Tuesday, September 25, 1945

The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 25, 1945

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that General MacArthur appeared to have suddenly changed his tune from the previous week and now asserted that the occupation of Japan might last many years, denying the report from Ted Dealey of the Dallas Morning News, quoting MacArthur from an interview of September 4 as having said that occupation might end in six months provided the Americans were "not too cruel and ruthless". In clarification, the statement issued by headquarters stated that the General had said that occupation forces might be reducible to a minimum size within six months under favorable conditions.

Meanwhile, as pressure in the United States mounted for a tougher form of occupation, General MacArthur imposed additional controls on the Japanese, forbidding the manufacture of any arms or ammunition and aircraft.

The New York Times, via correspondent Frank Kluckhohn, reported, in an unprecedented interview with a reporter, that Emperor Hirohito claimed that he had no advance warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor and had intended his rescript for war to be followed by a formal declaration of war by Tojo, not a sneak attack. The Emperor also claimed to have been opposed generally to war as an instrument of policy.

Mr. Kluckhohn stated that he was the first American to see the Emperor since the beginning of the war and the first foreigner to interview him since surrender. The Emperor gave the interview standing up, poised a foot from Mr. Kluckhohn, looking him dead in the eye.

He may have been thinking, "How did I get here?"

In London, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin reportedly clashed with Russian Foreign Commissar V. M. Molotov regarding the refusal of the British to support Soviet-backed Balkan governments, and the facts that the Russians were not amenable to the British and American proposal that Austria be fed from the Balkan granary, and their wish to block any discussion anent the Balkans. Molotov also opposed a provision for the treaties with Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Finland whereby arms would be reduced. Molotov furthermore charged that the British were supporting an anti-democratic regime in Greece.

The Navy announced that any enlisted man with three or more children under 18 would be released upon his own request.

Labor Secretary Lewis Schwellenbach announced support for a 65 cents per hour minimum wage to replace the current 40-cent wage established in 1938. The minimum wage bill, introduced by Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, provided an increase to 70 cents in the second year after passage and to 75 cents in the third year. The Secretary indicated that only a small percentage of workers received less than 50 cents an hour as it was.

Labor and management representatives came together for a meeting in Chicago to try to iron out differences regarding the mounting labor crisis in the country. First on the agenda was to try to settle the oil refinery strike, affecting 30,000 workers. Idle workers now numbered 350,000.

The top floors of New York City skyscrapers took on a ghostly air as the elevator strike moved through its second day, with no prospect of settlement in sight. The strike had impacted 1,575 buildings, with 15,000 elevator operators and building service men out of work. Police gave the number as 2,015 buildings. David B. Sullivan, president of the local which initiated the strike, stated that it would continue "until hell freezes over" unless the union demands were met. Many other unions, including the Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Hotel Service employees, were preparing to strike in sympathy to avoid crossing picket lines. Some 200,000 workers in the Garment District alone had been impacted by the elevator strike.

Because of the spreading strikes, the House Ways and Means Committee shelved all proposals regarding extending unemployment compensation. It was asserted that with so many workers idle, it was impossible of the moment to assess the unemployment situation.

General Patton, in Bad Toelz, Germany, apologized for a poor choice of words in comparing the Nazis to Republicans and Democrats. He stated that he was, nevertheless, complying with the directives of General Eisenhower to de-Nazify Bavaria. The General had also made other controversial sounding statements, as quoted on Saturday. His statements had drawn criticism from the press.

In New Haven, Conn., a musical based on Uncle Tom's Cabin was canceled because of protests from black leaders, charging that the presentation would only revive race prejudice for showing only the degradation imposed on blacks by slavery. One black leader compared it to showing films of the persecution of Jews in Poland, showing only the humiliation. Bridgeport had, earlier in the week, voiced similar criticism.

On the editorial page, "All the Way" indicates that the first local returns in France bespoke a shift to the left, not surprising, as France, since liberation of Paris in August, 1944, had been moving leftward before Britain. The winners were Communists and Socialists in the industrial centers, the losers being Rightists and Centrists, the equivalent of leftists in America.

The basis for the Left Bank reaction appeared that the occupation had taught a bitter lesson of rightist orientation which the country now sought to escape.

The move left France well poised to act as a bridge between Britain and Russia.

"Slight Error" predicts accurately that the Republicans were out to use the line of Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, exploiting the conflict between the State Department, as voiced by Undersecretary-designate Dean Acheson, and General MacArthur, regarding who was responsible for policy in Japan. Senator Wherry, along with Senator Happy Chandler of Kentucky, a Democrat who soon would depart the Senate to undertake full time his new occupation as Commissioner of Baseball, had delayed Mr. Acheson's nomination, to publicize the spat.

