The Charlotte News
Wednesday, October 16, 1946
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Hermann Goering had chosen to take poison before his date with the hangman, scheduled to occur in the early morning hours of this date, Nuremberg time, during the evening of Tuesday, EST. The other ten condemned defendants swung
Army intelligence officers were busy trying to find out how Herr Goering got the poison.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, former foreign minister, was first to drop, at 1:14 a.m., 7:14 p.m. EST. An hour and forty-three minutes later, at 8:57 p.m. EST, Arthur Seyss-Inquart went through the trap door, the last to die.
Following the executions, Goering's corpse was brought into the execution chamber for symbolic pronouncement of the sentence.
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, lead American prosecutor at Nuremberg, stated that the death of Hermann Goering by suicide killed the myth of Nazi bravery and stoicism. He could not face the death by execution to which he had condemned millions.
Justice Jackson said that Goering was the only defendant to whom the Germans might have attached martyrdom and the gallows had afforded the only platform on which he could have impressed his followers with his deep commitment to Nazism. He observed that the lesser officials died with greater courage.
Herr Goering had uttered no strong words as Nathan Hale, such that he might be remembered in death, or one day be dug up and memorialized as Napoleon, per his aspiration.
"His end," said Justice Jackson, "betrayed the weakness of his whole life—cunning and crafty, always outwitting somebody, bullying and cowardly."
Kingsbury Smith of the Associated Press, one of the witnesses to the executions, had seen Goering's corpse. As it was presented to the witnesses for viewing, the bodies of Col. Gen. Alfred Jodl and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the last of the executed defendants, dangled from the end of their ropes. The body of Goering was taken beneath the shadow of the scaffold, between the first and second gallows, where the blanket covering him was removed so that witnesses could see that Goering was dead and had not simply escaped. His face remained contorted in pain.
"They covered him up quickly and this Nazi war lord, who like a character out of the days of the Borgias had wallowed in blood and beauty, passed behind a canvas curtain into the black pages of history that mark the end of the Hitler era."
G. K. Hodenfield reported that the assistant chief of security at the prison believed that Goering had carried his poison with him since the beginning of the trial eleven months earlier, that despite his person having been searched a hundred times and his cell microscopically inspected routinely. He also ruled out that the poison might have been slipped to him recently, as security had been too tight. The prison chaplain also believed that Goering had kept the poison since his capture. Goering had a vial of poison hidden in a can of powdered coffee, discovered shortly after his surrender.
Some speculated that he got it through brief contact with a visitor, as only a small amount of potassium cyanide was necessary to kill.
The guards, however, stated that he had not placed his hands near his mouth during his last hours. Though not knowing the precise hour of the scheduled execution, Goering was discovered dead just as the warrant of execution was about to be read.
The German lawyer for Martin Bormann, tried in absentia and sentenced to hang, stated that he had evidence that Goering had obtained poison by July when he made a statement implicitly suggesting that he would beat the hangman, though harboring no illusions of his death sentence to come.
Livestock traders
In New York, prime rib rose in price from 44 cents per pound to 61 cents at one market
OPA appeared set to wipe out all controls remaining on food items. The Government also appeared to be poised to remove wage controls.
Secretary of Agriculture Clinton Anderson stated that more meat would be available in about ten days but that the meat shortage would continue through the end of the year.
An American report to the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission advocated having inspections of peaceful uses of atomic energy in such a way that it would not aggravate the nations or be used indiscriminately, that a need for the inspection should first be demonstrated and that the inspection should be transacted in a manner to minimize resentment. Inspections should extend only as far as necessary, sometimes not beyond the shipping areas, other times including sampling from processes. But sovereignty should always be respected.
Russia had raised objections to the plan for an authority to inspect nations, as being an infringement of sovereignty. America had advocated inspection without restriction. The new report gave for the first time a thorough explanation of that position.
The Pacusan Dreamboat B-29 took off from Paris for Chicopee, Mass. There was no indication, however, that the commander intended to try to break the trans-Atlantic speed record of 14 hours and 39 minutes, set a year earlier by a TWA Constellation. It was believed that the Dreamboat could get across in about 11.5 hours, at an average speed of 315 mph.
President Truman, while listening to the World Series the previous afternoon, received word that the Supreme Court was going to drop in on him wearing formal afternoon attire. He then dashed upstairs and made a quick change, only to find eight of the nine justices wearing regular business suits, only Justice Jackson being attired halfway formally. Whether he wore shoes appropriate to the occasion, was not indicated.
