Tuesday, November 13, 1945

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, November 13, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Prime Minister Attlee had addressed a joint session of Congress, telling them that there was plentiful room for Americans and British to get along in the area of international trade without undue rivalry. He barely mentioned the atom bomb. Neither did he make an outright plea for financial aid, but stressed that Britain had to start from scratch in rebuilding after the war. His remarks were warmly received.

President Truman was said to be irked by the implication put forward by the press that it was Mr. Attlee's proposal that the atom bomb be turned over to the Security Council of the U.N. and that the President was in agreement with the proposal. An announcement on the secret conference between the two leaders and Prime Minister Mackenzie King of Canada was expected by the end of the week.

Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin stated in London that the United States and Great Britain had agreed to a uniform policy with respect to the Palestinian homeland for Jewish refugees from Europe, that there would be a temporary settlement of the question pending submission to and resolution by the U.N. He urged that there would be dedicated effort to resolve the matter amicably such that both Arab and Jewish interests would be served and the peace preserved in the Middle East.

In China, Government forces were reported by neutral sources to have taken the key Manchurian town of Shanhaikwan, coastal anchor of the Great Wall.

In Java, as the British Indian troops continued to attack Indonesian Nationalist forces in Soerabaja, to disarm them after failure to meet the earlier ultimatum to lay down arms voluntarily, a moderate Socialist Premier had been selected for the Indonesians, Sutan Sjahrir, said to be cooperative with both the Dutch and British. The Dutch had refused to deal with President Soekarno, now believed relegated to a minor role among Indonesians.

In the 32nd installment of General Jonathan Wainwright's account of his captivity by the Japanese at Karenko Prison on Formosa, he tells further of the consistent beatings as the men went to the latrine and the continued starvation, interrupted only by Christmas, when the Japanese supplied 30 ducks for 400 men, plus an apple apiece. It was nevertheless a godsend, given their usual rice and watery soup. The ducks were carefully apportioned and each man got a sliver in his soup.

Despite their depressed condition, the men insisted on merriment at Christmas, and decorated their barracks to the extent they could scrounge items of color for the occasion. They sang hymns accompanied by a violinist, Col. William Braley. When they got to "Hark the Herald Angels Sing", General Wainwright, having retired to his room off the barracks, broke down.

Yet, afterward, there was no change in the treatment or the diet. The men continued to work on the truck farm, receiving an extra spoonful of rice in payment each day, and continued to dream of food at night. Their bodies were gradually consuming muscle tissue, reducing them to skeletons hung with flesh.

Early in 1943, they received a gift from the Japanese, the stomachs, intestines, and lungs of cattle which had been sent to Karenko for conversion to canned meat. They ate the "nauseating viscera" without hesitation.

A second article by Randolph Churchill, relating of his interview with President Eamon De Valera of Southern Ireland, reveals that there were two reasons asserted for Eire's neutrality in the war, one being to show its independence from Britain and protest of continued partition of Ireland, the other to spare Eire from the harshness of the war. Eire had insisted that it would not be used either as a staging ground for warfare by Britain on Germany or by Germany on Britain. To that end, it monitored the German embassy and its wireless set, confiscated it on December 24, 1943, on the insistence of the British, worried about intercepts regarding the plans for invasion of Normandy.

Lt. Buford Patterson of Charlotte returned home, a veteran of the Philippines action, having started out as an airman and then winding up as front line infantry after the Japanese invasion in December, 1941. He was confined in a Japanese prison camp after the fall of Bataan and was a survivor of the notorious Bataan Death March of April, 1942.

In Oroville, California, a sixteen-year old boy was confined to jail, as was his 25-year old mistress, married with two children, after she professed the intention to divorce her soldier husband and marry young Ellsworth, known to his friends as Sonny. She claimed that Ellsworth was more a lover than many men 35 years of age.

She ought to know.

Ellsworth was quite active at the pursuit of older women, having been married in Yuma at age 14 to a woman 22 years old the year before, also married with two children. That marriage was annulled at the request of Ellsworth's mother. They had honeymooned in Denver.

In Niagara Falls, two boys, age 10 and 12, had risked their own lives to save the pet dog of one of them, which had fallen into a ten-foot deep gorge. They lowered themselves with clothesline and then could not obtain egress from the trap themselves, had to be rescued. The owner of the dog said that he was glad his dog wasn't hurt too badly and was not going to allow him to die.