The editorial asserts that General MacArthur had exceeded his authority and that Mr. Acheson was entirely correct to call his hand, Senator Wherry, entirely wrong to react as he had.

Senator Wherry had labeled implicitly President Truman and Mr. Acheson as "all the Commies in the country", thereby muddling an already confused situation.

Indeed, this line would characterize much of the Republican debate with the Truman Administration through the ensuing seven years and would inform much of the campaign rhetoric thereafter during the 1950's in both of General Eisenhower's campaigns against Adlai Stevenson, in 1952 and 1956, albeit rhetoric engaged by surrogates, such as Clare Boothe Luce, Joe McCarthy, or Richard Nixon, not by General Eisenhower.

"Room to Grow" discusses the worthwhile proposal by the City Planning Commission to build a new library with room for 250,000 volumes to replace the outmoded 50-year old library, the worst in the country for a city of 100,000. The move meant a five-cent increase in taxes, but that was a small price to pay for the enrichment to the community to be gained by a well-stocked library.

"No Substitute?" suggests that the passing of the War Labor Board was going to leave in its wake a tangled morass of strikes in defiance of Board orders all over the country, with no agency ready to step into the shoes of the WLB to disentangle it. The result would likely be a delay in reconversion to a peacetime economy. It would be the public, it predicts, who would suffer the most from the ensuing tug of war between management and labor.

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Representative Frank Chelf of Kentucky, after a return from a tour of Europe, discussing Army discharges, stating that with all the severe shortages of farm labor in the country during the war, he was receiving correspondence from soldiers saying that to fill time, they were ordered to pick up cigarette butts on base.

Mr. Chelf remarks that he had been forced to pick up butts while in the Navy in 1924 and he had not liked it, that it hurt his pride, even at age 16.

In response to reading accounts that the Army had suggested the demobilization process to be impossible, he recalled that during the war, the Army had sported a motto seen on many bases: "The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little time." It had been this spirit which had won the war. The same spirit needed to be applied to demobilization.

If, as claimed, there were not enough ships available to transport the men across the oceans, then, he suggests, idle warships ought be converted to transports. In so doing, the six million men to be discharged could be handled more quickly. He recommended lowering the discharge points to 35 and placing men on reserve status until the red tape could be completed for their formal discharge.

Of course, while sounding good, the sudden dumping of six million men into the labor force, assuming that not all of them or even very many of them would wish to go from being soldiers to farm laborers, would have likely had a terrible impact on the economy, already beginning to smart from the 350,000 idle urban workers from strikes. And now the House had tabled indefinitely the unemployment compensation bill, even in its amended form, only to extend the time of payments.

All of which goes to prove the moral: one cannot smoke one's butt and not bend over and slowly pick it up afterwards.

Drew Pearson comments on General Eisenhower's feeling of despondency at reading an article in Time containing a photograph of a female entertainer in a Berlin night club standing on her head with her legs spread, holding a photo of Premier Stalin between them.

The General had been trying for six weeks to effect better relations with the Russians in Berlin, in the person of Marshal Zhukov, and now the single photo had effectively banished that diligent effort, scattering it to the wild winds of Kansas.

Marshal Zhukov, who at first was coldly reticent, had now warmed to his friend "Ike", but had informed him that he was angered by the Time photograph and wanted to know what Ike would do about it. When he got the inevitable answer that the General would do nothing, he stormed in protest at the insult, still not understanding the concept of a free press, that the picture in one publication did not reflect necessarily the American attitude toward Marshal Stalin.

Moreover, there were other ways, no doubt, to interpret the photograph than to view it as insulting. Ike should have called in General Patton to explain this alternative interpretation to Georgi.

Mr. Pearson next reports that President Truman had informed Senator Harold Burton of Ohio of his nomination to the Supreme Court by telling him that initially, he had promised the nomination to Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson but had changed his mind in favor of having Mr. Patterson replace retiring Henry Stimson as Secretary, that Senator Burton had always been his first choice. He had considered also Judge Philips of Denver and Judge John J. Parker of North Carolina, but inevitably came back to Senator Burton.

The President expressed the reservation that it might be contended that he had in his back pocket the idea of getting a replacement Senator from Ohio who was a Democrat, as the Governor who would appoint the successor was a Democrat. Majority Leader Alben Barkley, however, had convinced the President during their plane ride ten days earlier to Paducah, Ky., from Washington, as the President went home to Independence, to go ahead and appoint Senator Burton and hang the political consequences.

