The Charlotte News

Friday, August 14, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page, per the ordinary, is preoccupied largely with more war news, but none too reliable or too specific. The Russians claimed to have stopped the forward advance of the Nazis toward Stalingrad and launched a counter-offensive. Another report from Sweden pegs a separate Russian counter-offensive northwest of Moscow, in the Rzhev region, as presenting a major quandary for the Nazi: whether to move troops from the south to resist it and thereby risk loss of momentum in the Caucasus, giving the Russians a chance to rest and bring up reinforcements.

The Japanese put forward a preposterous lot of claimed ships sunk in the Guadalcanal and Savo Island battles of the previous weekend. The American figures were correct.

Out of somewhere in South America comes a report that ten U. S. Army soldiers fought through a miserable morass of jungle finally to reach a "large river" and there see a riverboat rounding a bend, but too noisily to allow the call for help to be heard over the roar of the engines and the rush of the water in its wake.

Solution: pull out a cigarette lighter and hope.

It worked, the men were rescued, but the lighter hadn't worked since.

Must have been a Zippo.

Whether the riverboat was once owned by a nineteenth century Peruvian rubber baron named Fitzcarrald is not told.

On the domestic front, out of Beaumont, Texas came a report that an African-American Army private had been dragged from a bus by two police officers and then beaten and shot while on the way to the station house, all for the offense of having insisted on sitting elsewhere than in the back.

To the credit of the Federal Government, Attorney General Francis Biddle had initiated action against the two officers in Federal court for violating the private's civil rights.

The question remains, however, whether the ordinary citizen of the time, not in uniform, could have committed the same or like minor transgression of the law, but in gross offense to the established norms of apartheid, and escaped with their life; and, even if so, whether the Government would have similarly responded.

Certainly, it did not so respond in the 1950's, after the war, after the black came home from the fight, having fought just as resolutely alongside the white.

On the editorial page, "Precedent" tells of the election by the North Carolina Federation of Labor, an independent part of the AFL, of an African-American as its vice-president. The editorial suggests that the move, which had not been the norm among independent state unions or with the national union, boded well for cooperation among labor in the country at this time when production was so critical and thus esprit de corps indispensable.

Colonel Frederick Palmer again returns to the page to explain in brief why it was that the Axis nations were able to supply with such apparent relative ease such far-flung armies and navies and air forces over so broad a terrain and vastly expansive seas as they were compelled to do, while the Allies, by comparison much larger nations physically, were having such difficulty in supplying their defenses. He sums the answer simply: the tip of the bayonet was the means by which the Axis enforced their satrapies' populations to work to produce, in Korea and Manchukuo, in Czechoslovakia, in Italy, in France. And, in truth, he points out, the relative populations of the Allies to the Axis were not so great, about the same in fact, when subtracting Russia's 200 million and China's large but underdeveloped population of 457 million.

Anent war production, on target for meeting the President's seemingly impossible January goals for tanks, ships, planes, and guns, Raymond Clapper quotes an editor who nevertheless lamented the continuing lagging lines in the country with the statement, inter alia, "All too many have become too accustomed to Uncle Sam in a Santa Claus role. Let him turn Simon Legree and let us like it."

Well, the editor would only have to wait a little over two and a half decades and, voila!

And, Mr. W.C. Ethridge, in a letter to the editor, describes, no doubt, the source of President Nixon's double-douzey wave.

Someday, this war's gonna end.

Incidentally, we feel obliged to come to the lady's aid outside the office of the newspaper's trade: 'Twas in Kerch and Sevastopol that they did blast 'n' roll, These Nazis in search of caster oil, To grease their tread, to grip the thread of Scylla's sea, Yet, will it be Charybdis who grabs their throats nigh ere long, And sends them athwart their Black Sea hassock grave, Away from Balaklava's blades of Cossacks drawn.

When the Solano blows hot venomed breath,
It acts upon men's knives: steel takes to stabbing
Which else, with cooler winds, were honest steel,
Cutting but garlick.
There's a wind just now
Blows right from Seville--

--from The Spanish Gypsy, by George Eliot, 1868