The Charlotte News
Tuesday, November 11, 1941
FIVE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: This last Armistice Day of its kind, as the first piece predicts, had both "Blue Kurusu" and the Clapper column relating dispiritedly the coming to America of the special envoy from Japan, Suburu Kurusu, who, along with Ambassador Nomura, would carry on talks with Secretary of State Hull until the night before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He would be given only 19 days before the matter was virtually irrevocable.
It would be "internuncio" Kurusu late in the evening on November 27, as we have made mention several times, who would speak by telephone to Kumaichi Yamamoto of the Foreign Ministry about the enigmatic "southern matter--that south, SOUTH--southward matter" having its "considerable effect" in his negotiations with Hull.
The News editorial conveys the grim mood stocked of plentiful futility with which Kurusu greeted his task. He obviously saw little hope of convincing the United States to give up its quid, Japan's removal from China, the sine qua non for enabling acceptance of Japan's principal quo, resumption of critical trade with the U.S. The island now, says Clapper, was in dire trouble, having shut down, for instance, all but 50 of its 960 glass factories.
Hard to make fighter planes without glass. Maybe use cellophane.
Meanwhile, in the United States, as "Passing Frills" tells it, rolling blackouts conveyed defense needs for electricity, Spartan blackwall tires, the requisitioning of all inessential civilian rubber, and the sudden disappearance of cellophane wrappers, the requisite use of its key ingredient, cellulose, for gunpowder.
"Ffaunge the fermes in fatthe of alle þa faire rewmes."
"May I þat faitour fange."
Framed Edition
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