The Charlotte News
Friday, July 11, 1941
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: Today's page again carries little of note. A note from the editors attached to a letter to the editor from High Point raises an eyebrow for its caustic nature, implying the author is a Communist, regardless of the fact that he ostensibly agrees with the editorial positions enunciated by The News. We reiterate the elegant question, appearing July 1, asked by Gerald W. Johnson of The Baltimore Evening Sun: If a policeman shoots a rabid dog biting a Communist, does that make him a Communist-sympathizer?
Perhaps, someone on the staff that day was simply feeling irritable. Given the state of the world at the time, it is understandable.
Today, as we have previously made note, the position of Coordinator of Information was formally created with the naming of William "Wild Bill" Donovan to the post. Hugh Johnson's piece of June 30 explains its significance. It was the first time the various intelligence gathering services of the government, each of which on its own was relatively small, were organized under one roof. Formerly, a large amount of the government's intelligence gathering in the field had been performed by civilians, journalists mainly, supplemented by police and military personnel, while a great part of the intelligence analysis had been performed by college professors and journalists and various specialists, such as foreign language translators.
In April, 1942, to accommodate the exigent circumstances brought on by war, Donovan would be appointed to head the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the CIA, created in 1947. In addition to spying and infiltration of foreign military and sabotage operations, the Office of Strategic Services engaged in both information analysis and dissemination of American propaganda in Nazi-occupied countries, though the latter function was also accomplished, more openly, by the Office of War Information created at the same time in 1942. The latter had absorbed some of the functions with regard to foreign propaganda dissemination previously performed by COI.
After the war, President Truman at first resisted the move to create a peacetime version of the agency, as pushed by John Foster Dulles and other adherents to the post-war Red Scare, that Soviet Communism was worse than Hitler and must be equally infiltrated and defeated before coming to engulf all of Europe as surely as had Nazism. Whether the paranoia thus rekindled from before the war regarding our wartime ally, produced as much aggression or more than it actively ever prevented, is subject to debate. Eventually, Truman succumbed to political pressure in Congress and, for better or worse, authorized the CIA's formation.
Installment 35 of Out of the Night tells of Jan's continuing torture at the brutally vicious whiphands of the Gestapo--the polite, nonchalant Gestapo. Eventually, as the Death Head is given the signal to begin clouting him with chains, the harbinger of the final gasp for light and air before the death throes of pallor would benumb the remaining meat crumpled on the floor, Jan accepts his fate, signs his confession. The salves and balms from the good little Nazis are now administered aplenty. They have him--or do they?
The wash-rag is involved in the cover-up as the plumber's unit is called in to remove it; the Boss at McKee is overcome by the crippling news of marriage of his daughter to ne'er-do-well Washington Tubbs--future Senator. Pug can't even take a bath in privacy in the barnyard; Sally wants both, not just the petting. Popeye, after the Mermaid, garnering information through the porthole, has informed of his whereabouts, tells Olive he is safe in Davy Jones's locker, Mrs. Jones meanwhile playing mama. And the bad guys, foreign agents after Superman, use words such as "consternation".
To what on earth within the plans of Heaven was the world coming? surely the readers of The News this day in July, 1941 must have been inquiring of themselves. A time when, for many, far too many, the manner in which one expressed one's self was far more important than either the substance or even the action accompanying or following on from the expression. Where guns and whips and chains made right. Where elegant words meant death; where resistance in mere language was subversion fit only for the headsman's axe. Where some had complete freedom to do what they wished, while others had none but to accept the will of the almighty ones, their lords and masters.
Framed Edition
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