Radio ownership by newspapers faces new fight
‘Equality for all groups’ asked by publishers but Congress may have to decide issue based on policies of FCC
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
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The people must know –
Americans should get all of the war news, the good and the bad
By Palmer Hoyt, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Terror over Germany –
Rossi: ‘Never was so scared, but I kept on firing’
By 2nd Lt. Antonio M. Rossi, as told to the United Press
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Baruch Report simplified –
War contracts must be ended fast and fairly
Reconversion depends on government’s getting out of business
By Arthur F. Degreve, United Press staff writer
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Communists lose their ballot plea
San Francisco, California (UP) –
The State Supreme Court today denied an application brought by the Communist Party which sought to restrain Secretary of State Frank M. Jordan from removing the party from the California state primary ballot May 16.
The court’s ruling upheld the constitutionality of the election code which provides that whenever the registration of any political party falls below one-tenth of one percent of the total state registration, that party shall not be qualified to participate in the next primary election.
Editorial: Soldier votes in the primary
Congress is still engaged in a political wrangle over the enactment of a law which will enable the members of the Armed Forces to cast a ballot in this year’s election.
But whatever Congress does, if anything, it is unlikely that any federal legislation will be applied to the primaries, which will take place over a period of seven or eight months, according to varying state laws.
Pennsylvanians in the Armed Forces, if they are to vote in the April 25 primary, must vote under the Pennsylvania Military Ballot Act. This law, while cumbersome and circumscribed with a certain amount of red tape, does give the soldier a chance to vote.
However, the man or woman in the Armed Forces who wishes a military ballot for the primary must apply for that ballot within a prescribed time. The first day to apply is March 6. The last day to apply is March 25. Postmarks govern in all cases.
Voters who apply for military ballots must have been previously registered. If they were registered voters when they were inducted into the service, that registration still stands. If they were not registered, they may apply to their home registration commission for a card, which has to be returned.
It is highly improbable that many members of the Armed Forces, especially those overseas, will be able to comply with all the requirements of the Military Ballot Act.
They will not remember, it they ever knew, the dates within which applications may be made for ballots.
But the families and friends at home can help them by writing letters of reminder. Suggest in them that they apply to the County Board of Elections for a military ballot – if they are registered. If they are not registered, tell them to ask for registration by writing to the Pittsburgh Registration Commission, if they live in Pittsburgh, or to the County Elections Board if they live elsewhere.
Background of news –
Japanese revolt likely
By Col. Frederick Palmer, North American Newspaper Alliance
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Allies study Soviet terms for Finland
Proposals reported given U.S. and Britain are mild
By John A. Parris, United Press staff writer
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One dead Jap wasn’t enough for Adm. ‘Terrible’ Turner
Officer who returned body of ambassador to U.S. sees many more
By Boyd Lewis, United Press staff writer
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Dogfight around steeple wakes little German town
One Nazi plane crashes in street, five others fall in battle 50 feet overhead
By Douglas Werner, United Press staff writer
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Joan weary of being clown, she wants to be ‘character’
Miss Davis, queen of comedy, pleads for chance to be given a ‘situation’ in her pictures – tires of doing meaningless slapstick stuff
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Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
In Italy – (by wireless)
At long last our company was really underway on its night movement up into the line. It was just past midnight, and very black. The trail was never straight. It went up and down, across streams, and almost constantly around trees.
How the leaders ever followed it is beyond me. The trees on each side had been marked previously with white tape or toilet paper, but even so we did get lose a couple of times and had to backtrack.
The rain had stopped, but the mud was thick. You literally felt each step out with the toes of tour boots. Every half hour or so we’d stop and send runners back to see how the tail end of the column was doing. Word came back that they were doing fine, and that we could step up the pace if we wanted to.
Somewhere in the night, both ahead of us and strung out behind us in files, was the rest of our battalion. In fact, the whole regiment of more than 3,000 men was moving that night, but we knew nothing about the rest.
Throughout the night, the artillery of both sides kept up a steady pounding. When we started, our own guns were loud in our ears. Gradually we drew away from them, and finally the explosion of their shells on German soil was louder than the blast of the guns.
Rifle fire gets louder
The German shells traveled off at a tangent from us, and we were in no danger. The machine-gun and rifle fire grew louder as our slow procession came nearer the lines. Now and then a frontline flare would light up the sky, and we could see red bullets ricocheting.
The nagging of artillery eventually gets plain aggravating. It’s always worse on a cloudy night, for the sounds crash and reverberate against the low ceiling. One gun blast along can set off a continuous rebounding of sound against clouds and rocky slopes that will keep going for 10 seconds and more.
And on cloudy nights you can hear shells tearing above your head more loudly than on a clear night. In fact, that night the rustle was so magnified that when we stopped to rest and tried to talk, you couldn’t hear what the other fellow said if a shell was passing overhead. And they were passing almost constantly.
At last, we passed through a village and stopped on the far edge to rest while the column leader went into a house for further directions. We had caught up with the mules.
