Thursday, October 25, 1945

The Charlotte News

Thursday, October 25, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General Motors workers voted overwhelmingly in favor of strike to obtain their demanded 30 percent wage increase to keep pace with wartime wages based on a 48-hour work week. Walter Reuther, vice-president of the UAW, stated that the vote did not necessarily mean there would be an immediate strike, as it could be authorized only by the union executive board. Chrysler was taking its vote on this date and Ford would follow November 7.

In Hollywood, the strike of movie workers ended except for those at Warner Brothers. The strike had lasted since March. The reason for the continuing strike of 400 at Warner was the use of tear gas and water on pickets during the course of the strike and the union's consequent demand for compensation up to $500 each for the injured strikers, claimed to number 300.

In Saigon, a French soldier was killed and another wounded in a grenade attack, presumably by the Vietminh, as a jeep column returned to Cholon from Saigon. A dozen Annamese, that is Vietnamese, plus a Japanese officer, were arrested by the French.

As set forth in conjunction with The News of October 25, 1937, the Cuban Missile Crisis entered its tenth day on October 25, 1962, a fateful day as U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson would make a strong presentation to the U.N. laying out the evidence to the world of the presence in Cuba of medium range and intermediate range ballistic missiles, defined by their range to be offensive weapons. The presentation was based in part on low-level reconnaissance photographs taken since Tuesday. Soviet U.N. Ambassador Valerian Zorin sat with egg on his face.

Yet, there was also bad news as the Russian tanker Graznyy and fifteen other ships bound for Cuba continued to head for the quarantine line without apparent intent to stop. Fifteen others had turned around. While by the end of the day, there was a report that the Graznyy had stopped, another critical confrontation in the blockade was set for Friday and Saturday.

To supplement the coverage of the crisis, here are several contemporary newspaper accounts from across the country for each day of the crisis, after it became public knowledge on Monday, October 22.

Japanese Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano stated that at the beginning of the war, a formal declaration of war by Japan was to have been delivered to the United States thirty minutes before the attack began at Pearl Harbor. For unknown reasons, the message was delayed in Tokyo.

Admiral Nagano accepted full responsibility for the final decision to go forward with the attack as other admirals thought it too dangerous, urging instead initial action against Java and Malaya. He had no regrets in issuing the order to attack Pearl Harbor, saying that had he not done so, Japan would have been defeated earlier. The deceased Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had selected the initial sailing date of November 26 for the Combined Fleet.

Revised American casualty figures for the war were released showing the Army with 216,966 killed, 571,330 wounded, 18,565 missing, and 115,784 taken prisoner. The Navy was reported to have suffered 55,896 killed, 80,256 wounded, 9,287 missing, and 1,119 taken prisoner. Of the Army prisoners, 107,457 had been exchanged or returned to Allied hands. Thus, the total Americans killed during the war stood at 272,862, plus another 28,000 missing.

In London, Conservative M.P. Robert Boothby raised before Commons the notion that negotiations for an American loan should be suspended as too expensive. The House cheered the statement.

In Washington, the House refused to approve the Senate amendments in the bill which cut taxes, sending the bill to Senate-House confreres to work out the differences. The House had approved 5.3 billion and the Senate, 5.7 billion in cuts.

In Charlotte, a scheduled demonstration of a hundred Navy combat planes at Morris Field was delayed by weather, their "attack" on the field being re-scheduled for the next day.

The sixteenth installment of the series of articles by General Jonathan Wainwright on the fall of Bataan and Corregidor in April and May, 1942 tells of the foresighted construction of Malinta Tunnel on Corregidor during the 1930's at the behest of General Charles Kilbourne. General Wainwright provides a description of the tunnel which saved many lives on the island fortress during the Japanese attack between April 9 and May 6.

By April 25, the hospital in the tunnel was handling a thousand patients amid the shaking from constant shelling and bombing. Several times the lights had gone out during medical procedures.

General Wainwright obtained a promise from General MacArthur that he would dispatch his only two Navy flying boats to Corregidor to rescue some of the nurses.

