Paid with U.S. money –
Jap boasts to internees he’s Tokyo representative
Instructor at relocation center also tells them Nippon is ‘sure to win the war’
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Paid with U.S. money –
Vinson orders price ceilings be maintained
Government must absorb added costs on four canned vegetables
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Farm supply bill passed by Senate
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Zoot suit war ends –
Sharpies and slick chicks seek peace with sailors
Delegation of reet pleat clan tells police word has been passed to ‘cut the rough stuff’
Los Angeles, California (UP) –
Zoot-suit rioting ended today in unanimous expressions of regret and goodwill. The sharpies and slick chicks themselves made the overtures.
Six cars, packed with 53 representatives of East Side gangs, hoisted American flags and white banners of truce above the radiators and paraded through the downtown area to central police headquarters.
They told Capt. Joe Reed, administrative officer:
We’re good Americans. We’re not Mexicans or anything else. And we want you to know we’re passing the word along to cut out the rough stuff.
Police pledge cooperation
Capt. Reed guaranteed police cooperation and took eight of them home himself when he decided their autos were overloaded.
The entire metropolitan area was quiet, with only scattered disturbances which would normally not be noted.
Symbolic of the change was Luis “The Chief” Verdusco, 27-year-old master of an eight-suit zoot wardrobe. Jailed earlier this week, he wore a reet outfit and the ducktail hairdo of a zoot clan.
Appearing yesterday for arraignment on a charge of violating the Deadly Weapon Act, he had a neat haircut and a regulation suit. He said, “I’m through with zooting.”
Army and Navy officials earlier had called off soldiers and sailors who had been ripping the clothes off the zoot-suiters in an attempt to halt the fighting.
Soldiers get warning
Maj. Gen. Maxwell, commander of the southern sector of the Western Defense Command, said adequate punishment by a military court would follow for soldiers guilty of street fighting.
The Navy strengthened shore patrols and made public a telegram from RAdm. D. W. Bagley, commandant of the 11th Naval District, to Alfredo Elias Calles, Mexican Consul here, pointing out that he had acted to cope with the “deplorable situation.”
I deeply regret that individual incidents of hoodlumism in Los Angeles have been interpreted as acts specifically involving nationals of either Mexico or the United States. For the very explicit reason in your telegram, I already have acted to cope with the deplorable situation and will continue to act within my prerogatives until matters are adjusted to our mutual satisfaction… You and I are sympathetic to each other’s position in a situation which should have been classified as simple rowdyism and handled accordingly at its inception.
Hearings begin Tuesday
The admiral also expressed admiration for Mexico, which he said had been increased through understanding of the consul’s “sincere motive.”
Public hearings were scheduled to pry into the background of the rioting. The county grand jury begins an official prove Tuesday. A citizen’s committee and State Attorney General Robert Kenny, meanwhile, pushed their investigation. Mr. Kenny officially denied any foreign motivation of the riots.
Spy’s friend sentenced
Chicago, Illinois (UP) –
William Bernard Wernecke, 32, close friend of Herbert Haupt, executed Nazi spy, was sentenced to a five-year prison term and fined $10,000 yesterday for failing to answer his draft questionnaire.
They’re envied by millions, but stars have their woes!
Certain assignments scare them, as for instance Dot Lamour’s dancing chore
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
NOTE: This is one in a series of columns by Ernie Pyle reporting on his 13,000-mile trip into the heart of Africa, made before the heavy fighting began in Tunisia.
Somewhere in Africa –
At any number of our camps in Central Africa, I noticed with sharp surprise a playful little thing which you would never be aware of if you hadn’t been at the front.
In these camps, soldiers will walk along in groups, kidding and laughing, and you’ll hear them give each other mock others of “Squads Right,” or “Halt.”
The first time I heard that shouted word “Halt” down there, I stopped dead still, and my heart skipped a couple of beats. For believe me, when you’re up at the front, halt means halt and no monkey business. Nobody ever says it in play, and when you hear it, you freeze in your tracks. If you don’t, you’re likely to get a bullet through you.
It’s a sound that bears the same deadly warning as the whine of a shell or the hiss of a snake, and you obey it automatically and instinctively.
Too hot to walk the dog
For some reason, and I can’t explain it, the troops on Central Africa don’t go on for pets the way they do up north.
True, I’ve heard of soldiers who had baby giraffes for pets, and others who had monkeys and parrots, and even leopards. But they are rare. The small number of dogs is what amazed me. Up north, the soldiers have thousands and thousands of dogs for pets.
I guess it’s just too hot down here to walk the dog around.
Many of our officers and men, by the nature of their jobs, have covered Africa from stem to stern. They know the whole continent intimately, and they rattle off the merits of some unheard-of jungle river port as knowingly as they’d speak of Cape Town or Cairo.
And they are impressed. I’ve heard many an American say he’d sure got his eyes opened by coming over here. Before the war, he was hardly aware that Africa existed. But now he sees the immense richness of the jungle and the plains going partly to waste; he wonders who said there was no more land left in the world to pioneer.
