In Washington –
Father-draft fight renewed by Wheeler
Senator protests discharge of single men with slight physical defects
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In Washington –
Editorial: That non-partisan plank
Since it was first proposed some months ago that foreign policy be taken out of the political campaign by Republicans and Democrats accepting the same foreign plank in their platforms, more and more politicians have shied away from the idea.
It is not orthodox. Anyway, the old-line bosses cannot make up their minds which party it would help most – and, as usual, they put partisan considerations first.
The people are more intelligent; they are thinking about the country first. At least that is the indication of the recent Gallup Poll of Republican voters.
They were asked:
Do you think that both Republicans and Democrats should take exactly the same stand for an active part in world affairs in their party platforms in 1944?
With 21% undecided, 58% answered Yes and only 21% No.
The reasons given by the majority were as significant as the vote:
First, world affairs should be treated by a complete nation, not by political parties;
Second, if our political parties squabble among themselves over foreign policy, other nations may take advantage of the disunity in such a way as to harm American interests.
What can the politicians say to that?
Editorial: How soldiers get a vote
Some time ago, the U.S. Senate passed the Eastland “states’ rights” soldier-vote bill.
Last week, the House amended the Eastland bill and passed it, sending it back to the Senate.
This week, the Senate vote to lay aside the Green-Lucas soldier-vote bill, which provided for a federal ballot and take up the House-amended Eastland bill.
Senator Barkley, the Democratic Leader, then offered the Green-Lucas bill as an amendment to the House-amended Eastland bill.
Senator Ferguson of Michigan then offered an amendment to Senator’s Barkley’s amendment – in other words, an amendment to an amendment to an amendment. It was adopted.
Senator Taft of Ohio then offered an amendment to the Barkley amendment. It was rejected.
So, the Senate adopted the Barkley amendment, as amended by Senator Ferguson, thus writing the Green-Lucas bill, which had been laid aside, into the Eastland bill.
Senator Taft then reoffered his amendment as an amendment to the whole works, and was defeated again.
Then, for the second time, the Senate adopted the Eastland bill, which now included the Green-Lucas bill, which the Senate previously laid aside, after both the House and the Senate had amended the Eastland bill.
The whole business then went back to the House which rejected it. Now delegates from each house are trying to determine where they stand.
Ferguson: Exaggerated sex
By Mrs. Walter Ferguson
The term “frustrated old maid” must be dropped from the American vocabulary, says Mrs. Bertha Hess of the Dallas Hygiene Association.
She says:
It’s nothing but male propaganda, and women should take a stand against such arrant nonsense.
Our discussion centered around post-war problems. Everybody had agreed we would have a surplus of women and that the male shortage would force many to live without husbands. So, we may as well consider ways and means for feminine happiness in a world which cannot supply each girl with a mate.
For years, psychologists have built up the idea that continence is bad for people. It sneaked into our thinking via the Freudian wave, and has never been dislodged. Yet it is a damnable doctrine, dangerous to public morals. Many sane people have developed sex obsessions because such a fallacy was foisted upon them.
Every day we meet women who refuted the theory – sweet, sane, sensible, busy, happy women, valuable members of their families and the community. If they sorrow in secret because they lack husbands and children, they do not invite our pity since they are anything but pitiable.
Sex is an alluring subject as well as an importance force, but in our time, it has been exaggerated so that it dominates the social scene. In the future, girls must be taught to realize that men and women can derive satisfaction from intellectual stimulation and through love that encompasses all of humankind.
The single life has never carried any social stigma for men. There is no reason for women to be afraid or ashamed of it.
Background of news –
How Lincoln conducted a war
By Bertram Benedict, editorial research reports
As the leader of the United States in a long, bitter, and difficult war, Abraham Lincoln revealed two characteristics which on the surface seemed contradictory, yet really were complementary. On the one hand, he compromised and temporized with opposition, often surrendering to it when it proved too strong for him. On the other hand, when he considered certain steps necessary to win the war, he took them of his own volition, without legislative or constitutional sanction, until he was roundly abused as a dictator.
Lincoln was even ready to evacuate Fort Sumter, if that would deter Virginia from seceding. He is reported to have observed:
A state for a fort is no bad business.
At the outbreak of war, he delayed for several months summoning Congress into special session to act on the secession. Lincoln called for volunteers, proclaimed a blockade of the South, enlarged the Navy, expanded the Army beyond the limits set by law, ordered money spent for which Congress had not voted appropriations – all before Congress recognized “a state of insurrection.”
As to Lincoln’s suspension of the habeas corpus privilege, opinions still differ as to whether the Constitution gave him or Congress that power. At all events, Congress ultimately passed legislation which in effect ratified the extra-constitutional action the President had taken, so in this respect he could not be said to have flown in the face of Congressional sentiment.
He put up with Cabinet feuds
On many occasions the anti-Lincoln group of radical abolitionists and anti-appeasers of the South held a majority in Congress. Cabinet members squabbled among themselves; Lincoln kept them together for the sake of political unity. He even held on to Secretary of the Treasury Chase, although Chase was manifestly angling to defeat the President for the Republican presidential nomination in 1864.
Lincoln yielded to Congress when that body set up a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War which sadly interfered with the presidential and military direction of belligerent activities. Lincoln treated the committee with consideration, yet prevented it from actually taking the general conduct of the war out of his hands.
