville and Carolina beaches at Wilmington, N.C., killing an undisclosed number of sailors, some ground in the propeller shaft as the ship slipped beneath the waves.

A Chilean freighter was sunk 30 miles off the coast of New York.

Russia prepared its eastern frontier for a potential attack from Manchukuo on Vladivostok, but scoffed at the notion that a million Japanese congregated on this frontier would seriously jeopardize the contingent of a million and a half men maintained by the Russian Army.

The Russian Army also announced that the re-capture of Kharkov, Russia's steel capital, was imminent. The communique indicated that some 14,000 Russians had been executed by the Nazis in atrocities during the occupation begun October 30.

The goldfish bowl used in World War I for the lottery was brought to Washington for the same purpose again, to serve as the ominous repository for little green capsules, each containing a birth date for each day of the year, the force of the hallowed stroke of the wooden paddle giving them stir finally determining the fate of each possessor of the date selected, thereby establishing the order of draft for those men as yet unregistered between the widely divergent ages of 20 and 44. This war would have the last United States draft for men above the age of 26.

A piece from Time on the editorial page chronicles the harrowing escape from Singapore as filed by young but grey-haired A.P. reporter Yates McDaniel--standing in sharp contrast to the report filed the week before the fall of the city during which civilians attended the theater and the tea garden as bombs fell inside the city and fighting continued across the Johore Strait in the jungle reaches to the north. He describes the journey by raft to Sumatra after the rescue ship was lost to bombs, and then a truck ride through 400 miles of jungle to an awaiting ship to take him and his fellow evacuees to Batavia on Java. The coverage of war had proved not such an exciting proposition even for a young and fit reporter accustomed to the travails of war already experienced as he covered the fighting on the Yangtze River in China.

The Marshall (N.C.) News-Record piece tells of a unanimous resolution passed by the Tri-State Medical Association of the Carolinas and Virginia condemning Tom Jimison for what the association found to be a scurrilous and unwarranted attack on the head doctor and his associates at the Morganton insane asylum. The article dismisses the attack as doing nothing but shedding unfavorable light on the medical association itself. Significant in the piece is the first expression, among the many pieces and letters on this important series by Mr. Jimison from late January and early February, to the effect that many believed that Jimison voluntarily committed himself to the institution in order to get the story firsthand as a participant-observer. We think it more than probable that such was the case, underscoring both the accuracy and credibility of his reports. Sometimes, extraordinary measures must be undertaken to obtain a story when the reporter is an extraordinarily dedicated soul to the truth and the story lies hidden otherwise amid plausible denials that the declarants were, after all, committed to the facility, voluntarily or involuntarily, for insanity. Mr. Jimison was such a reporter and individual, as his whole career testified.

"Bob's Proposal" sets forth the Hitleresque idea that all "enemy aliens" interned during the war should be sent to labor camps in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico to build highways. Leave it to Bob's brilliance and his longstanding anti-alien prejudices to come up with another extraordinarily egalitarian scheme such as that.

The New Yorker piece on the page tells who this chap Jane was who in 1897 first issued Jane's Fighting Ships, still in publication to this day. (And we had always thought that perhaps it might be just some lady named Jane who had an interest in ships.)

And whether the preacher there on St. Simons Island, Georgia, had partially in mind, in his preachments regarding the end of times, another preacher's fatal shooting in February, 1938 on the hire of the notorious Cofer Brothers, gambling casino and liquor store magnates on the island, we don't know. Maybe it was just the war; maybe it was a combination of things. But between U-boats off the coastal shores regularly now plowing torpedoes into shipping and a preacher, just four years earlier, shot to death at long range by hired killers while he sat in his home preparing a sermon, we can understand why Pastor Winburn might have thought it the time of Armageddon imminent.

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