One of the muleskinners out in the darkness kept up a long monolog on the subject of the mules being completely done up. Nobody would answer him, and he would go on:
They’re plumb done in. They can’t go another foot. If we try to go on, they’ll fall down and die.
Huffy muleskinner
Finally, some soldier in the darkness told him to shut up. We all privately endorsed his suggestion. But the monologist got huffy and wanted to know who that was. The voice said it wasn’t anybody, just a new replacement soldier.
Then the muleskinner waxed sarcastic and louder. He had an objectionable manner, even in the dark.
He said:
Oh, oh! So we’ve got a baby right from the States telling me how to run mules! A tenderfoot, huh? Trying to talk to us veterans! A hero right from the States, huh?
Whereupon one of the real veterans in our company called out to the gabby skinner:
Aw, shut up! You probably haven’t been overseas two months yourself.
He must have hit the nail on the head, or else his voice carried command, for that’s the last we heard of the muleskinner.
It was almost midnight when the company reached its bivouac area and dug its foxholes into the mud. Always that’s the first thing to do. it becomes pure instinct. The drippy, misty dawn found our men dispersed and hidden in the bottom of shallow, muddy depressions of their own digging, eating cold hash from C-ration cans.
They attacked just after dawn. The Germans were only a short distance away. I stayed behind when the company went forward.
In the continuously circulating nature of my job, I may never again see the men in this outfit. But to me, they will always be “my” company.
Pegler: Father McGlynn’s play
By Westbrook Pegler
Kansas City, Missouri –
I see by the New York papers that Father Thomas McGlynn, a Catholic priest, has written a play, presenting the white man as the minority and the Negro as the majority in our country, in appropriate reversals of the equation.
Jack Chapman, the drama reviewer of the New York News, recalls that some years ago I happened on a similar idea in a sketch for the Dutch Treat show.
In my play, called Old White Joe, the old family retainer was a cringing white man who was hailed into a high-suburban drawing room of the Negro aristocracy, and commanded to bring in the field-hands and sing an old folk song for the gentlemen who were all in dinner jackets and having their brandy while the ladies powdered up.
Old White Joe, played by Ray Vir Den, an old Oklahoma boy who came down East to yell mi-mi-mi in the opera but got a job in the advertising business instead, then backed off and returned with the rest of the Dutch Treat quartet to sing, “Gone Are the Days, From the Cotton Mills Away.”
They entered in faded overalls, blinking at the elegance of the room and the company, and sang beautifully to the final “Hear Them Angel Voices Calling, Old White Joe.”
Radical reformer is guest
Mr. Chapman says that Mr. Fordyce, the master of the manor, snarled at Old Joe, “Come here, you old white bum.” That is not correct. What he said was, “You, Joe, come here, you old white rascal.”
Then he asked him how many hams he reckoned he had stolen in all the years, boy and man, that he had been in the Fordyce family. Old White Joe said he reckoned he didn’t “never stole none, lessen you could call takin’ stealin’.”
Among the Negro guests of the Negro host there was a radical reformer from New Orleans who kept saying that nevertheless white men were human children of the same loving God. He was hollered down by a Negro clergyman who explained that down South they didn’t have the same white problem.
Down South, the Negroes were in the majority and could keep the white man in his place by force of numbers. Up North, the Negro minority had to use prestige and segregation.
Another guest, a noisy, pompous, Greenwich broke type, said that yes, he had been down South on business and that it had made his blood boil to see some great big pushful buck white man walk into a streetcar and deliberately pass up empty seats to plant himself beside some lovely innocent colored girl.
Mr. Fordyce softened the debate by explaining how well his family all loved Old White Joe. At that point, Worth Colwell, another advertising man, ran onto the stage in the role of Miss Pansy Fordyce, the young missy of the household, yelling “rape, rape, rape!” The curtain fell as the gents, including the Southern radical reformer, tore offstage to lynch the beloved Old White Joe.
Versions of typical white men
This sketch was done strictly for the amusement of a stag dinner, but I confess that I have never been able to moralize the story to a happier conclusion depicting mutual trust and friendship.
As a matter of fact, those colored aristocrats were not too fond of each other, nor above a little cheating one way and another, for they were just burnt-cork versions of typical white men.
But, if it comes to that, the Negro is no more tolerant or kind, even among Negroes; and history gives him no reason to boast of his gentle consideration for others when he is up.
And he is to a certain extent to blame for the prejudice which has followed him since slavery through his overbearing conduct in the Southern states during the Reconstruction era. In Haiti and Santo Domingo, Negroes have massacred other Negroes and there were Negro masters of Negro slaves in Abyssinia.
In Father McGlynn’s play, a poor white woman and her baby are evicted by a greedy Negro landlord and the baby is adopted by a Negro family and finally sent to college to study in equality with Negroes.
Well, so what? Well, so I know what, but it wouldn’t do any good to say what because the solution has been there all the time in a building with a cross on the spire where Father McGlynn works, but neither side is yet sufficiently civilized to give it a try.