Tuesday, October 16, 1945

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, October 16, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Eisenhower stated that a fair and impartial election in Berlin would not support the present Communist Party dominance of the city. The Russians, he said, prior to entry of the other occupying forces of France, America, and Britain, had established a bloc of four parties, the Communists, the Social Democrats, the Christian-Democratic Unionists, and the Liberal Democrats. The first two were well established and the latter two drew membership from former middle class, conservative parties, were less organized and less active than the Communists and Social Democrats. The Communists were the majority party in Berlin.

The coal dispute continued to dominate the labor picture, constituting 200,000 of the 385,000 idle workers across the nation in 135 different strikes. Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach announced that the conference to resolve the coal strike had broken down. Violence was reported out of New York in the longshoremen's strike.

Admiral William Halsey returned to San Francisco with the Third Fleet and, in a press conference, stated that the way to preserve the peace would be through the military. He promised that Japan would remain a fourth or fifth rate power for some time to come, until it had earned its way back into the society of nations.

In the war crimes trials at Lueneberg, Germany, Irma Grese, an SS guard at Oswiecim and Belsen, standing accused of beating and killing prisoners at the concentration camps, heard her British defense counsel argue that the beatings which had taken place were comparable to beatings administered in a convict camp in North Carolina. He argued that infliction of corporal punishment in a prison camp was not justiciable before a court. He further stated that the Belsen internees were riddled with diseases and his client did not want to touch them.

In Buenos Aires, General Avalos of the Army, in control of the country after the overthrow of the Farrell Government the previous week, stated that he was not a strong man in the mold of ousted Vice-President Juan Peron.

General Jonathan Wainwright provides the eighth in the series of articles on the fall of Bataan and Corregidor in April and May, 1942. He tells of reaching Bataan on January 6, 1942, in the retreat south in the face of the advancing Japanese Army. His men, originally numbering 28,000, most of whom were untrained, had now been winnowed to 16,000 after the tortuous retreat through the razor-sharp jungle grass and along roads. Many of the men now possessed but a semblance of shoes on their feet.

General MacArthur placed him in charge of I Philippine Corps, defenders of the western side of a line which ran across Bataan between Moron and Abucay. Major General George Parker defended the eastern flank, separated by Mount Silanganan, steep wall separating the two forces.

By that point, they barely had enough food to nourish them daily. They had to resort to slaughtering carabao for the meat, tough as it was to consume.

General MacArthur came over in his air-conditioned Ford on January 9 and inspected both General Wainwright's troops and those of General Parker.

The Internal Revenue Bureau was seeking $189,860 in back taxes and penalties from actor William Powell, contending that he had not provided a true statement of an additional $150,000 over and above the reported $55,000 earned from a single motion picture in 1937-38.

Actor Jon Hall, husband to Francis Langford, had been discharged from the Army after six months, most of which time he had spent in the hospital undergoing treatment for a gall bladder ailment.

Some of the G.I.'s were probably heard to ask, "What gall?"

The note which we prepared five years ago regarding the first day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, fifty years ago this date, October 16, 1962, is present in conjunction with The News of October 16, 1937.

On the editorial page, "Leadership" comments on the record-breaking rate of divorce in Mecklenburg County, having reached 450 during 1945. It points out that the number was padded by South Carolinians who trooped over the border to obtain their divorces. There had also been an upward trend nationally in the divorce rate, always a product of uncertain times. Many of the divorcees were young women who had married men in service just before going overseas.

No longer was divorce shunned but had become somewhat routine, even respectable. It was to be expected that the rate would continue to rise higher.

"Stassen's Bid" finds former Minnesota Republican Governor Harold Stassen, to retire from his position as a commander in the Army in December, ready to cast his hat in the presidential ring for 1948, with a formal speaking tour set to begin the following year.

Mr. Stassen, a liberal progressive and an internationalist, was a candidate who the party Old Guard should actively court if they wanted to break the four-term Democratic hold on the White House. The latest polls had shown that President Truman would be a formidable candidate in 1948.

