The Charlotte News

Friday, July 10, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: In "Fat of the Land", the editorial column points up yet another shortage in the country, the basis for alleviation of which resided in the kitchens of America--animal fats. From animal fats comes glycerine, a prime ingredient of gunpowder, as well as for use medicinally in ointments and dressings. Thus, the shortage was significant and the resident cooks of America's households and restaurants consequently were being called upon to save their fat and send it to the government.

So, add animal fat and its glycerine to the hard chrome shortage, to the rubber shortage and the campaign just ending this date, inaugurated by the President June 15, for the requisitioning of scrap rubber, to the sugar rationing and the gas rationing, both of which latter commodities' short supply having arisen more from transportation problems, with tankers and railroad cars preoccupied in military usage, than actual lack of available raw product--even if in the case of sugar, the fall of the Philippines had significantly impacted the supply itself, notwithstanding plenty still remaining on the brazos.

These shortages, in each case, of course, were the result primarily of military needs taking precedence over civilian needs and the military then taking the lion's share of the supply which was available and able to be transported to the necessary depots for distribution to the consumer. Sugar, recall, as with glycerine, had both its medicinal and ordnance applications, was necessary for production of grain alcohol for treating the wounded, as well as for the manufacture of explosives.

Incidentally, whether the Herblock of the day before gave rise to the inspiration for this particular editorial, we don't know. But the cook could now see emblazoned on every strip of bacon sizzling on the griddle a Nazi Swastika or a big orange Rising Sun or a bound Bundle of Twigs, the Fasci, yelling loudly back: save the drippings in the cup for the next encounter with Rommel at El Alamein, with Italian airplanes in the Mediterranean, with the Japanese at Guadalcanal, all to insure sufficient powder that the ammo won't run short during the engagement.

"Rounding Out" tells of the related problem of poor physical shape found to be prevalent among the males attending Davidson College, such that only three of twenty-two qualified recently for entry to the Marine Corps. The problem was laid to the absence of an adequate gymnasium. The remedy was seen to lie in a drive to raise $250,000 to build one.

Whatever the case, the exiguity had not stopped recent Davidson graduates, Lieutenants Gurley and Holton, as reported in the column June 13, from riding with General Tinker to Wake Island when their Liberator was shot down June 7 in the waning hours of the Battle of Midway.

Albeit a little less pleasant during the winter, the absence of a gymnasium is no excuse, nor its presence necessarily a remedy, for failure of physical fitness. There is only one path to that remedial end, exercise and lots of it, preferably outdoors, even in the winter. Send the animal fat to the government rather than wear it.

Wipe away those glycerine tears, landlubber, pick up those feet, hit the track, double-time, triple-time--left-left-left-right-left. Back in line there, soldier.

Speaking of Lieutenant Gurley, we are reminded that young Annie Lee Gurley, letter writer of the previous spring carping of old Superman and Red Ryder being objectionably violent, would seem to have been borne out in her opinion by the relative lack of popularity of those comic strips as indicated in a recent poll by The News, the results of which are set forth on the page today. Of nineteen comic strips appearing in the newspaper regularly, Superman finished at number 12 and Red Ryder at 13, the latter with a one-way ticket to Palookaville down on the waterfront of Frisco trying to recover all that stolen cattle, at least last we checked in on him last summer about this time. Al Capp's L'il Abner finished at number 2. Everybody's talkin' 'bout baggism.

Anyway, popular or not, those who were syndicated were drawing six-figure salaries for drawing at a time when most of their readership of age to work were earning between $1,000 and $2,500 per year.

Paul Mallon reports on the quest by Little Steel workers for a dollar a day increase in their wage to $9 a day, a raise still somewhat less than the recent percentage rise in the cost of living in steel cities. Three of the four public members of the President's War Labor Board--responsible for negotiating with labor over wage and hours adjustments to avoid strikes in accord with the March pledge of cooperation for the duration from the AFL and CIO leadership--were said to be leaning against the increase. Only future Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, then dean of the University of Oregon law school, was definitely in favor of the raise. Among the other three public members was another future Senator, Frank Graham, the U.N.C. president at the time.

