Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SEATTLE – Recently I visited a place where a big merchant liner is being refitted as an armed transport. It was a ship I had seen before the war.
It takes about six months to turn a liner into a fighting-type transport, and costs almost as much as the ship did originally.
The man who showed me over this one said, “Do you know what the yardstick is by which they figure out the number of troops to put on a transport in this war?”
I said I had no idea. It has been a long time since I’ve had an idea on anything.
“Well,” he said, “they judge it either by the number of men that can get on deck at one time – they won’t carry more than can all get on deck at once – or they judge it by the amount of toilet facilities they can find room for. Whichever one is reached first, that’s the number of men they’ll carry.”
There’s no question but that labor scarcity will be one of the major things in the tremendous expansion of our wartime industry.
And yet, here in the shipyards and plants of the Northwest, they tell me skilled workers are still available.
They say experienced machinists and tool workers drift in every day from the hinterlands, thrown out of work as the small shops go under for lack of priorities. Also, every day brings small shop-owners from Spokane and Boise, and from clear on into Montana and Nebraska, who have come out to seek subcontracts from the big companies.
Heeds anti-rumor campaign
I believe the public is beginning to heed the campaign against repealing rumors that have to do with troops or ship movements or military strategy. I haven’t heard a remark of this type for a long time.
A friend of mine in Tacoma has had for several years a Japanese maid, American-born. They are on very friendly terms.
This friend was telling me that when the Pearl Harbor news started coming over the radio that Sunday, the maid just disappeared. They didn’t see her for three days, until my friend finally drove to her house and coaxed her back.
“What was the matter with her?” I asked.
“She was afraid we were going to torture her for Pearl Harbor,” he said.
I can sense, as the weeks wear on, a slowly growing doubt and intolerance of all Japanese, American-born or not.
While we’re on the subject of foreign-descended Americans, I’m reminded of nosing around recently in the grape-growing country a few miles north of San Francisco.
This lovely, gentle country of rolling hills and Old World wineries is heavily Italian, German and French. I wondered, as I came through, how those of Axis descent were being treated these days.
Hears one cute story about Italian
I heard one cute story that concerns an Italian near Santa Rosa, Cal. In times like these it wouldn’t be pulled on anybody who wasn’t pretty well thought of.
It seems this Italian registered for civil defense. A few nights later his phone rang and he was ordered to proceed at once to a certain bridge and stand guard over it.
So off he drove, at 11 at night, to this bridge, which was about 12 miles from his home. He got there and took up his post, walking up and down in a pouring rain. He walked up and down for four or five hours; nobody ever came past, he never saw a soul, none of his “superiors” came to check on him.
And gradually it dawned on him that maybe he was being ribbed. So just before daylight he drove home, and early next morning he made a few discreet inquiries.
Yes, it was just a little joke. He took it all right, too.
Seattle has been testing its new sirens every noon. But they don’t sound enough like London’s sirens to make you suddenly sit up with a start. They sound more like fire sirens. They lack that high, metallic, singing quality of London’s sirens. They sound mushy. I was disappointed.
Fair Enough
By Westbrook Pegler
WASHINGTON – Communists? No, they’re not Communists. They are–
Well, take, for example, an economic genius named Harold Loeb, who is identified by the Dies Committee as a “senior business specialist” on the staff of Leon Henderson, the price administrator, who has just been authorized to ration all goods sold at retail.
Mr. Loeb and Mr. Henderson were interested in technocracy some years ago and Mr. Loeb wrote a book about technocracy in which he said, “Our case would be hopeless if the profit system could be made to work.” Mr. Henderson was a member of the technocracy committee, one of whose early statements said that if technocracy were adopted, “all social, political and economic theories of the present must be thrown away;” but a little over a year later, he resigned from the committee, rejecting technocracy. Mr. Loeb’s book, however, was published two years after that, in 1935; and, in 1936, he wrote another called “Production for Use.” He is not a businessman, by trade, of course. He does it by ear.
Named ‘senior business specialist’
Mr. Loeb is quite an author. His other works include one called “Doodab,” dedicated “to Kitty,” published in 1925; “Tumbling Mustard,” dedicated “to Poke,” published in 1929 and “Professors Like Vodka,” one of those roguish Parisian things, which came out in 1927 and was dedicated to – you’d never guess.