The seventh and final game of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, now at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, ended, incidentally, with a victory by St. Louis 4 to 3, giving the Cardinals the Series four games to three. The game winning run came in the bottom of the eighth inning when Enos Slaughter was able to score from first base. The Cardinals had won the sixth game 4 to 1, and the Red Sox had won the fifth game 6 to 3.
Meetings on the diamonds were very safe
In Times Square, Arthur Gross-Polesiuk, a Czech who had spent several years in a concentration camp, ran into his brother-in-law who had thought him dead. They had a tearful reunion. Mr. Gross-Polesiuk's daughter had, he thought, been killed by the Nazis in 1937. But his brother-in-law informed him that she was alive at age 19, and then she emerged from the crowd to reunite with her father.
Mr. Gross-Polesiuk was in New York to demonstrate his invention of non-explosive gasoline.
The meeting was very safe.
On the editorial page, "It's Time to Bury the Dead" tells of the poor political timing of the President in succumbing to the pressure to end price control, making it appear that he did so expediently for the purpose of the election. Republican chairman Carroll Reece stated, "He's trying to lock the barn door after the horse has been sent to market." The New York Herald-Tribune concluded, "The President entered a plea of political bankruptcy."
The piece, however, finds that the President had made the decision because it was the only practical choice, with the law passed by Congress proving unworkable in the nearly three months it had been in effect. The blame properly lay with Congress and the private interests who lobbied for the result. Yet he had failed to impress the public, as his own ineptitude had reduced the struggle regarding price ceilings to partisan politics.
While he stated that other controls would remain in place, other producers would inevitably want to follow the pattern established in the meat industry. It was time to let the last remnants of OPA die and allow production to keep down inflation.
The meat industry was poised to gouge a starving public and, starting the previous day, was in the midst of the largest slaughter in history. It hopes that those who were seeking release of controls did not wake up a few weeks hence "wondering just who has been poleaxed."
"Isolation Is a State of Mind" finds it remarkable that no editorials had suggested the "brother's keeper" moral or drawn the stark contrast between Americans clamoring for meat and the cries abroad merely for bread. Starvation still haunted the masses of Europe and Asia while America was staking its political campaign on the difference between a table stocked with steak or one with fish.
The effort to moralize drew a response something like: "'We fought a war to liberate them people, didn't we? What more can they possibly expect?'"
It admits being as remiss as anyone else and was reminding of the situation only by way of suggesting isolation as being a state of mind capable of being maintained even with the Atlantic Fleet in the Mediterranean and American armies of occupation on every continent.
"Henry Wallace's New Redoubt" finds Mr. Wallace's new position as editor of The New Republic to be one in which he would ultimately be singing to the choir of 23,000 subscribers and another 50,000 who perused the magazine.
A Gallup poll had found that of those who understood the feud on atomic energy between Mr. Wallace and Bernard Baruch, only 20 percent supported Mr. Wallace and his view favoring abandonment of opposition to the unilateral veto and his belief that the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission was too much stressing technicalities rather than substance. Only 42 percent polled had any idea what his foreign policy represented.
Those who read the magazine were liberals already largely convinced of his point of view. Thus, trying to find a respectable base among Democrats from this forum appeared futile. He had tried from his position in the Cabinet and failed, even if much of the press had fogged the message in the attempt to destroy Mr. Wallace.
A piece from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, titled "Ghost Ship off California", suggests that the boarding and impounding by the Coast Guard of the Bunker Hill off Long Beach, California, for its gambling operation not being within the purview of its license for coastwise shipping, had raised the specter of the past in the form of William Jennings Bryan, Jr., son of the great orator who was the Democratic nominee for President three times and represented the State in the Scopes case in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.
If the son was as puritanical as had been the father toward all vices, including gambling, then the owner of the ship had to be dreading his appearance before Mr. Bryan, Los Angeles Collector of Customs, responsible for determining the case of impound of the ship.
Drew Pearson tells of the American cattlemen, withholding meat from the market, also leaving the taxpayer holding the bag for the feed bill, based on a bill passed during the previous session of Congress. The U.S. Grazing Service controlled about 145 million acres of Western lands and cattlemen could allow their beef cattle to graze at a cost of only a nickel a head per month, and a penny for sheep. The total revenue from the grazing was but $650,000 per year, with half going to the states in lieu of taxes, and a quarter for improvements to the land, leaving the taxpayer footing the bill for 80 percent of the costs.
Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada had put the brakes on attempts by the Grazing Service to raise the rent, while Congressman Jed Johnson of Oklahoma was threatening to curtail the Grazing Service budget if rents were not raised.
