The Charlotte News

Thursday, August 6, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Among the war news of the day on the front page is a report that a "Mr. Murray" appeared before Congress as an inventor desiring the cloak of a closed hearing to provide details of his new invention, the waterproof concrete with which to build a submarine.

It was said that, as the doors to the hearing room closed, out boomed an Irish brogue, someone heard to be singing: "Farewell and adieu, oh you fair Spanish ladies. Farewell and adieu, oh you ladies of Spain..."

The concrete submarine, last we heard, never quite made it off the shelf. But it was a heavy idea.

Convicted traitor, Max Stephan, Detroit restaurateur found guilty on June 29 of aiding and abetting the escape of Luftwaffe pilot Peter Krug, was sentenced in Federal District Court in Detroit to hang on November 13. He would not, however, hang as the sentence would be commuted by the President to life imprisonment. His was the first conviction for treason in the United States since 1794 during the Whiskey Rebellion.

The Whiskey Rebellion arose near Pittsburgh in protest of a Federal tax on liquor. President Washington and Tresaury Secretary Alexander Hamilton led a militia of nearly 13,000 in pursuit of the tax protesters, seeking to make the mob an example before the newly inaugurated Federal government in the country, not yet even years old. Only twenty persons were found and arrested. Of those, two were convicted of treason and sentenced to hang; Washington commuted both sentences.

Were matters being carried too far in 1942? Did the death penalty really have any deterrent effect on such activity?

Did not indictment for "sedition" based only on printed matter not violate freedom of speech and press?

Without that form of "sedition" after all, Thomas Paine's literature would have been suppressed and the United States might never have come to be in the first place.

Just because we may not like what was printed and that it was antithetical to freedom and democratic principles does not mean that it should have been suppressed and chilled, especially in time of war, by the criminal or civil laws. The marketplace of ideas must prove strong enough to withstand any such petty puerile nonsense as that spewed by William Dudley Pelley and Elizabeth Dilling, both a couple of crazy people, appealing only to the uneducated of the time.

If the country cannot educate its people any better than to follow blindly such fanciful idiocy, perhaps it ought suffer whatever consequence there comes from it, without resort to the law to effect a roadblock when the going gets too rough. Were Pelley and Dilling, et al., really having any significant impact on the country? Were they and their ilk not adequately being considered and opposed by the only forum from which they might be while still preserving the First Amendment, that is from within the public conversation as stimulated by the public press?

Did such indictments and other forms of official suppression and chilling of free speech not open the door for suppression of valid thought which merely might carp later at, say, a Richard Nixon, or some other untoward force in American political life to come?

Was it not the chasing of red herrings around the block, wasting the taxpayers' money, to set examples which yet would backfire against the foundation pins of democracy itself inside another 30 years?

Had the Administration now gone too far? Was the headiness of being the first American President elected to a third term too much for any human's conceit to withstand?

Were the forces of constriction of freedom not winning in America, if in slower cadence than before the marching drums of Europe and Asia? Had the isolationists, with the coming of this war, not in fact won a victory for their overall philosophy of government, that characterized by xenophobia and assurance only of Loyalist forms of "freedom", a freedom for those provided the royal imprimatur for loyal service to the Crown, involuntary "voluntary" servitude for the rest, being voluntary only in the sense that, without the servitude, the servant would literally starve, as surely as under a system of slavery in fact, that restrictive philosophy dating back in the country's bloodlines to a time long before the Whiskey Rebelion.

Well, again, we merely ask some questions.

Lieutenant Commander John Bulkeley, pictured receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor from the President, was the PT boat commander who transported General MacArthur away from the battle zone in the Philippines back in March, enabling MacArthur's escape to his new command post in Australia. Bulkeley would lead a long and distinguished career, including service in the landing on D-Day, before retiring as Rear Admiral in 1967, a position to which President Kennedy had promoted him in 1961 when he was made commander at Guantanamo.

In other front page news, the President vetoed a bill which would have created a new agency to oversee synthetic rubber production from grain, and instead appointed Bernard Baruch, World War I production coordinator, to chair a three-person committee, comprised also of the presidents of Harvard and MIT, to investigate the matter and make recommendations. The problem with `1+a new agency was ensnaring the solution in a bureaucratic morass, potentially slowing production of a synthetic substitute for the vanishing rubber supply, needed immediately for both military and civilian consumption. The country had already experienced the myriad problems from too much bureaucracy accompanying attempts at coordinated price control and production stimulus the previous year.