Soldiers global-minded
Of course, the average soldier swears that after the war he’ll never set foot out of his hometown again. But everybody isn’t average. I’ll bet you that within five years after the war, you’ll find thousands and thousands of Americans scattered to the remotest points of the globe, carving out careers for themselves in spots they’d never heard of before 1942. This war is making us global-minded.
One evening, at a campo way down on the Slave Coast, an officer came up and introduced himself. He was Lt. Walter Wichterman, an insurance man of Indianapolis. The reason he spoke to me was this – we were college mates at Indiana University, and once went to Japan together when the Indiana baseball team made a tour over there. Our paths had not crossed for more than 20 years.
U.S. homes must be museums
If what I’ve seen is any indication, the average American home by now must look like the Natural History Museum. Soldiers are fiends for buying stuff and sending it home.
There isn’t so much to buy in North Africa. But in other parts, there is. The carved ivory, carved ebony, leather work, knives and stuff that have been sent home from Central Africa must reach an appalling total.
Add to that all that must be flowing home from India, China, Alaska and elsewhere, and we’re surely becoming a nation of ivory-hoarders.
Pegler: On the Zooter Riots
By Westbrook Pegler
Chicago, Illinois –
The so-called zoot-suit riots in Los Angeles may seem to be strictly local trouble arising from the local peculiarities of that peculiar community, but the problem is broader and more dangerous than that.
The same friction between gangs of young civilians and lone men in American uniform was noticed in Tucson, Arizona, during the winter, and an outbreak which might have been equally bad or worse was averted as soldiers and university students made more or less informal plans to go to town on Saturday night and beat up anyone found wearing a zoot suit.
Being forewarned, the police, a local judge and the editors of the papers started a counterpropaganda to minimize as isolated and strictly personal troubles a number of street fights which had previously aroused public alarm and moved one judge to declare that anyone brought before him wearing a zoot suit would be found guilty. Thus, a riot was averted.
Trouble is a mystery
In Los Angeles, as in Tucson, the trouble is a mystery, and in both places, there has been idle, troubled speculation as to whether the fights could be provoked by some enemy power, although there seems to be no evidence of that. Because the strife has been more dangerous in Los Angeles, it has been given more serious thought there.
One liberal newspaper reporter, who knows the Mexican people from many years of contact not only in Southern California, but in old Mexico as well, believes the young Mexican-American marauders are victims of frustration. Contrary to intimations in recent dispatches from Los Angeles, the majority of them are not Mexican nationals, but native Americans of Mexican blood.
This journalist says they feel that they are socially excluded for racial reasons, but admits that the gangs are made up of thoroughly vicious young hoodlums, including some girls. It is undeniable that they have been guilty of a number of killings and rapes.
There is nothing to be gained by pretending that the American soldiers and sailors started this trouble. American soldiers and sailors are almost always well-behaved, and the present personnel is distinctly superior in this and some other respects to any other wartime force in the history of the nation.
Provocation was great
Therefore, when they are moved to mob action against any element of the community, as they were in Los Angeles, it is plain that they are acting under great provocation. That was the fact in Los Angeles. So many men in uniform had been beaten up or “pushed around” that their individual resentment broke out in mob action.
Nobody seems to understand why the zoot-suiters, not all of whom, incidentally, wear the outlandish uniform of the group, are so bitter against men in the nation’s uniform. It may be bravado, but that is only speculation. But there is nothing mysterious about the delayed, violent reaction of the servicemen.
They just got tired of taking it and, as fighting men, will fight back. It is all very well to say they should have let the law take its course but the law was not doing its job, and when an individual is attacked on the street, he does not wait for a cop to happen along. He takes law enforcement into his own hands to the best of his ability.
It is a mistake to sympathize with these gangsters on the theory that they are misunderstood or the victims of social yearnings. The soldiers and sailors deserve the public sympathy and the protection of the law, and the problem will not be solved by placing out of bounds permanently the attractive city areas, which, in much of Los Angeles are pretty sordid at best, lest they undertake to defend themselves and their wives and girls against unprovoked attacks by repulsive gangs of cowards who always outnumber their victims.
Jive music inspired cult
It is the gangsters who must be restrained, and American cities must be policed so that others may go about in safety on the streets.
Indirectly but unmistakably, this cult got its inspiration from the degenerate exhibition of youthful mass hysteria which began on Broadway with hundreds of them writhing, twitching and howling gibberish to the horrible squeals and squawks of the jive bands.
That all this was sheer, intentional affectation, there is no doubt, for they behave so only in numbers, when they have an audience to show off to. The newspapers had a part in the promotion of the cult by treating it as a new expression of the spirit of American youth.
Although the zoot-suit gangs are predominantly native Americans of Mexican blood, not Mexican subjects, that does not mean that there is hard feeling, although obviously there is a danger of indiscriminate distrust and hostility on both sides. A little dose of good quick police work by efficient detectives and cops should be the answer.