The Charlotte News

Monday, September 17, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the hurricane had moved across South Carolina this date, having already caused five deaths, two in the South Carolina town of Gourin, 12 miles from Kingstree, producing also 50 million dollars worth of damage after striking Miami. Charleston escaped with little damage, hit only by heavy rains and winds with speeds up to 58 mph.

It was predicted that the storm would enter North Carolina in Columbus County and move toward Virginia through Gates County. At Rockingham, having been for awhile recently home to the late Tom Jimison, two mill dams had collapsed, flooding homes and roads, sweeping away cattle, hogs, and poultry. Chickens which had flown the coop were observed on rooftops in Rockingham. Two plants of the Pee Dee Mill in West Rockingham were flooded. Flood damage was estimated in the area at a million dollars.

I myself have all the other,
And the very ports they blow,
All the quarters that they know
I' the shipman's card.
I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se'nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tost.
Look what I have.

Pity the poor immigrants.

We read everything. Don't blame the honorable returning veterans though, just those who sought to crawl into their shoes for untoward purpose. The names may be the same or similar, but the faces have been re-arranged, as the wastrels carried perdition in their costrels for ill gain, attempting to distract for a decade with their rain.

Oh, what a deadly wot to the eye shall thee mote when first practice thou omnisciently to connote. We've a rope for such connivers. Shall we swing them at high noon from the gibbets divers? A tost to their livers: that they may be short and full of holes, as the cold wind blows from the ether across the nether.

Miami was reported recovering from "hurricane hangover", whether merely involving clean-up of debris or too many of those Hurricanes served in some areas, not being reported. Biscayne Boulevard's towering and protected royal palm trees were shorn of their fronds. The millionaire's retreat of South Biscayne Bay, the "shack colony" of sun cabanas, had been wiped out. The Quarterdeck Club survived. You may have a nice crab cocktail this evening, but nothing stronger, please.

But the Probus Club and the Swan Club "disappeared". When they might reappear, only the persons in charge would know.

Street Department crews were busy this date clearing away the debris, which included cocoanuts, palm fronds, tree branches, signs, electric fixtures, and general muck.

Electricity in Miami remained not currented.

Reported a Miami Herald columnist, "Miami is too dowdy to be a glamor girl among cities today."

Sounds as a bit of a gibe-knocker to the Charlotte News, if you ask us.

General MacArthur reported that occupation was proceeding in Japan so smoothly that he hoped to cut occupation forces to not more than 200,000 within six months. He suggested that it had been one of history's great gambles, if not, by the wabe, gybes, to land occupation forces beginning August 31 before a still armed Japanese military outnumbering the landing forces a thousand to one.

Of course, we must recall that uppermost in the Japanese psyche was the threat of more atomic bombs should they not be cooperative at this juncture in history.

Five Americans had been killed after being paraded through Hong Kong during the war, forced to wear signs reading, "These are the American devils who bombed us." Only six of 3,550 British and Australian prisoners taken to Borneo were known still to be alive. Many died as part of two death marches through the mountains during January.

A secret Gestapo handbook used during the war surfaced which had asserted that the International Boy Scouts had been employed by the British Secret Service as intelligence gathering forces and a propaganda dissemination device.

Radio propagandist for the Nazis during the war, Lord Haw Haw, a.k.a. William Joyce, on trial for treason in London, had his barrister's motion for dismissal disallowed, having raised the contention that Lord Haw Haw was not properly a British subject and therefore not triable on a charge of treason. The court ruled that there was sufficient evidence to put the matter to a jury for determination.

Haw-haw, haw, haw-haw-haw.

The Navy assured the Senate Military Committee, now holding hearings on the Army and Navy discharge efforts, that by Christmas it would discharge 764,000 enlisted men plus 75,000 officers.

During the hearing, Senator Harold Burton of Ohio, about to be appointed by President Truman to replace Justice Owen Roberts on the Supreme Court, brought out in questioning that, unlike the Army, the Navy did not discharge men on the basis that they were needed in reconversion, indicating that there were many men with technical skills which were important to the reconversion effort, thus arguing that the Navy take up the practice of the Army.

Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson stated that meat rationing might need continue on a limited basis, one which would restrict consumption, however, only to normal peacetime levels, thus not permitting gorging one's self as a pig, now that the war was over and restraints increasingly lifted. The full extent of the rationing depended on how much meat would need to be sent abroad to feed Europe during the long winter.

Many subsidies also would subside and be lifted within the ensuing few months, with all of them, save on flour, hoped to be gone by June 30, 1946. Those items on which subsidies continued to be paid are listed, including "cheeder" cheese, a type with which we are not familiar. Perhaps the cheese connoisseurs among us may lend their hand at education of what this cheeder is and from whence it comes.

Ah, we've got it. It was misspelled. Cheetah cheese. It's, a, like a feta cheese, only dropping its stripes rather than its spots.

New York City ended its meatless Tuesdays and Fridays, initiated by Mayor La Guardia a year earlier.

It was all a bit fishy from the start.

