The Charlotte News
Saturday, January 20, 1945
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the fourth inauguration of President Roosevelt had taken place at noon on the south portico of the White House before about 6,000 spectators on the lawn. With snow on the ground in Washington, the President lived up to his advance promise to keep the ceremony brief and without great fanfare in this sober time of war, with men daily dying along the Western Front.
He spoke for less than six minutes, just 551 words, and yet provided eloquence, if without the rhythm and energy which had committed to memory some of the lasting phrases of his first inaugural address in 1933.
It would be the last time he would speak formally to the American people, though he would yet deliver an address to Congress in March, upon his return from the historic Yalta Conference with Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin, set to begin within ten days.
A color film of the occasion, without sound, was made by the President's son-in-law, John Boettiger. Newsreel footage captured excerpts from the speech.
As the text is carried over to the inside of the newspaper from the front page, it is set forth in full below.
On the Eastern Front, the Russians had captured Tilsit in East Prussia, 25 miles from the Baltic. The Second White Russian Army had moved along a 35-mile front to within 62 miles of the Gulf of Danzig in southwestern East Prussia, reaching Gilgenburg, five miles from Tannenberg. Insterburg was in danger of being severed from Tilsit to the north. The Russians had captured more than a thousand towns within East Prussia.
Northwest of captured Krakow, the First Ukrainian armor advanced from Wielun twenty miles to reach Kepno, four to nine miles from the Silesian frontier, 38 miles northeast of Breslau, and 204 miles southwest of Berlin.
In Hungary, the Russians had captured Kassa on the Czech border and Presov. Another force advanced eighteen miles in lower Poland to take Nowy-Saez.
An armistice was signed by Marshal Klementi Voroshilov of the Soviet Union on behalf of the Allies with the Hungarian provisional government, headed by General Miklos. While officially taking the last of the German satellites out of the war, it did not mean the end of fighting within Hungary, maintained by German and Hungarian troops.
Military observers in London expressed the belief that the Soviet winter offensive might finally crush Nazi Germany within a matter of weeks.
Of course, it should be obvious to the daily student of these news dispatches through the previous two years that the Allies were essentially taking turns at offensive actions against the Germans, to frustrate attempts to concentrate their forces in any one sector or on any one front, since June occupied fully along three fronts, the Western, Eastern, and Italian.
On the Western Front, three German armored attacks, conducted with 10,000 enemy troops against Seventh Army positions in Alsatian territory, had driven the Americans back nearly five miles to Weyersheim, 8.5 miles north of Strasbourg. At stake was protection of Strasbourg, and the American position to the north on the Hatten Line, north of Haguenau forest, maintained by the doughboys against repeated attacks by the Nazis.
To the north, the British the night before had crossed the Meuse River in Holland below Roermond, without opposition, seizing Stevensweert, adding two miles to the seven-mile wide front of camouflaged white-clad tanks and soldiers hitting the German lines eight to nineteen miles from the Roer River. It was unclear whether the enemy was withdrawing from the tip of the salient between Roermond and Geilenkirchen.
Other British forces penetrated another mile and a half into Germany's Western Panhandle, taking Breberen, eight miles from the Roer River, and Saeffelen.
To the north, German parachute troops seized Zetten, four miles below Arnhem, but Allied counter-attacks during the night within the streets drove them out of the town.
The First Army continued its approach on St. Vith, having taken all of the commanding heights, and seizing five more towns in the area. The 30th Division had taken Eivetingen, while the 1st Division had occupied Montenau, and the 33rd Division captured Bovigny and Courtil.
In Luxembourg, the Third Army's Fifth Infantry Division gained a half mile above Diekirch, reaching to within three miles of Vianden, repulsing three German attacks at nearby Bastendorf. The 80th Infantry Division cleared a wood nine miles northwest of Diekirch.
Some 750 heavy bombers, accompanied by 600 fighter escorts, struck rail networks and Rhine bridges in Alsatian territory, following a one-day hiatus for bad weather. Hit were Heilbronn, Rheine, and a Rhine bridge at Mannheim. The previous day, 199 sorties had been flown along the Western Front, with four planes lost.
