Saturday, January 27, 1945

The Charlotte News

Saturday, January 27, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that, according to German broadcasts, the Russians had shut down the German war industries in Upper Silesia between Opeln and the Sudeten Mountains and advanced to the Obra River, 97 miles from Berlin at Bentschen, on the main road from Poznan to Berlin. Another drive had advanced to the area between Leszno and the Netze River, reaching the northern bank of the Netze east of Schneidemuhl.

The Russians had crossed the Oder and the heaviest fighting was for the bridgehead at Steinau.

A broadcast from Moscow, albeit propagandistic in nature, stated that the German East Wall from the Baltic to the Carpathians had broken down.

Official Russian reports announced that the Red Army had eliminated the German permanent defense system in the Masurian Lakes region of East Prussia, as encirclement of Koenigsberg continued.

On the Western Front, amid snowdrifts six and seven feet deep, the Third Army gained up to three miles in a strike along a twenty-mile front from Luxembourg into Belgium, into the Our River frontier, eliminating the last of the Ardennes Bulge begun December 16. Patrols of the 90th Division reached the Our at a point 4.5 miles northeast of Clervaux while the Seventeenth Airborne Division advanced three miles at a point seven miles below St. Vith. Three other divisions, the 28th, the 5th, and 80th, were also astride or across the "Skyline Drive" Highway running to St. Vith and overlooking the Our and the Siegfried Line.

The Ninth Army and the British Second Army consolidated their hold along the west bank of the Roer River from Roermond to Monschau, 19 miles southeast of Aachen, widening the only breach of the Siegfried Line to 35 miles.

The German offensive begun two days earlier in Alsace against the Seventh Army had been dissolved.

The French First Army was menacing Colmar in the Rhineland.

Despite fog and snow, the RAF flew 150 sorties against German trains and truck columns.

The Russian winter offensive was now impacting the Western Front, causing the withdrawal of the Germans from the Alsace sector and the Roer River sector. German rail traffic was flowing continuously east and northeast from the Ruhr, suggestive of removal of hoarded equipment to the east.

On Luzon, the Japanese mounted their first stiff resistance to the Sixth Army, south of the Bamban River on the main Manila Highway, about 40 miles north of Manila, five miles beyond Clark Field. Japanese artillery units also had begun firing from heights surrounding Clark Field, just captured by the Americans on Thursday.

A large force of B-29's, estimated by Tokyo to number seventy, was reported to have attacked Tokyo, this the seventh raid on the capital, again originating from Saipan. Early reports indicated heavy resistance to the raid. Indo-China was also targeted. Nagoya, Iwo Jima, and Tokyo had been raided within the prior five days under the new commander of the 21st Bomber Command, General Curtis LeMay.

Republicans, led by Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, threatened to vote uniformly against the nomination of Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce, regardless of whether the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and its lending powers were divorced from the Commerce Department. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, however, indicated his belief that several Republicans might support Mr. Wallace for the nomination should divorcement of the lending powers be approved by the Congress.

A Federal District Court judge in Chicago had ruled against the Government's right to take over Montgomery Ward, holding that the company was not engaged in war-essential industries and thus not within the ambit of emergency war powers of the President. The Court also rejected the Government's argument that the War Labor Disputes Act embraced the situation because Montgomery Ward's defiance of the War Labor Board's order to honor closed-shop union contracts affected the entire wartime labor dispute settlement machinery. WLB chairman William Davis said the ruling threatened WLB's ability to issue orders to companies to avoid strikes impacting the entire wartime economy. The Government expressed its intention to appeal the ruling into the Federal Court of Appeals.

Eventually, the end of the war would render the matter moot as President Truman would dissolve the takeover order later in the year.

On the editorial page, "The City Limits" comments on the efforts of opponents to block planned city expansion, that the reasons devolved to the personal, whether children would be able to continue to attend a specific school, whether fire, police, and sewage services would be obtained before the end of the war, etc. But, says the piece, if the opponents could successfully block the planned extension of the city limits, then they could block other forms of city planning and thus growth of the community within a systemic model.

"Narrow Escape" approves the House action in dropping the anti-closed shop amendment from the proposed national service bill. The bill, says the editorial, should be left to stand on its own merit and not encumbered by ancillary measures.

While workers compelled to go to work in war-essential industries should not be forced also to join a union and to pay dues, this important bit of war legislation to insure maintenance of war production through to the end of the war was not a proper vehicle for addressing this issue.

The piece offers that a retained substitute amendment, allowing for reasonable choice of employer by workers, appeared as a fair compromise.

This late legislation might seem superfluous given 20-20 hindsight on the war. But, at the time, though it was apparent that the European war probably would resolve within the coming weeks or few months, the Pacific war was thought likely at the time to continue into and even through 1946, with the daunting prospect ahead of having to invade the home islands of Japan and then march to Tokyo against heavy and brutal opposition.