He next tells of White House press secretary Charles G. Ross not filling the bill. Though a good man, he was inept as a press agent and demonstrated regularly that he did not read the front pages of the daily newspapers, unable to respond at press conferences on fresh stories. He often knocked down White House trial balloons to save face for the President, only to find that the stories were accurate. Mr. Ross, as with other close aides of the President, idolized him too much, was afraid to criticize, though the President received well constructive criticism.
Mr. Pearson compares Mr. Ross to his predecessor under President Roosevelt, Steve Early, and finds the distinction remarkable, that Mr. Early, for all of his acerbic sharpness at times with the press, was a superb press agent who understood a story when he saw one and how to develop news in aid of his boss. Not so, Mr. Ross.
Marquis Childs, in Cleveland, tells of the events in the labor movement in that city being typical of that which had occurred in other cities, with a bitter split between AFL and CIO unions. Communists and fellow travelers had gained control of the CIO in the city a couple of years earlier. The CIO endorsed the head of the state Communist Party as an independent for the school board, causing an outcry. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union withdrew from the council and the Steel Workers threatened to leave until the endorsement was rescinded.
In another showdown, regarding control of the local CIO newspaper, between Communists and non-Communists the previous June, five unions threatened to withdraw. In response, Philip Murray brought in an independent agent to assess the situation and clean out the governing council. But the political damage had been done in the public eye, enabling Republicans to paint the organization with the Red brush.
The actual influence of the CIO PAC, however, was debatable, subject to varying opinion. Voter registration was at an all-time high of 650,000 in Cuyahoga County. Some viewed the registration as emblematic of dissatisfaction; others saw it as the result of the PAC effort to register voters, especially active during strikes.
When Governor Frank Lausche had won in 1944, he carried only 17 of the 88 counties of Ohio; but those were the most populous counties. How the populated areas would vote three weeks hence remained a question mark.
Harold Ickes examines the effort to bar Senator Theodore Bilbo from his seat in the Senate, to which he had been re-nominated in the primary and thus assured re-election in November in one-party Mississippi. A dinner was about to occur at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York to orchestrate the ouster. Present would be General George Marshall, Paul Robeson, Dashiell Hammett, Quentin Reynolds, columnist Vincent Sheean, and others. The charge was that he had been elected without properly permitting blacks to vote in the primary. An additional charge was that he had accepted $25,000 to provide a war contract to a constituent.
Mr. Ickes cites four elected Senators who were denied their seats by Republican Congresses based on corrupt practices. The fact laid the gauntlet for the Democratic Congress to do likewise with "Chanticleer" Bilbo.
He charges Senator Bilbo and Governor-nominate Eugene Talmadge with causing the race riots which had broken out in some sections of the South recently. Some of the "ragged whites", depressed economically, who precipitated these confrontations could not be wholly blamed for taking their cues from the likes of Bilbo and Talmadge.
He thinks it would be more salutary for the Senate to deny Mr. Bilbo his seat. Most men of normal moral conscience, he ventures, could not take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution knowing that they had won the office in such an unconstitutional manner. But Mr. Bilbo had no such conscience.
A letter suggests that The News look into the operations of the Southern States Fair and its political connections, in relation to a recent determination by the State Attorney General that the fair was "agricultural" and apparently thus not subject to a $1,000 tax imposed on a competing circus. He thinks the cat acts
The editors state that it was on their agenda.
A letter finds the strikes in the country to be inspired by communists and that giving young people educational and religious instruction in all phases of development might combat the trend.
A letter addresses the meat situation, wants everyone to work together to resolve it in a non-partisan way, just as the country had pulled together during the war. He favors having farmers come to town and sell the meat on the curb, directly to the consumer.
Can't do that for the fact of meat inspection laws, so that you don't get a deadly disease from bad meat.
A letter from a World War I veteran responds to "The Legion Keeps On Rolling", of October 7, regarding its statement that the American Legion appeared to want the veteran to be able to milk the Treasury. He thinks that when the Congress would take the profit out of war, then the Legion would cease trying to milk the Treasury. Those who stayed at home during the war made money. The balance needed to be righted with respect to veterans who served the country for little pay and did not share in the wealth.
A letter from the secretary of the Charlotte Classroom Teachers Association thanks the newspaper and Burke Davis for his series of articles on the impending educational crisis, with a shortage of teachers because of low pay, and overflowing classrooms.
After much debate, we have determined, being for the benefit of education, that we would be remiss in our reminders were we not to recall that in the Missouri 5th Congressional District Democratic primary race back in August, the President's opposition to Congressman Roger Slaughter, for his opposition consistently to Administration programs, led to the victory by his primary opponent, Enos Axtell, orchestrated by the James Pendergast political machine of Kansas City
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