The Charlotte News

Monday, September 14, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We should make a slight emendation to that which we indicated Saturday in our note regarding the delayed report of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons at Guadalcanal on August 24. While it was the first major naval assault undertaken by the Japanese to attempt to regain the crucial airfield captured on Guadalcanal, the first land assault had occurred on August 21, launched from the Tenaru River, resulting in a debacle for the Japanese, a loss of 775 of 917 men with another 15 captured, while the Allies lost 42 men out of a force of 3,000. But Tenaru was obviouisly intended as a combined offensive to be followed by naval and air support on August 24. Thus, the whole battle, which is generally divided in twain for historical analysis between Tenaru and the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, can nevertheless be seen as one operation from the Japanese perspective—one operation which failed miserably.

Not too much of note appears on the front page of this date which we have not previously noted at some length and so we leave it for you to read. Clare Boothe Luce went on to win the Congressional seat she sought from Connecticut and served two terms in the Congress, remarkable primarily for her efforts to limit FDR in the prosecution of the war and her general support of Conservative causes, a hallmark of her life through her death in 1987.

On the editorial page, a piece by Robert Ruark reports of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s positive prognosis for North Africa, concluding with a quote that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel would prove no match for General Patton, whose picture adorned the Senator’s office wall. True enough. But we wonder how that got past the censor when it plainly telegraphed to the Nazis where the second front was likely to open and even who would lead the assault—as in fact would begin under Patton in North Africa less than a mere two months hence.

Perhaps it was simply another feint to suggest to the Nazis a red herring. For why would any censor allow such information to be passed to the enemy in the public press if indeed such a plan were in fact afoot?

"Grim Choice" poses the Hobson position confronting the French people: submit to the conscription of labor initiated by Pierre Laval to support the Reich or revolt and undertake sabotage, inviting mass Nazi reprisal. The editorial votes for revolt, even if futile in the short-run, for it believes that at least it would create enough chaos in the Reich’s production scheme to draw off troops from the Russian front.

"All Others..." leaves us a bit confused. It carps that the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, had only implemented half-measures in promulgating the otherwise laudable austerity program limiting the amount each citizen of the country could eat in restaurants. But the editorial assumes that the category of "other meals" includes something besides breakfast and proceeds lightly then to criticize the apparently fat outbacker for his gluttony.

It is true that if one had to be "limited" to three courses per meal for starters, there appeared a bit of excess in the pastry department or somewhere. Maybe in between the salad or soup and the sirloin, they were having kiwi a la mode with sorbet to clear the palate.

Whatever the case, they had just beat the fire out of the Japanese at Milne Bay in New Guinea and so the Yanks had little ground for quarrel with whatever austerity or profligacy they sought for themselves.

"Home-Grown" cites the six native North Carolina baseball players in the lineup of the St. Louis Cardinals, then vying for the lead in the National League. They would go on to win the pennant by two games over the Brooklyn Dodgers and the World Series, 4 games to 1, over the Yankees. The Cardinals’ roster included Stan Musial. (Cf. Corporal Potts in "Guadalcanal Diary", the 1943 film, for further scores)

Paul Mallon writes briefly of the tactic being employed by the Japanese, that of night landings via small boats and setting up sniper nests, shooting from trees, generally guerilla-style tactics which he describes as "savage" and comparable to the ambush off the bluff or stealth in moccasins employed by the American Indian in the frontier West.

He, however, neglects to recall the same guerilla-style tactics employed by the Patriots against the Loyalists and Redcoats during the American Revolution against the similar British complaint that the Rebel colonists were uncouth savages fighting by methods unacceptable in modern warfare, not fighting as gentlemen fought in previous wars, out in the open, mano a mano en la corrida, with established parameters beyond which no one but uncouth heathens dared venture.

Pearl Harbor, of course, the Blitz of London before it, Poland before that, Czechoslovakia even before that, the rape of China by the Japanese and the massacre of Ethiopia by Mussolini before all of it, had served to establish a paradigm indicating that this war prosecuted by the Axis was not a gentleman’s war confined by any decorous rules, those established in Geneva or otherwise.