Smart kid. Should have left him for awhile and taught him and his pal a lesson in the value of human life over animal life.

Buster, the rich tom cat, who had been endowed by his owner with a $40,000 bequest in August, 1944 after the death in July of Woodbury Rand, Boston attorney, had, himself, now kicked the bucket. Since Buster left no will, probate lawyers were trying to figure out what to do with the remaining bequest, which had included a $5,000 per year stipend to Mr. Rand's former housekeeper to care for Buster.

Guess they can have a pretty elaborate funeral, replete with a parade through Boston, for old Buster.

"Broncho Bill"'s "Son of a Gun" is no longer available, incidentally, from August 2, 1944, and so we substitute this one for it. Don't change it again or you will join Buster in the Great Beyond. Same goes for "fruitcake" of September 6, 1944. Ditto for "well and good". Would you like a Love Letter, you crazy Fruitcake?

On the editorial page, "Enter That Old Nemesis" reports that Mayor Baxter of Charlotte was asking for a bond election on building the proposed auditorium, not limited, as recommended by the City Planning Board, only to purchase of land and planning.

While the editorial backs the auditorium in theory, it found problems with floating a bond to build it, as there was already money owed by the City, borrowed and not paid back. There was too little margin available against the legally incurred debt of a municipality in North Carolina to enable the Mayor's proposal and leave enough for emergencies.

"Patton Rides the Escalator" comments on the automatic assumption of command of occupation troops in Europe by General Patton by virtue of his rank and years of service during the temporary absence of General Eisenhower, regardless of Patton's past and recent mishaps.

Despite its temporary character, the piece finds the promotion ridiculous given the fact that command of the Third Army had been taken from Patton in September as a result of his not having followed Eisenhower's policy of strict de-Nazification.

The elevation called attention to the need for revision of the Army's strict adherence to seniority, comparing it to the Charleston St. Cecilia Society, from which, according to legend, one could be removed only by reason of death or commission of adultery.

"Boston Breaks Our Monopoly" finds the election of Boss Jim Curley to be Mayor of Boston, his fourth such term, after serving as Governor and presently a member of Congress, to have a "gamy odor" about it, that Mr. Curley's prior graft, including his pending Federal indictment for using the mails to defraud in conferring war contracts, had become an asset rather than a liability. Mr. Curley contended that he was persecuted for his politics by Boston aristocrats.

The piece suggests that he was cut from the same cloth as Senators Robert Rice Reynolds of North Carolina, Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, Pappy O'Daniel of Texas, and the late Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina and Huey Long of Louisiana, with populist appeal to hide nefarious politics. The South, it turned out, had no monopoly on demagogy.

"Open Discussion" reports of the strike by bartenders at Colombo Pecci's saloon in New York. Mr. Pecci, not to be outdone by claims of unfair treatment displayed on placards of the pickets outside his saloon, donned a sandwich-board which stated that he was fair to his employees and invited customers to come in and see for themselves, then began walking alongside the pickets displaying the message.

The piece finds it a novel response to a strike, permitting the customers to make up their own minds whether to enter the saloon by crossing a picket line or walking on down the street to another.

A piece from the Pascagoula (Miss.) Chronicle-Star, titled "The Man and the Homefolks", contrasts the fight for the best in the national character by the veterans of the war from Mississippi with the fight for the worst in the national character by Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo. It predicts that the war had filled his constituents with a sense of democratic ideals, which the returning veterans would impress even further.

It predicts also that Senator Bilbo in 1946 would be defeated and asserts that the rest of the South would find the loss grounds for congratulations to Mississippi. His racism had brought disgrace, says the piece, to the State.

Drew Pearson comments on the changed tradition in place since Charles Evans Hughes had been Secretary of State, that the Secretary held five or six press conferences per week. James Byrnes, however, did not like meeting with the press, had cut down press conferences to one per week.

When he did meet with the press, he could be grim and difficult, withholding information which he did not think should be made public.