This tasty little tale, so revealing of the man who is now, above all available American believers in the American system, selected as a “senior business specialist” for price administration in a nation at war, was dedicated to “My Friend Malcolm Cowley” who is–
A poet, deemed to be, among all Americans, the best man available for an $8000 job in the Office of Facts and Figures, and an old political comrade of William Z. Foster and James W. Ford, who were, respectively, the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the Communist Party. Comrade Ford, being a Negro, was selected as an incitation to civil commotion among the Negro population, North and South, and Mr. Cowley, who, of course, is not and never was a Communist, himself, endorsed this ticket.
He also was a member of the national executive committee of the American League Against War and Fascism, whose directorate included Earl Browder, late chief of the Communist Party and now a prisoner in Atlanta, and Clarence Hathaway, late editor of the Communists’ official organ in New York. Mr. Loeb’s friend, Malcolm Cowley, poet and expert compiler of facts and figures at $8000 a year, to be paid, in part, out of the income taxes of the seven million new eligibles in income brackets as low as $14.50 a week, later went along with the League Against War and Fascism, when, because of the excessive heat generated by the popular anti-Communist sentiment of the country, it changed its name to the American League for Peace and Democracy.
Idle talk about Reds will do no good
Even then, of course, Mr. Cowley was not a Communist, although there were Communists all about him and with him, nor had he succumbed, when, in 1936, his name appeared on the list of sponsors of a banquet to Mother Ella Reeve Bloor, a well-known Communist relic, who, incidentally, has a son in the present Government service, who, of course, is not a Communist himself.
Nor could you have called Mr. Cowley a Communist even when, in 1935, The Sunday Worker, the official organ in New York, advertised him as a contributing member of the staff, although you might have been tempted to this rash judgment had you known that The Worker commonly excludes non-members from its employ and asserts the right to censor all copy in the interest of the party.
Loose and idle talk about Communists, Communists, Communists is going to do no good whatever, except for Japan and Germany by causing disunity on the home front where the noted author, Mr. Loeb, has revealed his great but unsuspected capacity for Government powers over American business and Mr. Cowley, a poet by trade, surprises everyone by his indispensability as a fact-and-figure man at $8000 a year.
But if you want to be a dirty Quisling and a disrupter, go ahead and read false meanings into past expressions of such patriotic men, so devoted to the capitalistic system, under which, alone, in all the world, exist those freedoms for which this nation fights, impugn their old motives and their present matchless talents for government, and thereby help the enemy win the war.
Do you think Mr. Henderson would have a Communist around or Mr. Cowley’s boss, Mr. MacLeish? If you do you are a duty Quisling.
Clapper: Hail the Chief!
By Raymond Clapper
WASHINGTON – The American people have the deepest reason to wish President Roosevelt on his sixtieth birthday continued health and success.
His leadership at this time is most essential to us. We have no other dependable source of leadership except in Roosevelt and some of the men around him. That is a terrible thing to have to say about a democracy but I believe it to be true.
The other sources from which true leadership ought also to come seems almost bankrupt. The Republican Party? What a pitiful thing it is. What has it offered us during the last nine years except stupidity, five-cent criticism, and complete misunderstanding of our main problems, domestic and foreign?
Once, by accident and not because the leaders of the Party wished it, a real leader appeared – Wendell Willkie, He was forced on the Party. But as soon as the election was over, the Party leaders tossed him out. The Republican Party was even unable to recognize a real leader when it had the luck to find one on its doorstep.
Roosevelt saw enemy approaching
That is about the story all over the lot. The bankers, the industrialists, the groups that have had the advantages of education and experience in affairs and who are efficient operators in their businesses, are the ones to whom we would naturally turn for guidance through this bewildering and violent revolution. But they have had nothing to offer except nostalgic pleas that we go back to the gay ‘90s, back to a world that had disappeared without their knowing it.
Roosevelt is not the perfect leader. He, too, has misjudged and made errors. He had no full conception of what was going on. Nobody could have had. Nobody does have. But he was on the right side of events. In both domestic and foreign affairs, he knew from which direction the enemy was approaching.
In the pre-war years, he knew that new mass forces were on the march and that they had to be recognized. He knew that people demanded more security, that the workman was determined to have the right to bargain collectively with the big corporation, that the ranks of hard-working employees would not be content any longer to beg for bread but would insist upon society doing something for them when economic conditions forced the closing down of whole industries. Roosevelt saw that and insisted that Government assume the responsibility before mass indignation forced it by violence, or before some American Hitler used it as a vehicle for a ride into personal tyranny.