His assumption that the troops holding Guadalcanal were regularly receiving support and reinforcement was incorrect; the air cover and re-supply would not come in force until mid-October, with the first wave of sturdy troops who fought, nearly green at the beginning, not to be replaced until early December.

Mr. Mallon also again takes issue with Leon Henderson, this time caviling at his complaint that American citizens, workers, and industrialists were not making enough of a sacrifice for the war effort. Mallon stresses what he claims are errant statistics cited by Henderson on the increase in workers’ wages and farm income, claimed to be by Henderson 71 and 75 percent respectively. Mallon says, however, that these figures were illusory, as most of the increased wages of labor went to the unions and much of the increased farm income was offset by the absence of available farm labor necessitating more hands-on work by the farm owners.

But, was he correct? Had union dues risen so sharply with the war as compared to the pre-war period such that higher income was now being absorbed by the union bosses at a greater rate than before? Were farm incomes rising because of more efficient labor by the farmers with smaller workforces to manage? If so, was this development, on balance, not a positive improvement?

His overall point appears valid. What was Henderson driving at? In order to demonstrate sacrifice, should the country not prosper, should the country return to near depression status in terms of personal and corporate incomes? Would that have been a positive development for overall morale on the domestic front?

Yet, Mallon's point seems to cut against his argument the previous day, criticizing Henderson for his comment that there had been 400 percent increase in corporate income, causing workers to want a like increase in wages.

Mr. Mallon appears more intent on knocking Leon Henderson than any consistent stance on this particular issue.

Dorothy Thompson writes of the predictions of Dr. Charles Stine, vice-president of Dupont, regarding "new continents of matter" with the "world of 1940 already become an antiquity". He suggests that new plastics would characterize this post-war age, this new frontier, as Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles had termed it in his Memorial Day address at Arlington. It would include, said Dr. Stine, high-pressure synthesis of ammonia, new age fertilizers to grow crops bigger and better than ever, unbreakable, floatable glass, non-flammable wood, wireless window screens, and, something Ms. Thompson stresses, air-woven hosiery.

What? Was this truly going to be the age where the new "Anything Goes" made the 1920’s version seem tame and demure?

Add rocket ships and space travel, jets, and thermonuclear devices to the mix and you do have a pretty accurate picture of the essential distinguishing characteristics of the post-war era.

Plexiglas and other such plastics—one word, think about it—wood or wireless?

We do have plastic window screens. The high-yield fertilizers, checkmark. Fiberglass, of which boats and even automobiles were manufactured by the early 1950’s. Air-woven hosiery? Polyester fabrics come close to the idea, being thermoplastics, the same genus of material from which fiberglass and plexiglas come.

As to non-flammable wood, we are not aware of any such analogue except steel. But give it time, as the night is still young. (Sheetrock doesn’t count as they had plaster over lath, albeit not as fire resistant as sheetrock, prior to the war.)

When they learn to manufacture fertilizer with special ingredients which mix with the sap to form a fire retardant circulatory material to protect the live trees from flammability in and around towns and cities, such as Los Angeles and Oakland, won’t that be a day? Of course, it’s the dead-wood kindling below the trees which ultimately starts those fires and so you still must have the non-flammable wood after its useful life to the tree is done. In that event, just don’t get lost in the Sierras in wintertime with your dog and then have to resort to caninibalism, or whatever you would call it.

But then, to spoil all of the post-war fun, there had to be those confounding thermonuclear devices, jets, and rocketry, all either derivative directly from or stimulated by the Third Reich. Once on the landscape and opened, Pandora’s Box has proved hard to close. Did these ultimate devices of war have to be to end World War II? Regardless of that purely hypothetical question, the concomitant question arises with it, philosophically, as to whether man is ready yet to close it, for the presence of nuclear weapons in the world having proved on many occasions to deter widespread proliferation of conventional warfare. But, in contraposition, the immediate question must also then be posed as to the expense to human health and well-being of the environment in which we must live resultant from this insistence on mutual deterrence over time by nuclear weaponry.