In Italy, German patrol activity seeking to establish bridgeheads on the east bank of the Senio River were beaten back by Canadians of the Eighth Army, southwest of Fusignano.
A Geneva dispatch reported that in December in Milan, an attempt had been interdicted to assassinate Benito Mussolini via a Partisan-manned machinegun perched on the third floor of a house in the Via Dante. Two soldiers of the Muti Brigade discovered the nest as Mussolini approached.
His death would come nevertheless at the hands of Partisans in a village near Milan within a hundred days, on April 28.
On Luzon in the Philippines, the left flank of the Sixth Army of General Walter Krueger continued into the third day their first stiff encounter with the enemy since the landing at Lingayen Gulf on January 9. The action was taking place within Pengasinan Province, seeking to cut off enemy forces at Baguio from the Manila supply route along Highway 3. The fight consisted not of a concentrated field of troops engaged in battle but rather of a series of small engagements from Rosario along a 30-mile course to the Agno River on the south near Villasis. The Americans captured Cabaruan in the Cabaruan Hills, providing a height from which to direct artillery fire onto enemy positions.
War Manpower Coordinator Paul McNutt reported that the race horse breeders had agreed to release some 3,000 men under age 46 to war industries, pledging to replace the men with older employees.
Brushup, Man o' War's best filly, was said to be upset at the turn of events.
The Thousand Club, members of which had contributed $1,000 or more to the President's re-election campaign, stated through a spokesman its intent to take an active role in the 1946 Congressional races. Members of the club had been provided front row seats for the inauguration on the South Lawn. The idea for the club, said one of its members, had come directly from the President, who had recalled a similar fund-raising group for Theodore Roosevelt. During the campaign, Governor Dewey had attacked the notion as a rich man's club.
Among the membership present at the inauguration was one Fred McDuff of Seminole, Oklahoma, who appeared dressed
On the editorial page, "Sub-Let Planning" compliments the new city planning board for immediately adopting a proposal to revise City housing codes to ameliorate the low standards of low income housing. But still much work would need be done before the proposed plan could actually be implemented to achieve the intended results. It was, however, a step in the right direction.
The editorial suggests calling in an array of experts to advise on the various needs to alleviate the worst conditions both in housing and within the neighborhoods in which lower income housing existed.
"India's Burden" comments on the fact that the British Empire's casualties from the war had reached over one million, with the United Kingdom suffering the bulk of those casualties.
The colonies and dominions, however, had suffered as well. While the U.K. had 600,000 casualties, Canada had 79,000, Australia, 85,000, and South Africa, 29,000.
But impoverished India had the highest of all the dominions and colonies, 152,000 war casualties.
Indian Gurkhas had died in North Africa—in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya, at El Alamein, at Cap Bon in Tunisia. They had been in Malaya in 1941 and early 1942. They had fought in Sicily and Italy. They had paid a heavy toll for two years in Burma, helping in the struggle to enable the recent re-opening of the Ledo-Burma Road. They had paid especially heavily during the Battle of Imphal in Northeast India during the spring of 1944, the beginning of the end, along with the taking of Myitkyina in which the Gurkhas had also been instrumental, of the Japanese occupation of Burma.
These troops, concludes the piece, who were descended from fighters who had once resisted British rule, now fought for the Empire. They were to be commended for their valor and loyalty, even in the face of the tremendous momentum within Indian culture toward independence from Great Britain.
"Progress in Reason" finds the retirement program for the City enacted by the City Council, discussed further by Dick Young on the page, to have been a compromise between what some fire and police personnel wanted and that which the City deemed advisable. It would result in a ten-cent tax hike but the consequent efficiency from such a program would deliver itself back to the community in better services with the assured retirement of aging personnel.
"The Lowest Wages" again addresses the recommendation by the State Commissioner of Labor that North Carolina adopt a wage and hour law based on the fact that the state was second only to South Carolina from the bottom of the heap in terms of industrial wage level, despite its being eleventh in population and value of manufactures, third in payment of Federal income taxes, and fifth in crop production. The proposed thirty-cents per hour minimum wage was certainly not radical.
In looking at Charlotte jobs which were low-paying, the laundry industry, for example, was found to pay an average wage of 35 cents per hour, some employees earning below that average and some higher. The minimum proposed wage thus would raise the lowest pay and likely have a ripple effect on other wages in such low-paying industries. But the entire scope of wage increase would likely be de minimis.