"A Longer Term" comments on the desires of the PTA to retain the current Charlotte superintendent of schools rather than allow him to retire at age 70, as he planned to do during the coming summer. Harry Harding had been superintendent for 31 years and obviously was well respected in the position.

"Backing Up" compliments the Allied Church League of North Carolina for reversing its position and asking Governor Gregg Cherry to postpone a statewide referendum on alcohol until six months after the war, so that returning 300,000 North Carolina servicemen would be able to vote on it.

The piece points out that, at present, the referendum would not have succeeded in any event, but, nevertheless, maintains praise for the restraint shown by the church group, which had favored the elimination of Alcoholic Beverage Control by the state in the 25 wet counties—so that they, too, could become bootlegger paradise.

"Turn About" praises the appointment of Jonathan Daniels as the new press secretary to President Roosevelt, replacing Stephen Early, who had served in the post since the beginning of the Roosevelt Administration in 1933.

Mr. Daniels was the son of Josephus Daniels, the former Ambassador to Mexico under FDR and Secretary of the Navy under President Wilson, and, in that latter position, FDR's first boss in government service. The editorial describes Jonathan as "an individual whose urbanity belies his taste for a good controversy."

The two men, father and son, had, indicates the piece, followed similar tracks, alternating government service with editorship of the Raleigh News & Observer.

Parenthetically, we note again that Jonathan Daniels had become a friend to W. J. Cash after they met at the Charlotte Book Fair of spring, 1938, and, in fall, 1940, Mr. Daniels, along with Alfred and Blanche Knopf, co-sponsored Cash for the Guggenheim Fellowship which took him to Mexico in June, 1941 for a planned year to write a novel about a Southern cotton mill family.

Had Cash lived through that year and returned to North Carolina, no one knows, of course, what the possibilities might have been. Cash was not given to open political affiliation, but he was also respectful of President Roosevelt's accomplishments in the New Deal, if not entirely convinced of its overall management efficiency. Whether he might have been offered some press position at this juncture at the White House as assistant, for instance, to Mr. Daniels, is purely conjecture, and whether, if so, he would have accepted such an invitation is even further begging of speculation. Given the nature of Cash's death on July 1, 1941, as we have before related in detail, it remains interesting.

From the Congressional Record comes an exchange between Representative Curtis of Nebraska and future Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts re the appointment of Henry Wallace to be Secretary of Commerce. Mr. Curtis thought well of Mr. Wallace as a man of principle and honor but believed his economic theories were "bad", that they were "part and parcel of the system of state socialism known as the New Deal which is owned by the PAC [Political Action Committee of CIO]." He thought it was the way to total regimentation and slavery. Confirmation of Mr. Wallace by the Senate, he opined, would "be welcoming totalitarianism in the United States" and a "request for the end of liberty and opportunity".

Mr. McCormack rejoindered with expressed bemusement at his colleague's words, reminding that Governor Dewey had approved every major piece of legislation passed during the New Deal, including the National Labor Relations Act, establishing the NLRB, and the Social Security Act.

Drew Pearson suggests that the subcommittee headed by Senator Styles Bridges, now investigating the air transportation priority given to Blaze, Col. Elliott Roosevelt's pooch, over three servicemen headed west on furlough from Memphis, might also wish to investigate how the WAC secretary of General Benny Giles, commander in the Near East theater headquartered in Cairo, was able to take her honeymoon by plane to Rome and Paris rather than along the usual junket for excursions from Cairo, by dilapidated desert train to Palestine. The fact had caused plentiful disturbance among servicemen.

Perhaps she and her groom should have been taken out with Blaze and the son of Senator "Pass the Biscuits", and shot.

He next discusses the pow-wow held with Henry Wallace by Democratic advisers, suggesting that if Mr. Wallace were to agree to appoint Ed Pauley, DNC treasurer, as his Federal Loan Administrator, he would be confirmed by the Senate, as Mr. Pauley had been instrumental in many of the Senate elections during the campaign.

Mr. Wallace had refused to agree to such a deal, instead choosing to stand on his merits for confirmation or not.

Mr. Pearson then imparts the inside story as to why an editorial which had appeared in an early edition of the Nashville Tennessean favoring the appointment of Mr. Wallace, suddenly was yanked from the edition and an editorial appearing two days later had taken the diametrically opposite view, that Jesse Jones should not have been removed as Secretary of Commerce or Henry Wallace appointed in his stead. The publisher of the Tennessean, Silliman Evans, had acquired the newspaper through the help of Mr. Jones, for whom Mr. Evans had been a ghost writer. End of story.

Marquis Childs, in London, tells of the great bearing possessed by Prime Minister Churchill when observed in person in Commons and that such stagemanship might be the reason he would likely sweep the first elections to be held after the war.

By July, however, Mr. Churchill and his Coalition Government would be turned out in favor of Labor and Clement Atlee, thought better able to deal with the social and economic adjustments necessary after the war.

