The Charlotte News
Monday, December 3, 1945
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that President Truman had set up special fact-finding boards to deal with the strike at G.M. and the threatened strike of steel workers, asking Congress for permanent legal authority to intervene in such labor disputes and to authorize a waiting period of thirty days after a strike in a major industry had been called before it would be implemented, to afford time to study the facts and enable the Government to work out a solution between the two sides. The proposed legislation would neither ban strikes nor make resolution compulsory, but would afford the public knowledge of the factual basis for the concerns of each side.
He urged the auto workers to return to work and the steel workers not to join them on the picket lines.
The President declared that the Labor-Management Conference had failed to meet its major objective, to determine how to avoid work stoppages.
The head of UAW, R. J. Thomas, sought from Attorney General Tom Clark an investigation into whether G.M. had a monopoly on fuel pumps for the automobile industry. It was this central component, necessary for every automobile of the day, which had prompted G.M. to seek and obtain the approval of UAW to return to work in certain G.M. plants which manufactured fuel pumps and other parts required by other automakers.
George Romney, future head of American Motors and Governor of Michigan, in 1945, general manager of the Automobile Manufacturers Association, had also registered a comment, but it was continued on an inside page which we do not have.
We hope that his statement was to the effect, "We'll keep the front wheels from breaking off."
At least at the intersection of Robin Hood and Avalon, and in front of Fries Moravian, in Bohemia.
They did stay in place, however, down beneath the tobacconists' curve thrown by Hawthorne.
In ports throughout the country, National Maritime Union workers did blow, staging a 24-hour walkout in support of the union contention that the return of overseas veterans had been delayed because ships capable of carrying soldiers were being devoted to commercial usage.
We presume the nationwide walkout, besides providing a one day vacation from work, delayed the more, 24 hours, the soldiers and sailors from coming home.
In China, Nationalist troops were but 30 miles from Mukden, pushing northward 35 miles in one day without opposition.
It was reported that peace talks between the two factions would begin December 10.
In the war crimes trial in Manila of General Yamashita, the "Tiger of Malaya", the General testified that the Army Groups under his general command had been provided the legal power of court martial and he had no authority to alter it.
In Sydney, Australia, a Japanese Army officer was sentenced to death for cannibalism, eating the flesh of a dead Australian soldier to stay alive in New Guinea. The sweet meat he did not forgo, cost the lad his life far ago. Perhaps, he should have stuck to Duke's lice diet.
Another Japanese soldier was convicted for bayoneting an Aussie airman on Celibes, but his sentence had not yet been pronounced.
In Nuremberg, documents introduced at the war crimes trial showed that, at the time of the Munich Pact, had negotiations failed with France and Britain, the Germans were prepared to invade Czechoslovakia on October 1, 1938 with four armies and the Luftwaffe. Sudeten Germans were slated to stir unrest in Czech territory, and Hungary had pledged to be ready to aid the invasion. Unannounced bombing from the air of Prague was also part of the plan.
Just before the start of the trial, Field Marshals Wilhelm Keitel and Walther von Brauchitsch had, however, stated that had France and Britain attacked from the west at the time of Munich, Germany could not have withstood the offensive, having only five divisions on the Western Front, having committed 36 divisions to Czechoslovakia.
The Navy formally accused Captain Charles McVay of negligence in the loss of the Indianapolis during its return from Tinian after delivery of critical components for the first atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima August 6. The captain specifically was charged with failure to undertake a zigzag course to avoid enemy submarines and, after the attack, failing to issue appropriate orders to enable abandoning of ship, causing many to perish after the initial blast.
Captain McVay, the only captain court-martialed during the war for losing his ship, would be convicted for failure to zigzag. The Japanese commander of the submarine which launched the fatal attack testified that a zigzag course would not have prevented him from hunting down and sinking the ship. Eventually, Captain McVay, after being promoted to Rear Admiral at his retirement from the Navy in 1949, committed suicide in 1968.