The President had made up his mind on September 4 to appoint Mr. Patterson, but public reaction on Capitol Hill to the leaked story had been adverse to the appointment. He had called in Attorney General Tom Clark, future Supreme Court Justice to be appointed in 1949 by President Truman, to act as Administration go-between with Mr. Patterson and let him make the choice of whether to let his name go into nomination for the Court or for Secretary of War, stating that the President preferred him at the War Department. Mr. Patterson obliged and opted to stay at the War Department.

Republican leaders liked the nomination of Senator Burton for many reasons: he did not always follow the party line as a Senator and his appointment made it likely that former Governor John Bricker, the vice-presidential nominee in 1944, would be freed to run for the Senate seat when it next came open in 1946.

And, indeed, Governor Bricker would run and win the race, would serve two terms in the Senate.

He next reports of the circuitous journey of 182 Army Air Force personnel who got the run around on their discharge, though each had accumulated more than 100 points, well above the 80 necessary. Though having arrived in New York in July, most were still in the Army.

Marquis Childs suggests that the Truman Administration was taking some great risks in quickly abandoning wartime controls. Chester Bowles, OPA director, wanted to move slowly in this regard to assure that short-lived boom times, as after World War I, would not again become conducive to an ensuing depression. Removing too quickly the controls on prices of building materials, for instance, invited, through the competitive bidding process of the building trades, rapid increase in home prices, the prospect of building only a few expensive homes rather than a volume of less expensive homes to spread the profit margin being an enticement to contractors and builders.

Another example he cites was the determination by the Federal Works Administration to eliminate Federal child care assistance to working mothers, a move which had been implemented under the Lanham Act for mothers working in war industries. The aid was set to expire October 31, even though the President had authority to retain the program until the national war emergency was declared ended.

"This is the surest way to disunity; to the fear and uncertainty that mean psychological disarmament. We can speak fine words about world peace. But unless we stand strong and united as a nation, words are meaningless."

Dorothy Thompson suggests that the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times...," aptly described the present. "We are all going straight to heaven—we are all going directly the other way."

She suggests that, historically, such paradoxical times only served to bring on demagoguery, just as during and after the French Revolution.

Russia was seeking mandates in Africa only as a ploy to obtain its sphere of influence in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, to suggest to the West that, just as it would be inconvenient to have Russia in Africa, so, too, would it be to have the West in Eastern Europe.

France wanted to annex the Ruhr and Rhineland and so campaigned for a Western bloc of nations, believing Britain would go along with the plan for security and that the Soviets would go along to enable, in counter-balance, their Eastern bloc. But General De Gaulle could not commit France to anything at present, as the French elections were not scheduled until late October.

In the United States, the labor strikes were not as they seemed. Labor leaders demanded a 30 to 40 percent wage increase but did not expect to obtain it, for to do so could mean runaway inflation when civilian production was not yet up to speed. Industry trumpeted the policy of low wages and prices without expecting to obtain them, as the result would be deflationary. It actually preferred high wages and high prices.

"Never was there greater need for appeal to reason and principle. But the struggle for power does not even raise the question: Power for What?"

Samuel Grafton reports that, according to The New York Times, the Army was having problems with business leaders in Germany as in Japan. The dispatch had stated that General Patton had wondered to an official investigating Nazi connections to certain Bavarian bankers, whether it was not "silly" to select out from Germany "the most intelligent people", that the practice of disobedience to General Eisenhower's July 20 order of de-Nazification of Germany was rampant, that low municipal officials were being removed while business leaders were being left alone, the excuse being, as General Patton had stated it, efficiency.

General MacArthur was following the same policy with respect to Japan, had issued no analogous de-feudalization order.

Such reports, opines Mr. Grafton, begged the question as to the duration of military rule in both theaters of occupation. The Army, with its rigid discipline and non-political nature, was uniquely unfitted for the job. Its virtues did not lend themselves to deal with political conflict; to try to do so would inevitably embroil the Army in politics, contrary to its traditional role. While the Army's neutrality served as an attractive nuisance to Washington to use it for the purpose, the paradox prevented it, on balance, from serving utility. In consequence, the Army chose the path of least resistance, that of assuring minimally the elimination of dysfunctional utility in each country, to try to resolve grand issues of political disjunction.

He thus tends toward the notion of sending instead civilian politicians to perform the task of reorienting each country's political institutions toward democracy, allowing the Army to serve then in its more accustomed role as a police force.

The "more bitter portion" of the American press gave praise to General MacArthur's opposition to social reform in Japan.

"And on the horizon dimly forms the danger that not only shall we fail to stamp out a political virus abroad, but we shall, in addition, wind up with a vaguely politicalized army."

As to the Dorman Smith...

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