The Charlotte News

Tuesday, June 30, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports of another large raid on Bremen by the RAF, this one comprised of 300 planes, the third raid on Germany's second largest seaport city, producer of U-boats, in five nights.

In Egypt, Rommel moved another 35 miles closer to Alexandria, now taking Fuka.

The British announce a new commander for the British Eighth Army in Egypt, General Claude Auchinleck. After dissatisfaction with his command, he would be reassigned and succeeded on August 7 by General William Gott whose plane would be shot down in Egypt before assuming command, necessitating the appointment of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery--perhaps a stroke of fate which prevented the type of result envisioned by "Indian Gift" on the editorial page, loss of Egypt, costing the British Empire only 10% of its trade, while having the concomitant benefit of enabling it to combine all of its efforts in one theater to invade the Continent. Such a strategy of deliberate loss of Egypt, as suggested by the editorial, had it been employed, costing the loss of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal at a stroke--enabling easy Nazi supply to the Soviet front through the Black Sea, unrestrained access to the oil-rich Middle East, and joinder with the Japanese Navy through the Indian Ocean to protect it all once obtained--might well have cost the Allies the war.

Paul Mallon tells the amusing story, reminiscent of prohibition's search for speakeasies, of the government admission that it sent forth 2,000 spies to try to purchase gas illegally without ration cards. Rumors abounded that they were comely females. Regardless, the sting strategy failed to turn up more than 175 malefactors willing to sell gas on a come on.

"Sell me some gas, stranger, and you can come up and see me sometime."

Entrapment was the defense to use.

Raymond Clapper misses the 7.4 million tons of scrap iron sold to Japan between 1936 and the end of 1940. Still, with the rate of production now consuming 5 million tons of scrap per month to meet the needs of the armament industry, the Jap-scrap would have lasted only a month and a half. But, he reports, industry might fall short in meeting steel production goals by 5 million tons because of the shortage of available scrap iron to feed the furnaces. Thus, the 6th Avenue El continued to play its havoc.

Dorothy Thompson writes of the bullying, blood-lusting victory violence characteristic of the Nazi--starting with the purges of Catholics and Jews in the immediate aftermath of Munich in fall 1938, leading to Kristallnacht, November 9-10. The pattern had been repeated, she argues, in the destruction of the Czech villages of Lidice and Lezaky in the search for the plotters in the death of Reinhard Heydrich.

"Red Reward" tells of the other side of Nazi mentality, the consistent hunt for the effective propaganda weapon, in Czechoslovakia offering up a total of twenty million Czech crowns to those with loose enough tongues to provide information. Of course, most who did provide information scarcely lived long enough to spend the reward, for they, too, were usually shot or transferred to concentration camps where they died.

"Opening Gun" remarks on Paul McNutt's radio address to two African-American groups, indicating the Administration's sympathy with their goals of commensurate pay in the workplace, arguing that if they were fit enough to serve in the armed forces, they should be fit enough to receive wages comparable to white employees.

The editorial expresses agreement in the basic premise, agrees that blacks deserve protection of their rights, prime among which is the right to earn a living, but finds some degree of muddled alarm at the notion of such a move hearkening integration of the workplace, especially if the Administration was seen to be utilizing the war production effort and consequent appeals to patriotism to effectuate it.

This particular editorial opinion echoes a consistent distaste expressed for the concept of social and economic integration of society throughout the time since October, 1937 when our presentation of News editorials begins. The opinion was consistently present during Cash's tenure as Associate Editor as well, and when it arose, we speculated as to whether the opinion was one expressed by Cash or J.E. Dowd, leaning toward authorship by Dowd. This editorial tends to confirm that belief.

Cash disfavored Federal force bills as a means to bring about integration, and so expressed that reservation in The Mind of the South, believing that force bills, as in the past when they had been employed, were likely to stimulate the "hair-trigger temper" of the average Southerner, precipitating violent reaction in the masses of whites accustomed to the tradition of segregation in the South--as indeed Federal action did in the 1950's and 1960's. Nevertheless, Cash appeared to be in favor of integration of society. We have marshaled the evidence for this notion many times before and won't recapitulate it here.

In any event, while we disagree with the editorial's view in this regard, we nevertheless understand its positing its public opinion thusly in a society still resting on racial tenterhooks, still recalcitrantly resisting social justice, still retreating from reality, capable of becoming quite volatile over race at the drop of a hat. With war abroad ever threatening annihilation of the human race as it was then constituted, ever threatening to enslave every non-German, non-Aryan to a feudal dynasty, the last thing needed was to have division in society over race, threatening to hamper war production at this crucial juncture of history. Whether the common bond established by having a common enemy to fight in Japan and Germany had ameliorated generally to any great degree these feelings of racial discrimination or whether it merely sublimated them to a level from which they were less likely for the nonce to become irritated epidermally, is best measured in terms of what happened after the war, especially in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education decided in 1954.

It would take another generation and better education to realize acceptance of integration of society. Still, even with our first African-American President elected to office just eight months ago, it must be recognized that there is a grudging relinquishing in many segments of society of past traditions of segregation in neighborhoods, in churches, the truest and final test of integration of the social fabric and that which is signal of the abolition once and for all of racial apartheid in America, psychological and economic, such that there is a recognition of common humanity in whatever corporeal garb the human spirit is found to be dressed.

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