Maj. General Sherman Miles, acting head of Army G-2 at the time of Pearl Harbor, told the joint Congressional committee investigating the attack that General Walter Short had, on November 28, 1941, made a "totally inadequate" response to the war-warning message he had received from General Marshall a day earlier. General Short, having been warned that "hostile action is possible at any moment", had replied that he was placing the Hawaiian Department on alert to prevent sabotage.
Dr. Walter Zinn of the University of Chicago told a group of young 4-H members visiting the campus that the first atomic reactor pile of pure uranium and graphite had been monitored by men ready to give their lives in the unlikely event that withdrawing the rods from the pile and setting up the chain reaction of neutrons would cause a nuclear explosion unless the nuclear "fire" would be extinguished quickly with a special liquid. The scientists expected to lose their lives in the process had such an emergent event occurred.
In Dubuque, Iowa, Mrs. Jean Carbone, 19, daughter of a London fashion designer, had been located, in the company of an Army captain she intended to wed. Her husband, who had flown 65 bomber missions over Germany as an Army lieutenant, had told her, she said, that he would get a divorce from her in Rochester, N.Y., where he was located. The captain and Mrs. Carbone had fallen in love in London the previous year while the lieutenant was in the United States. The couple had been married for only a year.
Freck Sproles shares a letter from a generous businessman who sent in $50, ten percent of his commissions for the day, to the Empty Stocking Fund for needy children of Charlotte, sponsored by The News. The total for the fund was now up to $181.
Remember the posed photograph of the two little girls looking up at the empty chimney. You don't want to see that
And, says a little piece, the date marked the second time in 1945 that a straight numerical progression was formed by the mark on the calendar: 12-3-45. It had also occurred on 1-23-45. But not again until 1-23
We only have 32
Of course, they were cheating since 19 and 20 do not fit the progression.
Incidentally, 8-9-10, 9-10-11, 10-11-12, etc., do not work.
On the editorial page, "Renewed Lease for Squalor" finds the recommendation by the realtors and property management, that the City Council provide five years before slated improvements of substandard housing would be required to be implemented, to be begging to delay the changes until they would ultimately be swept under the carpet. There was need for implementation as soon as shortages in labor and materials were so alleviated as to permit the new construction.
A Council member had also wondered why the Planning Commission had recommended the requirement of bathing facilities in all housing but not hot water.
It pretty much had thrown cold water
"The Lonely Middle Ground" states that the President would now have to intervene in the labor dispute with management to bring the sides together after the failure of the Labor-Management Conference. It would be a perilous course but one which had to be undertaken if the strife was to be ended.
The piece muses that sometimes it seemed that the country had not gotten beyond its attitudes toward labor of 1892, when the "Homestead Massacre" occurred against striking steel workers at Carnegie Steel. The country had largely sided with the company and its hiring of goons to bring order and prevent further strike when the workers were denied their demanded wage increase. Some few believed that labor would need arm themselves to obtain any advance.
Those days had passed and largely labor disputes with management had since been pacific—forgetting, or diplomatically omitting, the violence at Ford in 1932 at the River Rouge Plant.
The editorial finds labor to be acting on its collective will, as evidenced by the strike votes of both the auto workers and steel workers, and not merely as puppets of the union bosses, as was often being contended by anti-union conservatives such as columnist Westbrook Pegler.
The two sides would need considerable prodding to bridge the gap between them, and the only party capable of doing so would be the Federal Government. FDR had always managed with his dynamic personality to prevent longstanding labor disputes. It was now to test the mettle of the new President.
"Taking Care of Our Own" reports of six counties in North Carolina undertaking to build their own hospitals from their own treasuries, with the help of the Duke Endowment, rather than waiting on the State or Federal Governments.
In Scotland County, for instance, sixteen African-Americans had contributed $500 each to the hospital fund, which totaled $311,000. In Stanly County, physicians and dentists had taken the lead in seeking to raise the money for a hospital.
A piece from the Raleigh News and Observer, titled "Cotton Is Still King", reports of the good news for cotton, that it still had a rosy future in the South, as reported by Braxton Bragg Comer of the Alabama Cotton Manufacturers Association in a piece in the Birmingham Age-Herald. While cotton acreage had diminished from 45 million acres to 18 million, the methods of farming had become more efficient, enabling more growth on smaller parcels.