It is self-evident that there have been manifold adverse effects resulting from the nuclear tests in the atmosphere conducted wholesale by the United States and the Soviet Union between 1945 and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. And to what extent subsequent underground testing impacted ground water and to what extent strorage of nuclear waste material with a half life of several hundreds or thousands of years impacts ground water and causes cancer have yet fully to be determined.

Statistical data suggest that cancer rates rose steadily from 1973 to 1992 and have generally been declining since that time. But there are a whole range of reasons which might explain that downward arc of the curve: reduction in cigarette smoking; better health care; the establishment of the E.P.A. in the United States and greater sensitivity generally on the part of governments to enviromental issues and protection, such as elimination of lead, mercury, and other toxic waste products of industry being injected into streams and rivers to pollute fish and thus find their way into the human diet. (We do not include in that array better treatment of cancer and prolonging the quality of life after its diagnosis because the statistics we reference are for cases of cancer diagnosis, not mortality rates from cancer, which have fallen precipitously in most categories of cancer in recent years.)

In any event, plastics—think about it. Wood or wireless? We have both.

In the end, we suppose that the quote of the day has something to say of man’s quest for a better, more comfortable existence on the planet. Does all of the infrastructure of industry manifested during the industrial age of the past 150 years or so, obviously taking its toll on the planet in terms of global warming, on balance provide a benefit to mankind or has it been detrimental? Is it collectively the Babylon Harlot, the messenger bird of the end times, ironically deriving in part, not only from the desire for comfort--the natural human tendency for adaptation to avoid pain and acquire pleasure--but also to try to arrest that preceding it by centuries which much or most of humanity obviously had considered to be the harbinger of the end times—revolution, war, pestilence, hunger, the hardship emanating effluvially abroad the settled world from the latter two phenomena causing redundantly the former two through time, through this last world war.

Well, was it true, Dr. Stine’s prediction of "new continents of matter"? this Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, who died incidentally on November 22, 1963, this new frontier of science and technology to which the Kennedy Administration in part dedicated itself to developing with greater tenacity than before, not only to keep pace in the very dangerous nuclear world of that time, but also to afford greater comfort through time, such that the elimination of poverty and with it ignorance and with those divisions of humankind causing war, causing discrimination by race and religion, might dissipate, might even ultimately disappear from the landscape--even if the notion of discriminatory prejudice of one sort or another is not likely ever to disappear from humanity. For we discriminate inevitably between human beings, for good or ill, everyday, mentally if not by action.

For instance, we discriminate between Lester Maddox and John F. Kennedy and their respective legacies from their political careers. We don’t like, historically, the politics, the belief system, or much of anything else about Lester Maddox. By contrast, we find the politics and publicly stated beliefs generally of President Kennedy to be cathartic for humankind, if not to be regarded as panaceas for all human ills or to be free from mistake, even major mistake, from the vantage of perfect hindsight. No single historical political figure could lay such a claim on history, contemporary or antedating the memory of those living, even if as to the latter group, except by analogy to figures who lived within memory, we tend gradually to lose sight of the interpersonal acrimony which came to cause personal biases of one sort or another for or against a particular personage in history, and thus, at least in theory, adopt a more objective view of their legacy.

We no longer know, for instance, what it was which drove the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar, whether a good and laudable purpose for the people of Rome in that complex time or one more akin to the evil suggested by the characters portrayed darkly and in contrast in Shakespeare’s dramatization of the event--even if Shakespeare allowed in his better characters moments of ambivalent contemplation and feeling on the matter: "This was the noblest Roman of them all," after all, said Antony of Brutus in the final analysis.

But we don’t think that charity befits Lester.

Lester Maddox saw the world monolithically, without color, in black and white, one superior to the other, one therefore dependent as a child on the other, one therefore entitled to good treatment only on the basis of being a good child to the parent, not by right, not by acceptance as a full human being, a citizen. He saw African-Americans consistently in that light just as he saw young people, labeling African-Americans who were too uppity for his standards "niggers", labeling young people too uppity for his standards "hippies".