The gratitude for saving Great Britain during the war, which Mr. Childs discusses and views as an insurmountable advantage held over Mr. Churchill's opponents, would, after the war in Europe had ended, not be deemed so dear by Britons, leaning instead to practical matters anent their pocketbooks.

Perhaps, too, in the minds of Britons had been the treatment of the ELAS in Greece and the veto of Count Carlo Sforza in Italy to be its foreign minister, moves which had been heavily criticized in the international press and which, in the case of the ELAS and the authorization to General Scobie by Churchill to use force if necessary to abate their revolt, had prompted street demonstrations and general strikes by workers within the United Kingdom.

Yet, the warrior whom Mr. Childs describes would not pass quietly into the night. Mr. Churchill would again become Prime Minister in 1951 for three and a half years.

Parenthetically, by the time this piece hit print, the Prime Minister undoubtedly was on his way to Malta in the Mediterranean to meet with President Roosevelt and the Allied chiefs of staff prior to the Big Three meeting with Stalin at Yalta. The meeting on Malta would begin February 2.

So, once again we speculate whether Mr. Childs's object in making this trip abroad at this time, which he had not discussed, was to act as journalistic decoy to ward off any assassination attempts to the Allied heads of state, conveying the possibility by his datelines that the Big Three meeting would be somewhere close to England, possibly in Paris or Geneva.

Dorothy Thompson finds the President's stated reasons for the appointment of Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce to have been unfortunate, that there were far better reasons to be provided than the former Vice-President's loyalty and service during the campaign. Mr. Wallace's promise of full employment after the war, in furtherance of the objective set by the President of 60 million new jobs, was a laudable purpose and one crucial to the state of the economy of the country after the war.

The New York Herald Tribune, she reports, had recently editorialized that the Soviet Constitution guaranteed all persons the right of employment and payment for it commensurate with the quality and quantity of work performed, arguing then that only the Soviet socialist system could make such a guarantee. Ms. Thompson begs to differ, arguing that the American capitalist system could respond to changing conditions and enable full employment. But it would only occur with sound Government planning. And that is what the President and Mr. Wallace had in mind, a far cry from socialism, state ownership and control of the means of production.

She favors the Senate looking beyond personalities and examining the substance of the policies which Mr. Wallace would implement. The people of the country would hold the Congress responsible if it placed politics above the welfare of the citizenry and insisted on divorcement of the lending powers of the RFC from the Commerce Department, thus emasculating the Department's authority and compromising the ability of the Government to assist in the post-war period of economic adjustment to a peacetime economy.

Samuel Grafton also takes to task the critics of Mr. Wallace and the anger being expressed within the business community for his supposed lack of executive experience and business skill and acumen. He had, after all, not only been Vice-President for four years, but had also presided over the Department of Agriculture, dealing with billions of dollars annually, for eight years prior to that.

The real reason for the firestorm of controversy, suggests Mr. Grafton, was not these straw-man issues, but rather that Mr. Wallace had a definite plan, utilizing government spending and disposal of the war plants by the RFC, to make the adjustment to the peacetime economy and provide the 60 million jobs promised by the President. Most people had no idea how to go about it.

To the conservatives, the mere mention of Mr. Wallace's name seemed to convey a kind of morbid dread, the same sort of notion conveyed by the knocking within heard by the porter in Macbeth. (We told you a couple of times previously to remember the Porter.)

It was a reminder that there were problems ahead in the readjustment process. The conservatives so bitterly opposed to Mr. Wallace would prefer to play the ostrich rather than face them.

The President had in this appointment departed from his recent course, as in the State Department, of conservative appointments, as in the Vice-Presidency in the summer, of allowing the convention to determine his running mate, at least from a short list of those he found acceptable. It remained unclear how much backing the Administration would give the Wallace appointment, but if the President abandoned him, then his own task in fulfilling his promise for the post-war economy would become much more complicated; for, if Wallace were defeated, or confirmed only with limited powers, there would be in tow a tacit admission that the country did not have any idea "how to greet the morning after the day the war ends".

Dick Young tells of the anti-wood shingles ordinance and the buttermilk ordinance, regulating the content of buttermilk, having just gone into effect in Charlotte after being postponed for a year by the City Council.

Heed the law: Should you get caught with bootleg buttermilk or a wood shingle, we shudder to consider the consequences.

He also informs of a secretary in the city inspection department and a secretary in the city attorney's office who were present on the White House lawn for the inauguration and attended the tea afterward given by the President and Mrs. Roosevelt, as well as other events.

Whether they ran into the Cowboy dressed all in white, from his boots to his ten-gallon, he does not impart.

The column also commends the patrolman who arrested a Camp Mackall paratrooper who subsequently admitted to several housebreakings in Charlotte. Whether the soldier accomplished his burglaries with a parachute is not indicated. Stranger things have happened.

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