Where we can turn in years to come
Where were the bankers, the industrialists, the professional groups, the people with education, the people who had experience in affairs, the people who had traveled and studied history? Where were they during all of this? They were fighting Roosevelt with every means they knew. They were clinging to the little narrow-minded leaders that the Republicans managed to dig up. They were trying to deal with these irrepressible forces, not by channeling them into social ana economic reforms but by ignoring them. They thought if we pretended the problem wasn’t there, it would disappear.
In foreign affairs, some of these people have a much better record. Some of them saw the dangers as clearly as Roosevelt. Many of them, long before the war, put aside their bitter prejudices against Roosevelt’s domestic policies to support him most earnestly and effectively in his judgment of foreign affairs. That is one shining exception. Unfortunately the Republican Party cannot share in it for it rode on the isolationist side – in a kind of desperate straddle. Even in foreign affairs, the Republicans as a whole, the top insiders in the party organization, couldn’t see that anything was happening.
So, as an American citizen who sees many day-to-day things to criticize in Roosevelt, I find myself in the fundamentals looking to him as the public figure who seems more than anyone else to know where the dangers are and to make an effort to grapple with them, whether they be at home or abroad. What worries me is that these dangers won’t end with the war. Where can we turn for the understanding leadership in the years to come when democratic order and control must be organized around these violent forces?
Maj. Williams: Our only hope
By Maj. Al Williams
“Japan must be bombed to defeat.”
How can we get near enough to Japan to bomb her munition-producing centers? We can’t use aircraft carriers, because that would mean exposing them to Japanese shore-based airpower. We can use carriers for slashing air raids only.
We can get near enough to Japan, but in only one fashion. We’ve got to work along the Aleutian Islands, studding them with refueling airdromes now, if we haven’t got them there already. We’ve got to establish a route of fly-from-factory-to-combat-zone system with our airpower machinery comparable to the advantage enjoyed by Japan at this moment in flying a steady flow of airpower machinery from Japan proper to the combat zone in Malaya and the East Indies.
No one knows the numerical edge necessary to win an air war. With Japan flying every single type of aircraft requisite for her campaign in the combat zone, and losing only those forced down by bad weather or faulty engines, we may not be able to offset her steady flow of all vital airpower machinery by shipping all but our biggest bombers across the Pacific. Especially is this true when one considers that the Jap submarines and air patrols are undoubtedly going to take toll of our shipping. One bomb or torpedo can easily account for a cargo vessel loaded with hundreds of crates of aircraft.
Necessary ratio
In the face of this contingency, what then of any aimed at numerical superiority ratios in aircraft? Three-to-one may be sufficient if we fly all our combat planes from factory to combat zones. But ten-to-one may not be enough if we insist upon taking the long way in cargo ships across the Pacific, and flying our longest range bombers.
But suppose we do equip all our Aleutian Islands, leaving only a short over-water jump to the Asiatic Continent (Kamchatka). The Soviets won’t let us use their air bases there, some objectors say. Now this is where we get really American and think in real American style. Daniel Boone shot at every feather without waiting to find out whether there was a chicken or an Injun attached to it.
Why not push a real, big air invasion over there and grab the Soviet air bases in Kamchatka and argue about it afterward.
Our envoys day dream
Everything we have won from foreigners has been won at the point of our guns and bayonets.
Why not think in hard, realistic, pioneering terms? We are pioneering for a world order within the framework of which our sacred covenant, with the Revelations of Christianity, and the Constitution, can exist and function. We are pioneering just as realistically as our forefathers pioneered for this country and that same Constitution. The Pollyanna era of yesterday is washed up and done. We’ve got to offset the flight delivery of Jap airpower from factory to combat zone, and the only way to do it is by flying from American aircraft factories through Alaska. But any such war plan means a true air war and means upsetting the existing system exemplified by our old Army and Navy outfits.
We’ve got to break that system, rather than remove a few Brass Hats after each defeat. To run a true air war and get what’s necessary to run it, we’ve got to build a United States Air Force.
‘Mac’ fighting Axis, forgets about taxes
WAUKEGAN, Illinois, Jan. 29 (UP) – Harry Hall, state’s attorney for Lake County, heard that Gen. Douglas MacArthur hasn’t paid his 1941 income tax.
Forthwith, Mr. Hall informed the Treasury that he would guarantee the account and “wire the money if necessary.”
The general, commanding American-Filipino forces in the Philippines, is a little too busy to worry about his tax just now, Mr. Hall suggested.