Jeanne Marshall of the News tells of an acrobatic five-month old Paw Creek girl, shown in a photograph, able to balance on both feet in the palm of her father's hand and stand upright. The feat came as the result of two and a half months of steady training.

She could also climb a third of the way up the Empire State Building while reciting the Gettysburg Address more or less verbatim.

On the editorial page, "Bedsheet Boys" remarks of the news of the latest rebirth of the Klan, in meeting at Stone Mountain, exhibiting its fiery cross for 60 miles. It had lain largely dormant during the war years but now boasted 20,000 dues-paying Georgians in its membership.

The Atlanta Journal reported that the Federal Government was interested in collecting $600,000 in back taxes from the organization.

The Macon News, which had waged a battle for years against the Klan, was distressed at the revival, that it felt it was fighting "against an unseen enemy of law and order".

But the column suggests that it need not fret so much as gathering together in one spot all of the state's crackpots was not completely a bad idea. It recommends to The Macon News a short story by a North Carolinian, Joseph Mitchell, titled "Fascism Comes to Black Ankle County", (actually, "The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County"), in which the author suggests methods to fight the Klan and that a white robe made an easy target by night.

"Unpleasant Answer" indicates that Price Administrator Chester Bowles had testified before a Senate subcommittee that prices on old and new housing ought continue to be subject to controls. Reconversion director John W. Snyder, however, plumped for removal of controls, that production at levels to satisfy demand would prevent inflation.

There was urgent need for 12.6 million new non-farm dwelling units. In 1925, when housing was at an all-time boom, 935,000 new houses were built. So, at that rate, it would take more than twelve years to satisfy demand.

After World War I, under such conditions, the price of building materials rose 214 percent during the first 18 months following the Armistice, a trend continuing until after 1925. The inflated prices of these houses led to rampant foreclosures beginning in 1929.

A survey had predicted that 75 percent of new houses during the ensuing two years would be priced above $5,000 while two-thirds of demand was for housing below that price. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was calling on builders to hold the line on housing prices and to stress construction of medium and low-cost housing.

Mr. Bowles had the right idea. Government controls would be the only realistic way to keep the lid on prices.

"First Installment" comments on Charles W. Morton, writing in the Atlantic Monthly for November of his surprise that there had been no thunderous chorus from the press rising in protest of the President's statement that security regulations would need be established regarding all information on the atom, implicitly including America's foreign policy, now inextricably bound up with the atom.

While a threat in fact to freedom of the press, the piece does not regard the lack of response with the same surprise as Mr. Morton.

The Bill of Rights, it suggests, would take on a different meaning in the atomic age, as the President was proposing universal military training of a year for everyone 18 to 20 years old out of high school. Generals were predicting publicly that there would be another World War by 1961. So, it was difficult to get excited about the extension of wartime censorship into peacetime, as the distinction between the two periods was rapidly disappearing.

"We should, perhaps, shed a sentimental tear over this violation of a great tradition, but it is, after all, only a down-payment on the sort of security our Government has decided to provide for us. There will be many more installments, for we cannot live in an armed camp and remain free men."

"GOP Prospects" finds a poll of Republican county chairmen and state committee members around the country favored the foreign policy of Senator Arthur Vandenburg, who had led the Republican delegation at the San Francisco U.N. Charter Conference, and the domestic policies of former vice-presidential candidate in 1944, John W. Bricker, Governor of Ohio.

It remarks that Senator Vandenburg marked a departure from isolationism in the party, but Governor Bricker had no real domestic policy, merely favored balancing the budget and cutting taxes, while controlling labor unions, without providing any real specifics on how he intended to accomplish it.

Seventy percent of the poll also believed that President Truman would be a formidable opponent in 1948.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman John Taber of New York favoring the addition of another billion dollars in cuts to the 52 billion taken off the budget for the fiscal year, that the amount could come from cutting out the remaining Office of War Information budget, now subsumed under the State Department. He says that 2,000 persons were employed in New York to broadcast short-wave propaganda, and another office with similar output in San Francisco. He believed that such information broadcast to foreign capitals without the direction of Ambassadors could only cause confusion in policy.