Mr. Pearson next discusses Raymond Davis, the former muledriver and owner of two West Virginia coal mines, who had been instrumental in getting the Randolph Bill before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to create a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, to spread good will around the world. Mr. Davis had been invited as an observer at the San Francisco Conference, and had proposed a constitution for the United Nations Organization, which many people were taking seriously.

He next provides several "Capital Chaff" items, including the fact that Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi had received rare praise on the floor by Robert Rich of Pennsylvania recently, only to have Mr. Rankin ask Mr. Rich, a Republican, not to take up further time.

Marquis Childs discusses the death of O.K. Bovard, managing editor from 1908 to 1938 of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, leading the newspaper in a series of attacks on evil practices, locally and nationally. Yet, Mr. Bovard was not a crusader by temperament. He had dedicatedly pursued facts with a scalpel, not a bludgeon, and felt little for those who fell beneath the charges of corruption. He had directed the investigation which led the Senate to reopen Teapot Dome, Paul Y. Anderson having been the primary reporter assigned to the story, for which he had received the Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Bovard had character and unswerving loyalty to those who worked for him. His exterior could be cold and disagreeable. But his character and sardonic wit ultimately triumphed over that flaw. In later years, he had become too solidified in his opinion, seeing the world from an arbitrary perspective. But he continued to search for the truth, the object, as he saw it, of a newspaper.

Mr. Childs, it should be noted, had begun his career with the Post-Dispatch.

A letter writer from Jonestown, Miss., puts forth a plan for the security of the veteran, allowing purchase of homes and farms up to $10,000 in value on interest-free loans for twenty years. He believes it a path to avoid foreclosure.

The only way to avoid foreclosures is to outlaw the practice, an antiquated holdover from old Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence if there ever was one. It is time to do away with the practice of foreclosure, streamlining the ability all too often of unscrupulous crooks to take real property without a trial or formal legal process, and force lenders to do what everyone else has to do to collect a debt, sue. Congress cannot abrogate state laws, but it can pass tax laws which make it not worth the while of lenders to foreclose, make it more onerous to foreclose than to forgo foreclosure.

Dorothy Thompson suggests that the American people lacked training in systematic thought, lacked any historic sense or logic. Instead, Americans had become pragmatists, willing to try anything once, regardless of its sense, without exercise of foresight born of reason. Nor were Americans seemingly capable of learning from error. Education consisted of imparting of vast amounts of information, without any framework by which to understand what the information in sum meant, leaving the student without even common sense.

Few of the country's policy makers had acquainted themselves with Russian history prior to 1917, or even Soviet and international Communist policy since. Thus they made no connection with Russia in the facts that Earl Browder, former head of the American Communists, had been an isolationist before the war, then, after 1941, became wholly supportive of the Allies, favored a no-strike policy from 1941 onward. He had been purged at war's end and replaced by William Z. Foster, a staunch isolationist who branded Truman's foreign policy as imperialist and a menace to peace, favored strikes.

The policy analysts apparently saw no connection between Foreign Commissar Molotov's last speech and the situation in China.

The Soviets had effectively resumed their world revolution, extending into Eastern Europe and Asia. It followed the same lines as Hitler's Pan-Germanism of the thirties.

The situation, she opines, had been created by American leaders who agreed to partition of Poland without any formula on how it would be carried out, agreed to free elections without oversight, allowed for Soviet spheres without military neutralization, agreed to armed guerillas acting as liberators without assurance that they would then take over in the countries thus liberated. Agreement was also made to contribute armed force to suppress aggression without properly defining what aggression meant. She offers that it was not just the fault of President Roosevelt and President Truman, for the Republicans had offered nothing in opposition.

She complains finally that the country lacked a trained, professional intelligence service, but rather, in the O.S.S., had "a superman association of ex-paratroopers and Yale sleuths, happily telling all in the slick magazines, forgetting that the requirement of a Secret Service is to be secret."

While starting out this piece with valid observations, Ms. Thompson, as had become her most usual habit since the end of the war, begins to venture into never-never land, unwittingly supporting policies which would act to deepen and stimulate the Cold War, rather than avoid it and nurture positive relations with the Soviets. Her normally sound reasoning had flown the coop at the end of the war.

Framed Edition
[Return to Links
Page by Subject] [Return to Links-Page by Date] [Return to News<i><i><i>--</i></i></i>Framed Edition]
Links-Date -- Links-Subj.