The Charlotte News

Tuesday, May 19, 1942

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page and "Key to a Policy" on the editorial page examine the membership of Senator Robert Reynolds on three lobbying committees which received funding from George Viereck, a Nazi agent, recently convicted for not registering as same. Noting that the Senator had publicly commented of his dislike for the editor of The News, the editorial concludes from the Senator’s public statements, including his recent endorsement of Gerald L.K. Smith’s Fascist publication, that Senator Reynolds wanted to win the war, but with the United States aligned against Britain and Russia. The piece stops short of calling the Senate Military Affairs Committee Chairman a Nazi and Fascist sympathizer, but, plainly, that is its implication, and the fair implication to be gleaned from the entire panoply of public statements which, at least during the previous four years, had made the Senator famous, at least as famous as Milwaukee which likely supplied a large part of his diet.

We reprint the nearly unreadable text of the bracketed note at the base of this editorial for your ease of discernment:

[The May issue of "The Cross and the Flag" devotes its entire back page to a promotional article based on Reynolds’ endorsement. Elsewhere, the Government’s investigation of Father Coughlin, a pro-Nazi sympathizer, is represented as a "Communist plot." Two pages are given over to reprinting an effort by Congressman Dies on Vice-President Wallace. For some individuals, however, "The Cross and the Flag" has praise. They are: Lindbergh, Dr. Gerald B. Winrod, Kansas pro-Nazi agitator, Col. "McCosmic," Col. Patterson of the New York Daily News, Cissie Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald, William Randolph Hearst, AND Senator Robert Rice Reynolds. Feature article of the May issue is entitled "My Hat’s in the Ring" in which the Rev. Smith announces that he will run for the Senate from Michigan. One of his planks, to redeem Father Coughlin.

"The treatment that this minister of Christ is receiving at the hands of the bloodthirsty Reds," he says, "is unbelievable."]

Whether his combined distaste for The News and his Nazi friends and his friends made in Mexico during his summer, 1940 trip, much to the dismay and embarrassment at the time of fellow Tar Heel and Ambassador Josephus Daniels, had caused the Senator to transact some business with some Nazi agents and intriguants south of the border in, say, June, 1941, we cannot say. But it does stand to reason.

The editorial column waxes angry in its denunciation of remarks by Gandhi to the effect that if Britain and the United States would give up profiteering abroad, they could end the war. The sentiment was certainly profoundly naive, as the editorial explains. At the same time, one can understand India’s gripe with the capitalist powers, especially the British. The argument was simple: allow India to govern itself. The United States could hardly fume at such an expression of desire for independence from Mother Britain.

But, practically, at this juncture in history, the time was not ripe for withdrawal, lest the entire globe be brought under the yoke of Nazism and Japanese feudalism. Gandhi, perhaps, did not fully understand the extent to which the Nazis and the Japanese were willing to go for conquest, that genocide was not only an expedient to be practiced but part of the overall plan when time was ripe or resistance too strong. Whether Satyagraha could realistically have worked against this form of insistently militant evil, devoid of human compassion, steeled as the Samurai sword, no one fortunately may say.

The origin of this ruthless design on humanity was a xenophobic perception of the world, that the world unlike themselves was hostile to their existence and that thus a perfect rationale existed to eliminate those unlike themselves who would be uncooperative in the Wave of the Future, which only the chosen might be able to perceive and place into action. Ultimately, of course, Hitler would have waged war on Japan out of this notion of Teutonic superiority and need for conquest of others to demonstrate its supremacy. In such a Ragnarok, the two warring societies might well have extinguished each other down to the sparks from which their xenophobia originated. But how many more might have been killed than the 50 million during the six years of war, and two more before that in China, no one may say.

And, of course, through it all, the United States was developing its doomsday weapon which, had the society lasted in isolationist mode so long as July, 1945 without falling under the yoke of Nazism or Japanese feudalism, it might well have ended the matter anyway on its own terms. But that was a long, unforeseeable gamble in 1942, and one hardly able to be risked on a hunch that the doomsday device might actually work, and do so without setting up a chain reaction which would blow the whole planet to kingdom come.

As we have speculated before, who knows? Maybe it did. Our parents perhaps just didn’t quite know how to tell us.

"In Retaliation" continues the hostile theme, suggesting that it was an appropriate check on German mistreatment of civilians and prisoners for the RAF and American planes mercilessly to bomb German population centers. The editorial writers, whether Dowd or Stuart Rabb, only in his mid-twenties, were tasting by this point, no doubt, the gunpowder themselves, Dowd getting ready to join the Navy and Rabb quite subject to the draft. So, the caustic tone of these editorials may be forgiven.

The entire society was suffering after a decade pinned under the wreck of cruel Depression which had only released in 1939-40 its jowling grip, to find now the new buying power restrained by lack of products to buy and reduced by the heavy taxation the war effort to supply, all the while under the intense pressure of actual attack or losing the war outright to the Axis--Odin's "whirling Cross of Fire", as Dorothy Thompson aptly it this day describes--, and falling soon enough afterward, economically and socially, under its enslaving thrip.

It was the most dangerous time the world had ever known. Consequently, it became, even among the democracies, of an unfurling deruncinating derving throne, the most ruthless to insure survival for the duration until the Axis could be destroyed, its adherents' sons made unshone, a detoxified sundial's abraxas allozooid.

Dorothy Thompson offers a look into Hitler’s consistent weather excuses offered up as explanation to the German populace for the debacle occurring on the Russian front, reportedly now having a marked effect on German morale. Two million young men lost in less than a year would tend to have that impact on most societies, especially when the reason for it was a megalomaniac possessed of a psychosis. Ms. Thompson points out that, to the Russians, the huge sacrifices, numbering in the millions, were fairly commonplace in their history. She examples several times in the previous two hundred years, in its conquests of the Baltic States and the Caucasus, Russia's sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of men, equivalent to one-third to one-fourth of its total armies on each successive occasion, to conquer neighboring lands or achieve victory over an invader.

She cites the 62 years it consistently fought to secure the Caucasus from Persia and asks rhetorically whether Germany would like still to be fighting for control of that region through the year 2003.

She concludes that the democracies have much for which to be thankful in the fact that Hitler did not take to heart Bismarck’s firm axiom: never wage war on Russia.

Double, double, toil and trouble.

As tens of thousands of Yanks, some having also come with the AEF in 1917-18, landed in Ireland after a well-protected voyage by ocean liner, ready to mount an offensive on the Continent some 300,000 strong, suggests the front page, the Russian cavalry, with plentiful air cover, gave fierce chase to the Nazis, leaving their guns and tanks behind as they fast fled from the Kharkov offensive, having encountered the Rebbaj gnickow.

All of that sounded as wonderful news, no doubt, to the readers of the day. Unfortunately, however, it provided undue optimism. There would be no invasion anywhere in the Atlantic or Mediterranean until the end of the year with the invasion of North Africa and then, once retaken for the Allies, the invasion of Sicily in 1943. And, the news from Kharkov would soon take its bad turn, winding up in wholesale slaughter of Russians in those large numbers, 200,000 to 250,000 in just two weeks of fighting. The talk of post-war planning was premature. But, these stalwarts of those times had somehow to keep their heads about them amid the ongoing horror astride the world.

Double, double, toil and trouble.

And Senator Owen Brewster of Maine asked for a report on the number of small craft deployed to find submarines in the Atlantic.

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