Congressman John Jennings of Tennessee expressed that if there were more than a dozen of the "parasites" and "dead beats" still on the payroll as OWI personnel, they were too many. Mr. Taber informed him that there were about 6,000 remaining on the payroll after cuts of about 2,000.

Drew Pearson points out that amid the strike news, not much had been written regarding the silent strike by manufacturers, waiting out the OPA removal of price ceilings on such things as cars, radios, and refrigerators, items which the public only purchased about once every four years. The manufacturers wanted to maximize their profits and so were holding back production. The strategy also had the advantage that if profits for 1945 remained at 1936-39 levels, the Government would rebate a large amount in taxes.

Though RCA could have produced three million radios between V-J Day and Christmas, it would only send to market about half a million.

Similarly, in the housing industry, builders were concentrating on high-priced housing until rent controls would be removed.

He next relates of an anxious time on board a ship bound for England from New York in August, on which several Congressmen were sailing, when a crew member informed them that there were several incendiary bombs onboard set to go off at midnight, placed there to harm the several Japanese-American officers aboard. After a search, however, no bombs were discovered.

The column tells of Reparations Commissioner Ed Pauley heading from Europe to Japan to study the reparations situation there. He was taking with him Far East expert Owen Lattimore and Joseph de Bois from the Treasury. Both Mr. Lattimore and Mr. De Bois wanted to get rid of Japanese militarism and replace it with democracy.

James Angell, former Columbia professor, would replace Mr. Pauley in Europe.

The column next reports that President Truman had confided to friends that he realized he had lost political prestige on account of sloth in reconversion and tangled relations with Russia.

The Navy, in conjunction with the Foreign Economic Administration, was busy recruiting men to be commercial representatives of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the Pacific Islands and offering housing on the islands as part of the deal to establish a basis for claims by the Government.

Marquis Childs suggests that it was the silly season for rumors regarding Russia, with one circulating that Stalin had died, or had gone to Mars to launch an atomic bomb at the earth. They were the same fantastic rumors which had swirled around Hitler and Mussolini during the war and even before it started. Hitler had supposedly been suffering from throat cancer prior to 1939.

Stalin had spent so much time personally directing the war against Germany that he had neglected domestic matters. President Roosevelt had done likewise.

Within Russia, a strong isolationist faction had grown up. Outside the Soviet Union, Russian troops appeared to act in some instances quite independent of Moscow.

Stalin now had to grapple with the failure of the London Foreign Ministers Conference in September. The State Department was taking the attitude that the next move was Russia's, as the British-American positions on Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean had been made clear at the conference. The United States intended to continue to work through the machinery established in San Francisco in June for the U.N.

The rumors surrounding Stalin were the result of secrecy in the U.S.S.R. It was a principal source of impedance to understanding in the West.

Former Associate Editor Burke Davis writes of name confusion generated by the Time article on Frank Porter Graham and the University of North Carolina, as reprinted the previous Saturday in The News. The piece had mentioned Franklin Carl Erickson, a geography professor, as having been defended by Dr. Graham in 1936 for having sat down to eat in Durham with James W. Ford, the black vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party. But in fact, it was E .E. Ericson, professor of English, who had been involved in the incident.

Professor Erickson had not appreciated the erroneous publicity, replete with his photograph in Time. He wanted monetary reparations for damage from Time, as well from The News and Raleigh News & Observer, which also reprinted the piece. The professor complained that he had been confused with Professor Ericson since 1936, that everywhere he went, people claimed to have heard of him.

Professor Ericson meanwhile remained a favorite of the U.N.C. students who were dedicating the current Yackety Yack yearbook to him. He had a son captured on Bataan and subsequently killed in captivity during the war. He was no longer the fiery rhetorician he had been in earlier days when controversy swirled about him.

When the story had come out that he had eaten dinner with Mr. Ford, it had not been reported that professors from Duke were also present or that he had attended school with Mr. Ford.

Both men were professional scholars with good reputations as such, but Professor Ericson had garnered a reputation as an exhibitionist, which Professor Erickson did not share or desire.

So let the record be square: Ericson and Erickson were two different professors, and the latter never had dinner with any black Communist in Durham.

It would have been bad enough had it occurred in Raleigh.

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