The apologists for his Neanderthalic ways say, even today, look, Lester hired more African-Americans in state government than all previous past governors and raised teacher salaries to the highest ever in the state’s history. See? he was really not so bad at all, just misunderstood.

While true statistically, the fact of course is that he had no choice if Georgia was to continue receiving necessary Federal funding for highways, for education, etc. He likely would have been impeached otherwise for violations of E.E.O.C. regulations and other such ameliorative Federal regulatory requirements, depriving the state of necessary matching funds for crucial state infrastructure.

Give at least a little credit where credit is due for those improvements, if you dare, apologist: to the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.

Lester benefited in his legacy, in other words, from being compelled to do precisely that by mandate of the Federal government which he had for so long publicly resisted and which gave him his notoriety in the first place, without which he could never have become governor in the first instance.

So, those statistics absurdly promulgated as being attributable to Lester Maddox are not. He had to hire more African-Americans than previous governors or simply face probable ouster from office after the state went to hell in a handbasket for want of Federal funding.

The apologists do not understand the broader context of society at the time or perhaps generally, that state and local governments are never systemically isolated from the Federal government. The whole is an integral, interlocking system, separation from which to avoid the perceived detriments of a large central government also works to relieve the state and local entities of the manifold benefits conferred from Washington, some of which are not appreciated daily by the Lesters of the world for their want of understanding of the world about them and how it came to be, as they proceed in a morass of daily confusion, observing disconnected events, near and far, out of context with the history recorded preceding those events, misunderstanding even that little of which they are aware from the history which preceded, confining it all within fences established to preserve their own narrow world view, eliminating with "Keep Out" and "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service" signs that which they cannot appreciate or understand, the subtle prismatic colorations which cause the world to be interesting within the daily routine, that which is dissonant to their pre-conceived notions of what ought to be, substituting the while for it that which was inbred from childhood by equally myopic parents out of whom the Lesters could not grow to enjoy a more expansive vision beyond their beginnings, one consistent with the change inevitable always in times abroad the world progressing, rather instead resisting, forming reactions to that change, stuck, in his case, somewhere in a nineteenth century romance novel—perhaps The Pickwick Papers.

Who knows?

Nothing wrong with that, though—

'Jingle,' said that versatile gentleman, taking the hint at once. 'Jingle--Alfred Jingle, Esq., of No Hall, Nowhere.'

'I shall be very happy, I am sure,' said Mr. Pickwick.

'So shall I,' said Mr. Alfred Jingle, drawing one arm through Mr. Pickwick's, and another through Mr. Wardle's, as he whispered confidentially in the ear of the former gentleman:--'Devilish good dinner--cold, but capital--peeped into the room this morning--fowls and pies, and all that sort of thing--pleasant fellows these--well behaved, too--very.'

Cold chicken, no doubt.

No, he had kiwi under sorbet, we heard.

Probably ate the kangaroo, mate.

He was a real nowhere man, though, apparently, was this A. Jingle, he was.

Oh yes he was, yeah.

But, one does not live inside a book. So let's get out of it.

Okay.

Memories of Lester, you will have to admit, are always good for stimulating juices of one sort or another, are they not? Pick it and rick it as you like.

Come to think of it, that would make a pretty fair book title—"Memories of Lester, Or, How All of Us, Black, White, Red, and In Between, Were Picked and Ricked in the South of the Sixties by the Lesters, More or Less".

Jolly good, then. You write it.

By the way, of the three men arrested and convicted for the murder of Malcolm X in 1965, only Talmadge Hayer eventually admitted being the trigger man. He was paroled in 1993 after 28 years in prison for the first degree murder. The other two convicted for the murder, Norman Butler and Thomas Johnson, received paroles in 1985 and 1987, respectively. All three men were members of the Nation of Islam.

They were nowhere men, too.

Here's to you, Mrs. L.; Joltin' Joe didn't win the series this year.