Cotton remained the most profitable crop in the South. The staple had earned farmers five million dollars in 1944. Mills were consuming 9.5 million bales per year but farmers, according to Mr. Comer, could not continue to grow cotton without price supports from the Government.
Drew Pearson relates of a story of a sergeant in the Army who had a personal emergency in his family and needed to return home. After getting the run-around through conventional channels, someone suggested that Sgt. Cohen contact General Eisenhower. It being ten o'clock at night, he called the General at home. An aide answered, told the sergeant to wait a few minutes, returned, saying he should call General Lucius Clay, after giving General Eisenhower a few minutes to contact him. When the sergeant called General Clay, an aide told him to report the next morning, at which time transportation was arranged and the sergeant was on his way home before noon.
Which also could explain why General Eisenhower was now to become chief of staff of the Army, in Washington.
He next relates of President Truman calling the Kansas City Star on Sunday afternoon after arrival for his mother's 93rd birthday in Grandview, Mo., to report the news of his short visit. A young staffer answered and refused to believe it was genuinely the President. "The hell it is," the President reported to Congressional leaders that the young staffer had said. "Mister, who are you trying to kid?"
California Attorney General Robert Kenny had managed to irk Ambassador to Brazil Adolph Berle by suggesting that the President had appointed Mr. Berle because he had seen a Broadway play he liked, "Springtime in Brazil" with Milton Berle, and decided Mr. Berle therefore would be perfect for the role as Ambassador. Mr. Kenny and Mr. Berle had long been at odds for Mr. Berle having resigned from the Lawyers Guild, headed by Mr. Kenny.
The column next comments on the struggle by the Mead Committee in the Senate to obtain an admission from the Army of vast stores of goods being hoarded, suspected as being preparatory for the next war. The items included 60 million pairs of sunglasses, 116 million pairs of cotton shorts, 42 million pairs of woolen underwear, and saddles and bridles stored in Hawaii since the Spanish-American War in 1899, to name but a few of the myriad of items.
Shoot, a fella could have himself a pretty good time in Las Vegas with all that.
The Army had sought to keep the information from the committee on the pretext of military secrecy.
In all, after the prodding by the committee had wrenched loose the facts, it turned out that for the proposed million-man peacetime Army, the service had on hand 30 sheets for each man, 53 blankets, 116 pairs of shorts, and 57 herringbone twill fatigue jackets.
Sold American!
Marquis Childs comments on the evidence being adduced at the Nuremberg war crimes trial, showing that the war had been plotted for some time prior to 1939 by the industrial, financial, and military leaders of Nazi Germany, a finding which came as no surprise. Lebensraum and Aryan superiority were simply slogans to appeal to the masses. The real purpose of the Nazis was to line the pockets of the hierarchy of the party and the aristocracy of Germany.
Critics of the tribunal, including some of Justice Robert Jackson's colleagues on the Supreme Court, doubted the legality of the proceeding and felt it would have been preferable simply to shoot the Nazis outright rather than conduct such a trial.
But doing so would have deprived the world in all likelihood of a thorough record of the Nazi atrocities, making it easier in later years to suggest these men as martyrs to young Germans. He notes also that, for the time being, news of the trial was being kept from Germans.
Mr. Childs urges that Justice Jackson had, in just six months, doggedly pursued a monumental task of sifting the enormous pile of documents, combining aspects of four disparate legal systems, and arranging for translations of the proceedings into several languages, to get the case properly to trial. Whatever the outcome, he deserved tribute.
The tendency in the country since the end of the war had been to engage in looking upon the world with renewed aloofness, as if from an ivory tower. It was easy enough to look down on the British for their actions in Java and in India, on the Soviets for their actions in Azerbaijan in Iran.
But in Nuremberg, Justice Jackson was not simply frowning at the Nazis, rather engaging head-on in what they had done. Incumbent in this effort was the attempt to try to carve for the future some decency in the world.