On the editorial page, Paul Mallon, in an open letter addressed in response to an inquiry among correspondents conducted by Life, suggests, among other things, to expedite the war effort, the landing of an expditionary force in the Aleutians to invade Japan and in North Africa to invade Europe, the apppointment of a leader of these forces who was committed to victory, and the sending of Lyndon Johnson to the Air Corps to offer his critique and straighten things out in that quarter.

Some of it would occur: Patton to lead the invasionary force in North Africa, Operation Torch, ultimately to coordiante the American invasion of Sicily in spring, 1943, and the suggestion for Lyndon Johnson--would await another 22 years for full implementation, concerning Southeast Asia, anyway.

You may assess for yourself the overall results of Mr. Mallon's recommedations and address your letters to him for either thanks or blame, as you see fit.

Sometimes, perhaps, it does not pay to be too propitious as a columnist.

We take nothing away from either George Patton or Lyndon Johnson, however, as it would be hard to imagine a world of the last 67 years without either or both. Without them, we might be living under the leadership of Hitler's grandson, His Highness, King Adolf III, and, for entertainment, doing what the New Jersey conscientious objector was doing, as described in "It Bites Back".

But then we did have Richard Nixon for awhile, anyway, despite the best efforts of Patton and Johnson.

So, maybe, after all, the country is strong enough to withstand just about anything.

As to the letter to the editor from Mr. Golden anent the solution to prostitution offered by Mr. Whitlock of Dayton, after prostitution became a problem when the rubber companies moved to town, perhaps the proper solution was not to throw the prostitutes, as Mr. Whitlock had suggested, bound in chains, in the Ohio River, but rather not to have the rubber companies move to Dayton in the first instance and, instead, put Mr. Whitlock maybe in the concrete submarine of Mr. Murray.

Charles Hargett wonders why so much fuss about the traveling salesman's right to increased gas rationing when the better solution lay with the storekeepers phoning or mailing in their orders for goods and services and putting the salesmen to work in overalls in the war industries. Mr. Hargett doesn't understand the social intercourse necessary to transmit commerce through its proper conduits. He also doesn't understand that once done, there would have been no going back. There is, after all, a penalty to be exacted for the internet and the elimination from the economy of salesmen and stores with goods in them.

The solution of course, in 1942, as well as today, is that good electric car we advocate, which, for all the talk, is still not being pushed hard enough up the hill of commerce. When? When the polar cap is gone completely?

Maybe we need Admiral Byrd here to lead the charge. Maybe Patton. Maybe Lyndon Johnson.

Grab these stubborn idiots by their shirt collars and lead. That's the way to effect change.

It is not done by practicing coolness and bridge club manners. That is a sure way for us all to wind up in the dark ages after the Flood.

Raymond Clapper quotes Archimedes as saying that if he had a lever long enough and a prop strong enough he could lift the earth. The problem was production.

We can put a man on the moon in eight years and two months after the first sub-orbital flight into space by a human being, but in the same space of time, we don't seem to be able even scarcely to make a dent in our consumption of fossel fuels, to cure our insatiable affair with gasoline and oil, indeed, despite the full knowledge of its poison to the planet in the meantime, even in the space of the last forty years. And, no precipitant event required us to get to the moon, except perhaps fear that the Russians would get there first and establish some sort of military base with nuclear weapons to hold us all in check.

Perhaps, the problem is that changing to fast, quiet, efficient, and sleek looking electric cars is just not enough of a stimulus to the average person's imagination to insist that the manufacturers shake loose from their oil roots and get busy at it. The prospect of the Flood, the starvation which will inevitably result, the new ice age in some parts of the globe where today it is temperate, the sweltering, tropical heat in other places now accustomed to relatively mild climes, seems not enough to trigger demand for that most crucial change.

Atlas has held the world on his shoulders for a long time and he appears to be getting tired under the weight. Archimedes might offer him help with that big lever and fulcrum.

Blinding one's self to reality is not what is meant by "imagination". Inventing concrete submarines is not what is meant. Creativity, with practical application of known principles, to effect a solution, even if temporary, to a major difficulty: that is imagination at work.

They called him Mr. Jimison.