Thousands of Muscovites filed past the tomb of Vladimir I. Lenin, opened for the first time to viewing since early in the war.

The auto industry now had 80,000 workers idle in Detroit and Windsor, Ont., demanding a 30 percent across-the-board wage increase. A strike at an electrical wiring plant in Warren, Ohio, supplier to G.M., might affect another group of workers. Balloting was being set for 500,000 auto workers across the country to vote on whether to strike. Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Co., supplier to Ford, having caused 40,000 indirect layoffs at Ford, rejected terms of proposed settlement of its strike of 4,000 workers based on the discharge of three, which had begun August 23, not supported by the UAW.

On the editorial page, "Two Doctrines" contrasts two views of peace, that of General Jonathan Wainwright and that of Premier Higashi-Kuni of Japan. The latter wanted America to forget Pearl Harbor, that Japan might also forget the two atomic bombs. He asserted that, under the Emperor, Japan would move, with the guidance of the United States, freed from the yoke of the militarists, toward true democracy, economically and socially.

"Burning It Up" reports that North Carolinians had managed to burn off 250,000 acres of woodlands and destroy a half million dollars worth of timber through cigarette ignited forest fires during the previous year, the group having been responsible for a quarter of the 9,000 forest fires. The Southeast had accounted for 85 percent of all forest fire losses, fourteen million of sixteen million acres. South Carolina had burned off even more acreage than North Carolina, 579,000 acres with a damage in dollars at 1.194 million.

"A Caution" suggests a caveat to anxious citizens wanting the removal of price controls and the lifting of restrictions on building materials so that they might build homes again: that with higher materials prices would come higher home prices, perhaps doubling overnight.

"It Can Be Done" reports that the North Carolina Highway Patrol had been especially vigilant of the roads during Labor Day weekend, with the consequence that the death toll had been less than in 1944, despite there being many more drivers on the roads and highways, the result of the release in August of gas rationing. The patrolmen had cited 614 motorists for speeding during the weekend and warned several thousand others on less serious violations.

—Man, you are like squaresville, daddy. When you got the chick and the wheels, you got to roll. Like, you dig?

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Congressman Jerry Voorhis of California, who would the following year lose his seat to Richard Nixon, commenting on the first day after the Congress had reconvened from summer recess, and, consequently, after the Pacific war had ended, in thanks that it had successfully terminated, and that it was the best news to the planet in many years.

Representative John Rankin of Mississippi stated that it was his hope that America would retain exclusively the secret of the atomic bomb, and would maintain strong air forces and Navy to preserve the peace so that another such war would not take place 25 years into the future, that is 1970—the time by which a UCLA sociologist had predicted in early 1943 that war could again erupt against Japan.

Well, in a sense, given the occupation by Japan of Indo-China during the period 1941 to 1945 and the stimulus from it to the rise of Ho Chi Minh in 1941 as a rebel leader in the jungles, self-styled expressly after George Washington's example, and the first vestiges of the Viet Minh, was it not, indirectly, the case?—and, despite following Mr. Rankin's suggested policy to the Crossroads T.

Drew Pearson suggests that the President's memo had been used behind the scenes to defeat in the Senate the proposed unemployment extension bill, to assure supplemental unemployment above the state outlays, up to $25 per week for 26 weeks. The President, following the same course as FDR, had routinely sent memos to Majority Leader Alben Barkley regarding pending legislation. The memos were supposed to be maintained confidentially. Senator Walter George of the Finance Committee got a copy of the memo, at first, did not read it into the record, but after a subcommittee was formed to study the measure, read it aloud. The major criticism of the bill was that it would encourage unemployment in poorer states, such as North Carolina and other Southern states, where the average wage was lower than the proposed unemployment payment.

A letter writer is appalled at the news that 994 prisoners who were supposed to be under observation at mental institutions in North Carolina were being housed in county jails of 76 of the state's hundred counties, as reported in the column on September 13. She calls for a drive to collect funds to build a special hospital for these inmates.

Another letter writer, a mother of three sons, two of whom were veterans and the other just 17, expresses her support for a peacetime draft, as long as it allowed first the would-be inductee to finish high school.

Marquis Childs discusses the elaborate preparations for the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, asserting that it had to be a trial which would present a proper case of guilt against the accused or potentially cause disrespect for Allied institutions. Justice Robert Jackson, lead prosecutor for the United States, had worked hard to prepare the case, along with investigators compiling and sifting evidence. Both documentary evidence of the wholesale elimination of the Jews and Gypsies, as well as some film documentation, had been discovered.

Samuel Grafton suggests that, in seeming defiance of definition of moving left or right consistently, President Truman was simply stepping where he could—to be free from the crocodiles nipping at his heels. "In crossing a stream, one steps on dry stones, wherever they are, and does not flop down into the water to please those purists who demand that all travel be in an absolutely straight hue."

"But it is ever a conservative belief that if we can only fasten down the weathervanes, we can thereby tie up the winds."

The problem, suggests Mr. Grafton, was not with the President's direction, but rather with the critics who professed omniscience as to how the world was going, knowing the movement of everything except the world.