Dorothy Thompson gives support to the criticism by General Patrick Hurley of American foreign policy in China, but believes that he did not go far enough, that within the gambit of his harsh remarks he might have included Europe, the Middle East, and all of Asia.
She argues that the United States had become essentially a satellite of the Soviet Union, kowtowing on the one side to Soviet expansionism and on the other to British, French, and Dutch renewal of colonial imperialism. The Government during the war, for the sake of preservation of Big Three unity, had become inured to this role, slowly abandoning the Atlantic Charter principles, eschewing any form of territorial aggrandizement.
The U.S. had abandoned to the Soviets, she asserts, both Poland and Yugoslavia, in the latter case allowing a tyrant with his own army, Tito, to rule on the basis of a rigged plebiscite, every bit as free as had been Hitler's.
In the Middle East, U.S. policy was equally hands-off, allowing Britain to renew its territorial and economic interests. The Soviets, without more than token disapproval from the United States, were giving succor to a puppet in Azerbaijan in northern Iran.
All of this weak-kneed policy was despite having emerged from the war the most powerful nation economically and militarily. She finds it an unprecedented surrender of American prestige. She questions whether it was not the result of what Walt Whitman had once called, "the lice of politics, the planners of sly involutions for their own preferment."
Anyone daring to speak against the policy was branded a "warmonger"; anyone criticizing the policy with respect to the renewal of colonialism was considered a Soviet agent; anyone rejecting Soviet expansionism was an American imperialist—neglecting to inform that the labeling and branding of which she speaks primarily came from the foreign press of these countries, especially Pravda in Russia.
She urges a rivitalization of the nation's foreign policy to lead toward justice among the nations, to insure preservation of the peace.
A letter to the editor from an alumnus of the University of North Carolina snarls at the hiring the previous December of Carl Snavely at a high salary, though actually at $8,500 per year, not the earlier quoted $12,000 which the author assumes.
That was bad enough, but now appeared an editorial by Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, as published in the Sunday New York Times, in which he quoted Mr. Snavely as saying that it would take $30,000 to turn out a top level football team. The letter writer assumes the money would go to scholarships.
But instead he advocates simply allowing the coach to have a semi-professional team as part of the gladiatorial spectacle, to compete with other college teams and not have the players required to attend school at all. For recreation and sportmanship, the students could participate in intramural sports.
Mr. Snavely's first fall back at the institution, where he had impressively coached for two years in the mid-thirties, was inauspicious, going 5-5, including back to back losses to arch-rivals Duke and Wake Forest in the last three weeks of the season. While, for sports enthusiasts, the Phant Cagers of 1945-46 would make up for the lackadaisy on the gridiron, the following year would begin an impressive three-year run, posting in 1946 a record of 8-2, losing in the Sugar Bowl to Georgia, also in 1947, 8-2, the beginning of the Charlie Justice years, and in 1948, 9-1-1, again losing in the Sugar Bowl, this time to Oklahoma. In 1949, the team would go 7-4, losing in the Cotton Bowl to Rice, the last bowl appearance by a Carolina team until 1963.
Well, we mention it because this year's team, coached by Larry Fedora in his first season, compiled a record of 8-4, also losing in close games to Wake Forest and Duke, as well to Georgia Tech, as also did the 1945 edition. Through no fault of Mr. Fedora, of course, the program is on probation this year, preventing any post-season play. So we have to tip our hats to the new coach for overcoming many obstacles this season, besetting the program as well for the previous two years, and posting nevertheless a respectable record. Should the team next year go 10-2 and get to a major bowl, we can accept that as a good start, every bit the equal or better than that of Mr. Snavely in his fedora.
We do not know, incidentally, what Mr. Fedora is paid, but we suspect that coincidences there end, that it is a bit more than $8,500.
Actually, since the season technically started after V-J Day, perhaps Coach Snavely did receive the allotted $12,000 after all.
"Theaters", incidentally, from both March 18 and December 22, 1944, is now
Just can't keep those little fingers off the triggers, can you, now? Guess we'll have to chop them right off. Growing up fat, lazy, and stupid, missing the entire point of the knife, is no excuse for ignorance of its inner workings.
Framed Edition
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