Professor James G. Randall, in the Dictionary of American Biography, notes that Lincoln took his defeat philosophically when Congress passed over his opposition the West Virginia bill and the Second Confiscation Act.
Lincoln had neither legislative nor constitutional authority for the Emancipation Proclamation, unless that be deemed strictly a military move to help win the war. The Proclamation did not affect slaves in the slave-holding states supporting the Union, nor in Union-held Tennessee and sections of Virginia and Louisiana.
Harsh hand with newspapers
It is true that Congress had enacted a measure to free slaves who came within the Union lines, who joined the Union armies, or who were “rebel-owned.” However, this legislation was not cited by the Emancipation Proclamation, which cites for authority merely an earlier presidential proclamation in the light of a warning. Earlier Lincoln had asked Congress in vain to provide compensation to slaveowners.
When, in May 1864, The New York World and Journal of Commerce each printed a proclamation which they mistakenly ascribed to Lincoln, he ordered the “editors, proprietors, and publishers” arrested and brought to military trial. Furthermore, despite the First Amendment, Lincoln directed the Army to occupy the newspaper premises and prevent further publication until he gave the word.
The midterm election of 1862 increased the strength of the anti-Lincoln Republicans in Congress. Until military victories came along in the late summer of 1864, Lincoln’s reelection seemed doubtful. As it was, with only the Union states voting, the Democratic candidate, Gen. McClellan, received 45% of the total popular vote – 48% in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and 49% in New York.
Atrocity note may lead Japs to ‘save face’
Government hopes protest will succeed where pleas failed
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Monahan: All-female cast in Stanley’s Cry Havoc - Regan in stage bill
By Kaspar Monahan
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Gable brings news of ailing player
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Patriotic buying is enemy of inflation
Don’t criticize those who splurge if you buy lavishly
By Josephine Lowman
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Clapper: The meek
By Raymond Clapper
This is another of the dispatches Mr. Clapper wrote during the battle of the Marshall Islands, in which he was killed.
With the Pacific Fleet, in the Marshall Islands – (by wireless)
A few days before we went into the battle of the Marshalls, I attended Sunday services aboard one of the several big aircraft carriers in this huge fleet. The chaplain, the Rev. J. F. Dreith, took as his text the Sermon on the Mount.
Sitting among the bluejackets on the forecastle, I was gazing out at several battleships around our horizon as the chaplain read to us, from Matthew, about how the meek would inherit the earth. I wondered whether we had not confused meekness with weakness. To be meek and humble in spirit is not necessarily to be weak physically, although we have distorted the idea into that. Scorn of force became a national policy with us. We believed that if we renounced aggression, and disarmed – in pother words, if we bowed in meekness and weakness before the world – it would encourage world peace and certainly would bring peace to America. But that policy did neither. It encouraged aggressors, and they finally attacked us.
We have discovered our error. The fleet in the midst of which I have been riding for some days seems to me to be the beginning of wisdom on our part. With the world as it is, we must hold the islands out here which are useful for airfields. We must use them to protect ourselves.
Work of Americans
I have seen island after island out here in the Pacific where, except for some coconut trees and the British flag, everything is the work of Americans – airfields, soldiers, great dumps of military supplies, docks and ships.
Meek and humble in spirit, yes. Encouragement and help to other peoples, yes. The spirit of the Sermon on the Mount is the essence of democracy. But, like the Pilgrims at Plymouth, we must carry our muskets to church.
As I looked around the horizon during the services that Sunday, it seemed to me that we were carrying some very large muskets with us.
The brother-in-law of an old friend of mine is the skipper of one of the biggest and most famous battleships that went with us into the battle of the Marshalls. He invited me to visit him aboard his ship, which gave me an opportunity to see this vessel at sea. I had been aboard her in the States some time ago, when she was in for repairs.
Battleships are quite different now from what they were a few years ago, when I was aboard the old Arizona during the trio Herbert Hoover made to the Virgin Islands. Now the once-spacious decks are covered with anti-aircraft guns. They poke out from every spare bit of space. You can’t walk around the ship at night without bumping into guns. Gun barrels are everywhere. When all of the long, thin, anti-aircraft guns are pointed up to an approaching plane, the big battlewagon looks like a bristling porcupine.
Not pampered now
The battleship today has become something of an escort and general utility ship, as against the pampered days of the last war when they were run up into the York River and tied up for safety. Now they go along to protect the aircraft carriers, because it is possible to carry so many anti-aircraft guns on them and they can take punishment.
Although it was once a naval principle that ships should not be used against shore batteries, now big battleships go in to bombard a coast in preparation for landings. Those tactics were tried out successfully in Sicily and are now standard practice. Hence the old controversy between battleships and airpower dissolves in the face of the fact that they are complementary.
Dozens of times aboard his carrier, I have heard crew members say, as they looked out at several of the biggest battlewagons, how comfortable it made them feel. And I heard the same thing on the battleship, about the carriers with their decks covered with planes.
But there is still some rivalry between gunners and air crews. The gunners refer derisively to the men who handle the planes on the carriers as “airdales.” But they all stand together for their ship.
As one of the crew of my carrier said to me when bragging about his ship:
When torpedoes come up and find out it’s this ship, they turn right around and go back.
Spy activity laid to Yanks
Argentina blames others than Axis nationals
By David J. Wilson, United Press staff writer
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