So, the proposal was modest and would merely raise the state's very lowest wages to some minimal acceptable standard, in an effort to eliminate the worst working poverty within the state. Business would not suffer as a result.
Drew Pearson comments that the two great goals before the country at the beginning of FDR's fourth term were the winning of the war and the winning of the peace. Many close to the President believed that when they were accomplished, he would step aside and retire to Hyde Park.
This concentration of the President on the war and the peace afterward was a dramatic shift from earlier times when he had emphasized domestic affairs.
Prior to the war, the Brain Trust regularly met evenings at the White House to discuss economic and social issues. No longer was that the case since the beginning of the war. The President in those earlier times had regularly traveled among the people, more than any past President. Those days, too, had passed.
The President now spent his time assiduously studying every report and aspect of the war.
Even his schedule had changed. He now arose at 8:30 each morning, had breakfast in bed, brewing his own coffee on the bedside table. While still in bed, his daughter Anna, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, adviser Harry Hopkins, press secretary Steve Early, Judge Rosenman, and Pa Watson would drop by to plot out the day's business.
By 9:30 he had perused five newspapers, shaved himself, and moved to the Lincoln study to work for an hour before heading to the executive office to greet callers. He then had lunch at his desk, and at 5:00 spent two hours on mail and reports.
Mr. Pearson insists that the rumors of the President's bad health were considerably exaggerated, that, from his doctors' advice the previous spring, he had lost twenty pounds, giving his face a more drawn appearance.
The President had also become less sensitive about being seen by the public in a wheelchair. In the early years of his terms, he had been very careful on the point, not wanting the public to realize that he was unable to walk. But now, he understood that everyone in the country was quite aware of the fact and so had shunned the heavy iron and leather braces without which he could not stand.
He could even comfortably relate stories about mishaps with the braces. One in particular which he relished was from the 1936 Democratic Convention at which, as he walked onto the platform to provide his acceptance speech, one of the bolts came loose from the brace on his left knee, causing him to begin to fall. The Secret Service caught him, held him up so that few discerned what had happened. The bolt was replaced and the President continued his speech, though shaken by the experience. Complicating the episode, his son, Jimmy, had dropped the speech onto the platform and the pages were scattered about the floor, had to be re-assembled.
During Vice-President Garner's preceding acceptance speech, the pages had been blowing and one page became misplaced, causing the Vice-President to repeat it in whole, never realizing his mistake. The President had worried that he might make the same error.
By 9:30, he had perused five newspapers, shaved himself, and moved to the Lincoln study to work for an hour before heading to the executive office to greet callers. He then had lunch at his desk, and at 5:00, spent two hours on mail and reports.
During Vice-President Garner's preceding acceptance speech, the pages had been blowing and one page became misplaced, causing the Vice-President to repeat it in whole, never realizing his mistake. The President had worried that he might make the same error.
Dorothy Thompson continues, as two days earlier, assaying the mental state of Germans, as viewed through Army psychologists appointed to study the matter within the area around Aachen. That which they had found, that many average Germans viewed the Nazis as foreigners who had taken over their country, had been confirmed by Ms. Thompson's own anecdotal information gleaned several years earlier, that ordinary German life had been overrun by a particular age group, the remaining population essentially acting as bystanders at a funeral for their former society.
While the result amounted to an earthquake within Germany, still it was accompanied by the notion that "nothing is eaten as hot as cooked", that eventually things, when cooled off, would resume in a normal pattern of life.
The strongest opposition to the Nazi regime had been in the working classes. The Nazis could not eliminate them and still maintain an industrialized economy. Thus, they directed their animus at Jews and individuals from all classes deemed inimical to the State. While eliminating overt opposition, they could not get rid of covert opposition. The ordinary German resumed his daily life, outwardly conforming to Nazi-enforced custom while inwardly maintaining his reservoir of independent thought. Eventually, however, political thought, silenced, was deadened for lack of expression.
Thus, when the SS and Gestapo would be eliminated there would still remain a political vacuum within younger age groups, albeit supplemented by a memory of the pre-Nazi past maintained by those over 40, but conflicted by strong Nazi identification inevitably remaining within the group 20 to 40 years of age.
