The Charlotte News

Wednesday, May 13, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page provides the conflicting news from the Kerch Peninsula in the Crimea, on Hitler’s two million man, two thousand airplane offensive to gain the key to the Caucasus and the opening of its rich oil reserves to the Reich, a make or break proposition for Hitler. The German press pronounces 40,000 Russian soldiers surrounded and the offensive a fait accompli; the Russian press and the Western press stationed in Moscow indicate little significant inroads having been made, despite heavy Luftwaffe bombing at Kerch. The truth was unclear.

The editorial column continues the analysis of the new offensive in "Hitler’s Choice", indicating that Hitler’s concentration of forces on the southern front, 2,000 miles from Murmansk and Archangel, the ports to which American and British convoys were delivering war goods for the Russian front, indicated Hitler’s respect for the firepower being delivered.

Probably, however, a better reason may be found in the fact, as Paul Mallon’s columns the previous month had indicated, that the weather had turned sufficiently warm in the south to enable a drive, whereas in the north, the ice was still melting, the resulting mud and slush still making roads impassable, or at least inhibitory, to large armored columns on which the German offensive was not only dependent, but dependent, for their full effect, on procession with speed.

"Cold Deck" is one of those editorials, through no fault of its own, which would later have to be appended with "never mind". For it was, indeed, General Wainwright who gave the broadcast to the Philippines to surrender, as the later surfacing photograph we added to May 6 bears out, not the imposter which the Army experts had determined to be the case and which the editorial unwisely accepts as gospel.

But for the nonce, anyway, General Homma, who accepted the surrender on Bataan some three weeks after his suicide, was still dead nevertheless of his own hand, and General Wainwright had an imposter delivering a surrender address in his name right after the fall of Corregidor.

All, as Paul Mallon, next door, says loudly in the face of the Congressman wishing to silence press critics of government policy, that such notions could be damned; the straight dupe was going forth regardless of such puling anti-democratic nonsense!

C’est la guerre, we suppose.

And you wonder why a later generation of reporters during Vietnam dared question government accuracy.

A letter to the editor and "A Policy" in the editorial column comment on Mr. Derr’s letter to the editor on May 11, criticizing caustically and sarcastically the decision of the South Carolina Democrats, the seat in 1948 of the Strom Thurmond led Dixiecrat movement, to bar African-Americans from membership, at least in Union County. As the letter this date bears out, and the editorial explains, a spirit prevailed in the wake of the publication of the letter which endangered Mr. Derr’s safety and even brought the FBI down on him to investigate a possible charge of sedition.

He was arrested by the Monroe police chief, (whether Jesse Helms’s father who at one time occupied that position, we don’t know), albeit, said the chief, more for Mr. Derr’s own safety than for any charge of sedition.

All that for saying that if the South Carolina Democrats were going to deny the black man the right to vote, then "to hell with the U.S.A."

Well, yes. Mr. Derr had it precisely right, and the rest of the idiots, including the FBI, apparently couldn’t see right from wrong on this notion for seeing only white.

The News had the forthrightness to publish the original letter and report of the entire fracas, including printing an editorial on May 7, condemning the action of the Union County Democrats, which inspired the letter in the first instance. It had nothing for which to apologize.

A visit from the FBI, some racist cracker with the military police wanting to pay Mr. Derr’s fare back to Africa, and arrest "for his own safety" and transportation away from god-fearing Monroe to the heathen burg of Charlotte, all for saying "to hell with the U.S.A." in a letter to the editor in the context of the petit bourgeois of the Democratic Party of Union County, S.C. banning African-Americans from party membership with the stated goal of banning them from voting. Yes, again. It was beginning to resemble Hitler’s Germany.

For if a man cannot vote or hold membership in a political party of his choice, or, as Paul Mallon intones in the adjoining column, cannot criticize his government in print without fear of arrest or censorship, then it is to hell with the U.S.A. because at that point there is no U.S.A., but a mere imposter waving a facsimile flag devoid of meaning, possessed only of a Constitution not worth the parchment on which it is penned. For it is the exercise of that most precious freedom, that which is the single, indivisible freedom embraced by the First Amendment, for which the concept of Union within the United States stands most visibly and indissolubly. Without it, the country is nothing. No better than any third-rate dictatorship to whom it sneers and superciliously condescends as superior.

In any event, no one much minds them there in Monroe on occasion saying to hell with the University of North Carolina...

Raymond Clapper extends the discussion of the previous day by Dorothy Thompson on Vice-President Wallace’s speech the previous Friday regarding the post-war world. He adds that, in sum, Wallace said, half in jest, half seriously, that the goal for which the free world should strive, post-war, was a quart of milk per person per day. Well, yes again.

Got milk?

And P.R. McCain, one of the perennial letter writers in 1939-41, from whom we have not heard until now in 1942, sums the whole of the thing nicely with his wishful thinking re the blackbird, sparrow, and red bird in his front yard, all singing away blissfully together for their want of the human problems besetting the world, rationing, no transportation, and what have you else on down the dirty road.

He concludes therefore that if only man could fly, if only man had wings, and the babies fed by the old hens, digging wondrous jings of rolled fen for glee, all would a warbling pleasant chorus of happy-go-lucky kindred spirits be.

And, in response, it indeed came to pass, Mr. McCain: the 1960’s.

But, then, you see, came "The White Album", and, well, a few months afterward, the moon landing, Woodstock, and some other things in there, and then Altamont Passand, after that, it all becomes very complicated, ye know. We shall try to explain it to you. Give us a minute or two.

For now, we shall simply be content to say, Look Homeward, Angel.

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