The broader significance of the sought increase was its impact on other industries and that omnipresent election-year balance to be struck between the need to appease labor and maintain production at high levels for the war effort, all while stultifying Hitler's and Tojo's best friend, inflation, at its usual source, wages. (If not Hitler and Tojo, at least in their physical bearing, certainly Mussolini had an inflated Axis--the wages of gluttony. But we digress.) The balance, in other words, had to be struck somewhere between power to the people and instant Karma, between Superman or Red Ryder and L'il Abner. Left-left-left-right-left.

A letter writer finds it not symptomatic of racism for Captain Brown of the police department to have recently used the word "nigger" in an official speech. The letter writer says that he was sitting close by at the time and knows that Captain Brown meant no offense when he used the word "nigger" instead of "Negro". The contextual usage is not provided and so we make no judgment ourselves.

For it is one thing to say, for instance, "Most of our murders here are committed by one nigger against another and so, as these must be dealt with swiftly and positively, we welcome our nigger officers to aid in that job," and quite another to offer, "I personally deplore the usage of the word 'nigger' publicly and privately, though as irony it may on occasion act as powerful antivenin to dissipate the virulence of its poison". Whether the captain's usage fell into the former category or the latter or somewhere in between is not provided, but if the former sort, or even if somewhere in between closer to the former, then certainly the captain was doing the bidding of Hitler as surely as the Gestapo, indeed, was acting the part which was part and parcel of the stimulus to the very conceptual basis which united the herrenvolk in Nazi commonweal, unity through appeal to racial superiority, providing in turn tacit approval to mob action resultant from shared emotive prejudice, creating in that the illusion of mystical power of one over another, enslavement to the herrenvolk's commonweal.

For what difference is there in a police captain demonstrating active prejudice toward anyone, individual or group, in a public forum, and the type of labeling which proceeded in Nazi Germany in the thirties, the drawing of long noses on shop windows below the label "Jude"? When officials countenance prejudice, the public, or large segments of it, are bound soon to follow, with Kristallnacht, with the primal lines jeering the marchers in Selma, with the dogs and fire hoses, with the bullets, with the gas following hard behind in steady succession.

Not reported thus far in The News, Hitler established during this time of July, 1942 a new headquarters on the Russian front, and returned, as he had the previous fall at Smolensk, to his emulation of Napoleon on the frontline, while maintaining his secure distance behind, comfortably insulated from the battle. The new headquarters, dubbed "Werwolf", was at Vinnitsa in the western Ukraine, near the north Rumanian border, hundreds of miles from Smolensk and its proximity to Moscow, within ready access to route of escape, a half hour's ride into satrapic-friendly Rumania, scarcely much further into occupied Poland.

Another key event which happened in July, 1942 but which will not be reported for its not being known outside the Nazi High Command, was the establishment of the notorious concentration camp at Treblinka in Poland. During 1942, some three million Jews who had been crowded into the Warsaw Ghetto, where rampant starvation had already begun the extermination process by the tens of thousands since its establishment in late 1939, were transferred to concentration camps in Poland, primarily Auschwitz, established April, 1940, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Treblinka accounted for an estimated 870,000 deaths in the time it operated, less than one year, until it was closed in spring, 1943. Treblinka, along with Belzec and Sobibor, were opened specifically to accord the mass extermination method by gas which was set into motion by Reinhard Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference in January after its personal approval by Hitler in November, 1941. Belzec was established in November, 1941 and closed in spring, 1943 after an estimated 600,000 were systematically murdered there. Sobibor opened in March, 1942 and was closed at the end of 1943 after an escape of 300 prisoners. An estimated 250,000 were murdered at Sobibor in its short year and a half of operation. Auschwitz saw the murder of fully 1.3 million in its five years of existence.

Together, therefore, these four camps in Poland accounted for over three million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, about half the total number.

But Treblinka, opened in July 1942, was the most efficient of all at fulfilling its purpose--870,000 lives extinguished in a mere ten months, about 3,000 per day for every day of its existence, 125 per hour for every hour of its existence.

Was it, as the letter writer suggested, divisive and doing the bidding of the Nazis merely to express offense at Captain Brown's public utterance, in an official police speech in Charlotte in 1942, of the word "nigger"?

Is that not the very point, following the example of the milice, with official police or judicial utterance, implicitly thereby sanctioning discriminatory relations, at which begins, vis à vis the common bonds of humanity, the Verfremdung?