The Senate had 33 standing committees, 25 of which were major. Of those, Southerners chaired twelve, Westerners, seven, Easterners, six, and Midwesterners, none.

The House had 47 standing committees, 30 of which were classified as major, seventeen being chaired by Southerners. The East had six chairmanships, the West, five, the Midwest, two.

Progress and growth of government in the larger counties had relieved the sheriff of many of these duties. Police departments conducted law enforcement in the cities; tax collection was undertaken by a special department. Only the role of service of process and duties as bailiffs were universally retained in the counties.

Collectively, the sheriffs of the one hundred North Carolina counties, however, remained a potent political force, as proved recently by their concerted opposition to defeat the State Police Department—which would eventually become the State Bureau of Investigation—as proposed by newly installed Governor Gregg Cherry.

Of course, in the mid-fifties, the vaccine of Jonas Salk would largely eliminate the presence of polio from the United States and begin the process worldwide. A major contributor in that fight was the March of Dimes, given its great boost in national recognition by President Roosevelt—the reason that his likeness is to this day borne on the dime.

The piece comments that he had indeed been a leader in progressive race relations, atypical for the South, though Dr. Odum was born and bred within the region.

His most important work to date had been Southern Regions, published in 1936. Race and Rumors of Race was published in 1943.

His work, the editorial stresses, had not been popular with Southerners at large, any more than his books had been best-sellers, but he had always been a leader in Southern thought and, since coming to the University a quarter century earlier in 1919, had been a leader in North Carolina's academic circles.

Dr. Odum had been one of the key mentors early on, in 1929 and 1930, to W. J. Cash as he began the writing of what became The Mind of the South. Cash exchanged numerous letters with the professor, who obligingly gave his insight to aid the initial shape and scope of the work, and greeted its eventual publication in 1941 with high praise.

We much prefer the latter, to tell you the truth, always have, especially vis à vis the tv.

Say no more.

Next is a brief by Euripides, questioning the providence which too often assigns the diminishing task to a parent of having to bury his or her own offspring, though having been nobly inclined to duty and loyalty. "...I ask, why do the gods heap on mortals this grief in addition, the most bitter of all, to drop the tears on the lost son's untimely bier?"

The Army and Navy needed 900,000 men during the ensuing six months, the goal to be filled by 18-year olds if no other group was made available, as through ending deferments for farm laborers and enabling the shift of younger war-essential workers into the military, replaced by older workers. Another 700,000 men were needed to supplement war production.

The Congressional representatives reported that opposition had grown among labor and farm groups to a national service act, the President favoring one for all age groups 18 to 60, the Congressional leaders wanting to stress, instead, only 4-F's between 18 and 45. The bill, reported the Congressional leaders to the President, was due for some tough sledding in both chambers of the Congress.

Mr. Pearson next makes comment on the new Vice-President, Harry Truman, the first such press comment since his nomination at the convention in late July. He tells of Mr. Truman's common-man past, starting on the farm, thence to employment in a drugstore, then a haberdashery—which failed—then into the Army where he became a captain in World War I, then a local judge under the Kansas City machine of Boss Pendergast, then to the Senate for ten years, much of which time he had spent in obscurity, until the Truman Committee came about to investigate government inefficiency and corruption, and now the Vice-Presidency, all in a miraculous whirl. Even Harry Truman—who had nonchalantly sat eating a hot dog at the convention at the point his name was called to come to the podium to accept the nomination, at first more concerned with finishing his hot dog than realization that it was he being called forth—could not believe his meteoric rise.

Mr. Pearson compares the Missourian to Calvin Coolidge, both having originated in the backwoods, neither given to making speeches, both thrifty, both enjoying political luck. "Silent Cal" had first come to public notice during the Boston police strike when he was Governor of Massachusetts, and he then had come to mind when the Republican bosses gathered to nominate a compromise vice-presidential candidate to run with Warren Harding. Then, of course, on August 2, 1923, President Harding suddenly died while on a trip to San Francisco, thrusting Vice-President Coolidge into the Presidency. He was then elected on his own merit in 1924.

Leaving aside the latter pair of facts, Mr. Pearson indicates that Harry Truman had risen much the same way, coming to national attention with the Senate investigating committee and then becoming a compromise vice-presidential candidate to replace Vice-President Henry Wallace.

"That is the man who today assumes the life insurance duties of Vice-President of the United States. He will be worth watching."

Indeed, he would be, for the ensuing eight years. The comparison drawn by Mr. Pearson, despite his recent denials in his column of the rumors abounding that President Roosevelt's health appeared anything but good in person, would prove itself uncannily accurate, even if no one today, knowing the historical reputation of Harry Truman as a feistily combatant President who stood his ground against any of the high and mighty who were self-anointed Royalists, such as General MacArthur, would dare compare Truman as President to Calvin Coolidge, the latter most noted for taking long daily naps during his tenure as President. The men were, if anything, historical contrasts in personality, even if coming to the presidency along the same route, marked finally by tragic loss of the nation of its leader—though Warren Harding, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal in 1923, was certainly far less beloved and missed than would be the nearly universally lamented and trumpeted Franklin Roosevelt, come April 12, 1945.

The alternatives being proposed, that of volunteerism, contends Mr. Grafton, really had nothing behind them but ephemera. The only way to insure adequate war production was to have a draft of labor to fill necessary jobs. It was not a matter of coercing labor, but an exercise of legitimate police power under the Commerce Clause to insure labor adequate to the national emergency.

The other alternative was "work or fight", meaning that those who did not work in war-essential jobs would be drafted into military service. While preserving an illusory form of choice, the only real choice was to work, because only 4-F men were in issue in the first place, those unfit to fight. So, those drafted would either be sent to war-essential jobs, refusing which, would be sent to jail.

Thus, there really was no proper alternative to the national service act. The only reason anyone would refuse to work was out of a lack of confidence in the Government. Management disfavored any precedent of government control over the workplace.

A sergeant and a private, quartered in a Belgian home, could not sleep for the wailing of a baby, even though they had no problem snoozing through artillery fire.

A German prisoner had figured out how mortarmen kept up the round-the-clock fire on German lines. They read books and every time they completed a chapter, they dropped in a mortar shell and fired it. The artillery, he theorized, played poker and every time someone lost, they were required to pull the lanyard of the gun.

A staff sergeant was busy digging a foxhole, heard others doing likewise on the other side of a hedge, began conversing with them on their progress. When his platoon sergeant asked him to whom he was talking, he replied that there was another company on their flank preparing their foxholes. When informed by the platoon sergeant that the company had not yet arrived in position, they both went to the other side of the hedge to find, and capture, three Germans digging their foxholes.