The problem with respect to non-Nazis without political affiliation would be to create in them new appreciation for the value of democracy and orderly government. The danger existed that, with the apathy and resignation to torment created by the war, anarchy could result afterward, with power seized by brutal minorities amid the chaos.
First would have to be set in place a functioning system of production and distribution to establish an economic system. Second, courts with the confidence of the people would need be placed in operation. Third, there would have to be long-term commitment to education, primary, secondary, and university, free from the shackles of Nazism. Each would require the creation of a commission to bring such institutions into being.
Samuel Grafton offers a pair of suggestions to make Congress more accountable and more consistent in its operations. First, he opines that it should have a majority and minority policy committee in each chamber which would see to it that legislation passed would have sufficient resources to function on its intended course. That way, newspaper reporters could approach the chairmen of those committees and make direct inquiry as to why a particular program passed was left hanging without adequate appropriation to fulfill its enunciated tasks.
The other suggestion was to have the Congress regularly question Cabinet officers, to make the Executive branch and Congress work more cohesively, less antagonistically.
Marquis Childs discusses the exhaustion ongoing of the country's natural resources, accelerated enormously by the war. In Oregon, it was reported that a fifty-year old lumber company would shut down within two years because there would be no more commercial timber to cut on the lower Columbia River.
In Minnesota, the
Copper reserves which had been estimated prior to the war to be co-extensive with 40 years of mining, were now reduced to a lifespan of ten years.
The war had caused relaxation of conservation practices which would have to be restored immediately after the demands of the war ended. Timber could take through decades of restored reforestation practices to recover the depletion caused by the necessities of Army and Navy demand on the forests during the war.
He concludes, perspicaciously, with the idea that America had for so long been a "have" country that it would come as a shock to begin to understand it as a "have not" country.
"If the depletion of our resources continues, the day may come when we will be forced to depend on oil imports from the Middle East, on timber imports from Siberia, and on minerals from the mountain ranges of China."
Think about it, Traitor, when you climb into that Big Fat, luxurious gas guzzling Hog and accelerate down the Hogway, burning fossil fuel aplenty, on a Hog's rationalization that you gotta get to somewhere Fast, Faster and Fancier than everybody else not of your Class, to make yourself feel that all is well in Mudville, and that it's just the nattering nabobs of negativism who wish to make you feel bad about being such an irrepressible Hog, the American Way, after all.
It ain't, Cowboy; and you are
Better get rid of that Hog, sonny, before we commandeer it and get rid of it for you, maybe with you
MR. Chief Justice, Mr. Vice President, my friends, you will understand and, I believe, agree with my wish that the form of this inauguration be simple and its words brief.We Americans of today, together with our allies, are passing through a period of supreme test. It is a test of our courage—of our resolve—of our wisdom—our essential democracy.
If we meet that test—successfully and honorably—we shall perform a service of historic importance which men and women and children will honor throughout all time.
As I stand here today, having taken the solemn oath of office in the presence of my fellow countrymen—in the presence of our God—I know that it is America's purpose that we shall not fail.
In the days and in the years that are to come we shall work for a just and honorable peace, a durable peace, as today we work and fight for total victory in war.
We can and we will achieve such a peace.
We shall strive for perfection. We shall not achieve it immediately—but we still shall strive. We may make mistakes—but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principle.
I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled: "Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend."
Our Constitution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet. But it provided a firm base upon which all manner of men, of all races and colors and creeds, could build our solid structure of democracy.
And so today, in this year of war, 1945, we have learned lessons—at a fearful cost—and we shall profit by them.
We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations far away. We have learned that we must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger.
We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.
We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that "The only way to have a friend is to be one."
We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear. We can gain it only if we proceed with the understanding, the confidence, and the courage which flow from conviction.
The Almighty God has blessed our land in many ways. He has given our people stout hearts and strong arms with which to strike mighty blows for freedom and truth. He has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world.
So we pray to Him now for the vision to see our way clearly—to see the way that leads to a better life for ourselves and for all our fellow men—to the achievement of His will to peace on earth.
Framed Edition
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