"Appropriate" comments on the position of the State Federation of Labor Board in opposition to state funding to arm the militia. The militia was unlikely to be used except in the case of labor strife and the money to fund it, they argued, could be better spent on the State Department of Labor.

The editorial comments that it bothered to mention it only because the Board had met in Gastonia, site of the 1929 Loray Mill violence in which the police chief was killed, resulting in a Communist witch-hunt in its wake.

Another time, precisely eight years earlier, the column had found scarcely worthy of mention an event, as set forth in "Pigs Is Pigs" of that day, except, it said, for the fact that a similar episode had nearly started a war in the Pacific Northwest, prompting the cry "54-40 or Fight". Pigs, in a manner of speaking, of course, almost resulted in the end of the world, beginning on the same date 25 years subsequent to that somewhat eery editorial. Cooler heads prevailed.

Let us hope that no violent clash between a militia and labor, or a similar group of protesters, ever leads to such a situation with international ramifications. Or, has that one already occurred also? ultimately with salutary results?

"Jap Alliance" discusses the armed revolt taking place in Java by the Nationalists seeking an independent Indonesia under the leadership of Seokarno, against the Dutch, Eurasians, and Ambonese.

The Indonese had been reported to be fighting with poisoned darts and even snakes.

The British had turned to the surrendered Japanese garrisons for help in quelling the violence.

The United States was standing in support of the Dutch in their effort to retain their colonies in the Pacific.

The insistence on order and restoration of the status quo had resulted, in this instance, in an alliance with the Japanese against a native government.

"We, who were revolutionists ourselves not so long ago, look a little awkward when we join in an effort to crush a republic and restore a colony."

It should be noted that the Dutch contended that the Nationalists were the puppets of the Japanese during the war.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Clare Boothe Luce speaking in favor of a bill providing for an increase in Hindu immigration.

She engages in an argument with Representative Jessie Sumner of Michigan, who stated that she disagreed with the premise of Ms. Luce that Russia did not practice racial discrimination, and thought that the immigration of 100 Hindus was not going to improve trade with India and would likewise not improve race relations, would enable Communists to come into the country.

Ms. Luce responded that the official policy of Russia was opposed to racial discrimination.

Ultimately, she states, upon inquiry, that though she was unaware of how many people from India immigrated to Russia, she imagined that it was fewer than to the United States, implicitly confirming the worth of the United States over the Soviet Union.

Ms. Luce, as we have pointed out previously, was possessed of the enormous perspicacity in 1962 to write a feature article in Life regarding the potential threat of Cuba as a base for missiles, as appearing in the October 5 issue, hitting subscribers and newsstands over two weeks before the CIA and the President of the United States had any inkling of the presence of offensive missiles in Cuba.

Maybe somebody else did. Several Republicans, including Senator Keating of New York and Senator Capehart of Indiana, seemed to know before everyone else, a month before the mid-term elections.

Ms. Luce, it should be noted, advocated ultimately the doctrine of preemption against Cuba, intervention to stop all Soviet aid coming to the island, including a military invasion, not waiting for "[s]ites for guided missiles and rockets and bases for submarines and submarine detection", which she viewed as "possible" at the time. It was just this kind of rhetoric in the public press over time since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April, 1961 which had caused the Soviets to begin to place the mid-range ballistic missiles and launching sites in Cuba, on the justification that they were necessary as "defensive" installations. The piece served no legitimate function of informing the public, merely acted as a goad to a world, on tenterhooks already, further toward the edge of nuclear holocaust, and for cheap political theater, the only thing at which Ms. Luce ever excelled in the political arena. When analyzed, her glowing rhetoric is nothing more than a sucker's invitation to disaster, as with Iraq in 2003 and the latter-day acolytes of the Clare Boothe Luce School of Blondedom.

Had President Kennedy followed the advice, none of us would be here to criticize it. Fortunately, he did not take political-military advice from Blondedom.

Drew Pearson explains that resentment was rising among atomic scientists regarding censorship, even as to discussions of international agreements or the politics surrounding the bomb. None of the scientists wanted to reveal the secret, but believed that they had the right to discuss the politics of the bomb and its post-war usage and sharing.

Major General Leslie Groves of the Army had issued the order clamping the lid on free speech. Scientists stated that General Groves had been the hardest man to convince of the need for the original development of the bomb.

Mr. Pearson next enters some "Capital Chaff", among which was the story of the estranged daughter of Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho, the former cowboy singer, having invited the Senator to come to see her. She then placed a concealed camera on the premises and also recorded his voice on a dictaphone. It resulted in a newspaper story the next day. It turned out that she and her mother were suing Senator Taylor for support after twenty years of separation.

He next relates of Democratic National Committee chair Bob Hannegan having button-holed the necessary votes for confirmation of former Congressman Ray McKeough to a position on the Maritime Commission, despite his having been a representative in the Midwest for the CIO PAC during the 1944 election.

Marquis Childs comments on the confusion abounding in the country on the issue of a peacetime draft, the tide of opinion running against it. The opinions voiced by the air forces and the Navy suggested the prospect of strong military forces in peacetime, the equivalent of a military state "permanently preoccupied with war and preparation for war."

General Patton had stated the day before the release of the Marshall biennial report, favoring a peacetime draft and a 400,000-man Army, that another war was inevitable.

Moreover, the advent of the atomic bomb had been even more confusing to the public. As General Marshall recognized, the people ended each war with a sense of "acute revulsion" to war.

Many millions of young Americans were tired of the military system which hardly punished at all the most derelict of officers while administering guardhouse sentences for any enlisted man who had gone AWOL.

While no one argued with General Marshall's general premise that the country had to remain strong, the question remained as to how that would be accomplished. In private, General Marshall recommended a civilian commission to study and make recommendations. Mr. Childs thinks such a commission might be the only viable solution to bring order from rapidly growing chaos.

A letter writer eschews the economic theory extolled by a speaker before the Kiwanis Club, that it was healthy for society to maintain a group of starving persons outside the labor force as a constant warning to labor, to keep them hungry. The writer finds this theory as obsolete and lacking in utilitarian value as collectivism and socialism, that a combination of Christianity, Americanism, and democracy had to be relied upon to solve the labor-management problems. Not everyone, he says, who stood a bit left of the speaker was a "Red" or a "long-haired boy", as he had labeled them.

Samuel Grafton discusses what he terms the first Truman crisis of his presidency. It was not yet clear which Truman would emerge as a result. The country was about to find out "of what stuff" the Truman era was to be made.

His initial efforts to obtain broad-based support from groups with divergent interests had backfired. He had now no fervent support from any faction within the country. Whereas in mid-August everyone was for him in the immediate aftermath of the end of the war, now that it was mid-October, no one was singing his praises any longer as the country had lapsed into the doldrums.

So much for the so-called "Best Years of Our Lives", which might better have been dubbed the "Best Couple of Days or So".

The New York Herald Tribune had termed "inept" the President's efforts to avoid the question of world control of nuclear energy. The Wall Street Journal had pointed to growing adverse public reaction to his having left town on a vacation at the height of the labor crisis. Drew Pearson had stated that the President had leaned over so far to accommodate Congress that it had become more of a sin than a virtue.

The image emerging of the President was that of an amiable man, gregarious, who did not like taking charge, but rather adapted to the whims of his audience. His sharp rhetoric had lost much of its punch because the public had come to realize that it did not precede action.

Mr. Truman personified the national indecisiveness with regard to Russia and refused to lead on that issue. He sought to placate the internationalists and the nationalists simultaneously, making ultimately both the country and Russia unhappy.

In contrast to President Roosevelt with regard to labor, President Truman had not yet been able to obtain concessions because he had convinced neither side that he had anything to trade. The national debate took place without him.

"The time has come for him to seclude himself, and staring for a day at a paper pad, to ask himself what he wants, and what the Nation must have, and to go out of the room resolved to have it, or to know the reason why."

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